by Arthur Allen
Naturally it would be best and simplest to give the people sufficient provisions, but that cannot be done. This is connected to the food situation and the war situation in general. Thus shooting will be employed when one comes across a Jew outside the ghetto without special permission. One must say it quite openly in this circle, be clear about it. There are only two ways. We sentence the Jews in the ghetto to death by hunger or we shoot them. Even if the end result is the same, the latter is more intimidating. We cannot do otherwise, even if we want to. We have one and only one responsibility, that the German people are not infected and endangered by these parasites. For that any means must be right.
Here, then, was the German medical community’s offer to Polish Jews: die of starvation and typhus in the ghetto, or die by shooting. The loyalty of the German medical profession to authority and its adherence to Nazi ideology seem to have kept any humane solutions from entering their heads. Occasionally the doctors were cruel, and occasionally they were corrupt. But for the most part they were “honorable,” on their own terms—hideously impassive in the face of a genocide that they blamed on the victims. Even assuming that most of them did not, at least in the early stages of the war, envision the complete annihilation of the Jews, their membership in the thought collective caused them to tread forward like sleepwalkers. This was groupthink in its most hideous form.
Hirszfeld, who had been ousted from his job by Kudicke and Nauck, was shocked at the stupidity of the German antityphus measures. Posters told everyone who found a louse on himself to report to a physician, and required the reporting of every case of fever. Science had long before abolished such medieval quarantine practices, Hirszfeld said, because in addition to being cruel, they were useless. “But since in this case the point was to liquidate the Jews and not the epidemic as such,” he added, “quarantines turned out to be quite useful.”
On April 24, 1943, Heinrich Himmler gave a speech to an assembly of SS officers: “Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology,” he told them. “It is a matter of cleanliness. In just the same way, anti-Semitism, for us, has not been a question of ideology, but a matter of cleanliness, which now will soon have been dealt with. We shall soon be deloused. We have only 20,000 lice left, and then the matter is finished within the whole of Germany.”
A few months before the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto, friends rescued Hirszfeld, and he lived out the war concealed in the country house of Polish aristocrats, where he wrote a memoir. He did not spare the German doctors under whom he had been forced to serve. “If in the institute that I had a part in molding there now works Mr. Nauck and Mr. Kudicke, whereas I—expelled—pine for my workplace: who is the parasite, I or they? And who is profiting from someone else’s work?” In the ghetto, there had been little Hirszfeld could do to slow the epidemic. “The wonderful Dr. Weigl,” he wrote, secretly sent him large quantities of vaccine. But the shots were available only to a tiny minority. The Generalgouvernement had given Kudicke 50 million zlotys to combat the typhus epidemic when it spread beyond the ghetto in 1942; the only part allotted to the Jews was an 8,000-zloty disinfecting sprayer.
Hirszfeld created a makeshift medical school in the ghetto, and one of the topics discussed in his immunology class was the question “Are the Jews really a separate race?” His answer: No. Blood-typing research—Hirszfeld was one of the world’s experts—proved that Jews had always mingled with the nations where they dwelt. The idea was controversial among the rabbinate, but the students were fascinated. “After the lecture, several of them came up to me and told me with overflowing emotions: ‘We thank you. We feel that you have taken the curse from us. . . . [I]t seemed to me that I was fulfilling the duty of a teacher who was showing new roads to his pupils, roads beset with difficulties but also offering a hope for a better future.” At the very edge of civilization, where millions were paying for the world’s insane obsession with race, a lonely man shone a lantern of scientific truth. “Unfortunately,” Hirszfeld wrote, “I was speaking to human beings sentenced to extermination.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE FANTASTIC LABORATORY OF DR. WEIGL
Feeding lice to make vaccine. (Courtesy of Emil-von-Behring-Bibliothek, Philipps-Universität Marburg.)
The Weigl institute was a mysterious labyrinth of science and deception during the German occupation. Its visible structure was odd enough, organized as it was around the somewhat gruesome production scheme of the vaccine. “Its base was the farmers, who grew the lice from eggs, watched their development and cleaned their cages, for the louse does not tolerate dirt,” wrote the novelist and poet Mirosław uławski in a memoir. “The feeders built the next part of the pyramid, and they were divided into two categories: the higher aristocracy who fed infected lice and the plebes, like me, who fed the healthy ones.” Only those who had suffered through a bout of typhus were allowed to feed the typhus-infected lice, and they received double wages. “Next came the injectors, and then the preparers. At the top of the pyramid stood The Professor—the high priest of typhus magic.”
After a feeding. (Courtesy of National Museum, Przemyl. Photograph of original by S. Kosiedowski.)
Weigl had ingeniously brought together several mechanical, chemical, and biological steps in the creation of the vaccine, and its mass production relied on an intricate set of standards and conditions. The process was arcane and appeared nightmarish from outside the lab; inside, however, its peculiarity was cherished, for it created a space of peace and relative freedom in the hell of occupied Lwów. Under wartime conditions in 1941 the scaling up of the vaccine production was a remarkable technical feat. The tens of millions of lice used in the vaccine during the war descended from a cross between lice gathered from the clothing of Russians in Austrian POW camps during World War I, and an Ethiopian variety that Weigl had obtained in Addis Ababa. The new creature was designated the “Weigl strain.”
Vaccine production began when lice in a petri dish deposited eggs on small squares of cloth, usually cut from Wehrmacht uniforms. Each square was put into a specially designed test tube, where it was held midway down by a partial constriction in the glass and a piece of cotton. After incubation, the lice larvae hatched after three to eight days, fell off the cloth squares, and dropped to the bottom. Each tube yielded some 800 larvae, which formed a pulsating yellowish ball about the size of a hard candy that workers transferred to 4 x 7 x 5 centimeter wooden cages. One wall of the cage consisted of a screen that Weigl had adapted from sifting screens used by Polish flour mills. The sesame seed–sized lice could feed through the screens but not escape. Each cage had a smaller square of woolen fabric on which the lice could deposit the next generation of eggs.
The cages were closed, sealed with paraffin to keep the lice from escaping, and strapped to the legs of the feeder with wide elastic bands. As many as 44 cages could be attached to a single feeder’s legs with four separate bands. The lice sucked bood for about 45 minutes every day for 12 days. Men usually attached the cages to their calves, while women placed them on their thighs, where the reddish bite marks could be hidden under a skirt. A person on average fed 25,000 lice a month from hatching until maturity.
Each day the feeder removed his or her cages of lice when the creatures were swollen and shiny with blood, and placed the cages screen down in boxes. The next day, the feeder would retrieve “his” lice for another feeding, until the cycle was over. Lice were periodically transferred to clean, heat-sterilized cages. During the transfers, the technicians collected eggs laid on the fabric and removed dead or sluggish-looking lice, molted skins, body parts, and feces.
When the healthy lice had reached 12 days of age, they were sent to be infected with Rickettsia. It was the job of the injectors—the strzykacze—to infect each louse manually. Two injectors worked together—one, using a small forceps, placed each louse in a slot in the clamp with its rear in the air. His partner, while viewing the rear of the louse under a 32X binocular microscope, inserted a glass pipette into the anu
s and used a foot pedal to release a valve that pumped a microdroplet of rickettsial solution into the louse. Each injection cycle required about a second. Two highly skilled operators could inject up to 2,000 lice in an hour. The infected lice were then loaded into cages and fed five more days on the blood of the injectors themselves.
Injecting typhus culture into the louse by hand. (Courtesy of National Museum, Przemyl. Photograph of original by S. Kosiedowski.)
When the population of Rickettsia prowazekii reached 10 million per louse gut cell, the cells burst. Undigested human blood leaked into the abdomen, and the lice turned deep ruby red. At this point, the lice were shaken out of the cages into jars filled with 0.5 percent phenol. Thus killed, they were transferred to the dissectors—preparatorzy—who harvested the louse guts to make the vaccine. This was also a highly meticulous activity. The dissector used a scalpel to make an incision between the thorax and abdomen under a binocular microscope at 16X power, where everything appeared backwards and upside down. She pulled the infected gut out with the needle and tip of a scalpel, taking care not to damage the gut so that the entire rickettsial harvest could be transferred into a jar. The apprenticeship for the dissector lasted two weeks and was unpaid. A supervisor with a stopwatch monitored the trainees as they gradually increased their speed. A good dissector could harvest 300 louse midguts per hour, or one louse every twelve seconds. It was the kind of activity that would cause blindness in short order, and shifts were limited to six hours. The infected midguts were ground in a special mortar with a phenol solution that killed the Rickettsia. This mixture, the vaccine, was taken to a filling room and prepared at three different strengths. At the height of production, the Lwów and Kraków labs each produced thousands of doses every day.
Much of what we know about the wartime structure of the Weigl lab comes from Wacław Szybalski, whose career in genetics—an interest spurred by Weigl—later took him to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Rutgers University, and the University of Wisconsin. Though only 19 years old in 1941, Szybalski was a remarkably self-possessed and determined young scientist. As a young teenager, he attended the lectures of famous Lwów professors, and while studying chemistry at Lwów Polytechnical, from 1939 to 1941 (when not making bombs in the basement), he attended the mathematics lectures of Banach, Antoni Łomnicki, Stoek, and Kazimierz Bartel. The latter had been prime minister of Poland on three occasions in the late 1920s, and Szybalski was the star pupil in his class, “Descriptive Geometry and Perspective.” The Nazis arrested Bartel shortly after the invasion. When he refused to head a puppet government, they murdered him, on July 26, 1941.
A louse dissected for removal of its typhus-rich intestines. (Courtesy of National Museum, Przemyl. Photograph of original by S. Kosiedowski.)
In the first days of the Nazi occupation, Weigl asked Szybalski to gather a group of men and women, including as many senior professors as possible, and to supervise them as lice feeders. His “breeding unit” was one of scores or perhaps hundreds of teams at the institute, each consisting of a leader and 12–15 feeders, or karmiciele. Szybalski’s group included the famous mathematicians of the Lwów school who had not been murdered or driven into exile: Banach, Jerzy Albrycht, Feliks Baranski, Bronisław Knaster, Władysław Orlicz. Their Scottish Book had been buried under a soccer field, where it was retrieved after the war. Szybalski’s group also included the chemist Tadeusz Baranowski; the former university rector Seweryn Krzemieniewski and his wife, Helena, both biologists; and the composer Stanisław Skrowaczewski, who would later conduct the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra. Szybalski selected the mathematicians, particularly Banach, partly for selfish reasons. “I thought I would learn from being in their company and listening to their discussions every day. As a former Boy Scout and diehard Lwów patriot, I imagined I could somehow protect them from the dangers of war.” The German invasion caught Banach in Kiev. Rather than retreat with the Red Army, he took the last train back to Lwów to return to his child and wife, who was Jewish. The Gestapo arrested Banach, but he was released after a few weeks; his family fled to Kraków, where they lived out the war in hiding.
Weigl at work during the war. (Courtesy of National Museum, Przemyl. Photograph of original by S. Kosiedowski.)
Szybalski’s routine changed following the occupation. Weigl had given his family a radio, and he awoke each morning at six to listen to the BBC. After breakfast, he pushed his bicycle up St. Mark’s Street, past the cast iron fence of the Botanical Garden, and coasted to the heavy wooden doors of the Weigl institute, which even by then was humming with activity. For two hours, he would prepare the lice for the day’s feeding. The louse cages, cleared of molted skins and feces, went into a high-pressure sterilizer, and Szybalski put the healthy lice into new, clean cages. “It was easy,” he recalled. “The lice didn’t run fast.” His feeders would come in before noon. This was the hour the Lwów’s professoriat had traditionally gathered in the city’s cafés, but only Nazis, spies, and Volksdeutsche visited cafés now. The Weigl institute had become the center of intellectual life. And nearly the entire university of Lwów was in attendance, broken into seminar-sized groups. “There was a huge table in the center of the room, and people sat around it,” Szybalski recalled. “They brought in books, sometimes, or something to eat. And they talked.”
The caged lice made the feeders itch, but scratching was forbidden, because it could lead to infections that hurt the lice. Conversation was the best distraction. “When you put on the lice cages,” Szybalski explained, “the first feeling is like a hot iron, as 500 or 1,000 of them pierce your skin. You don’t want that to be repeated, so you try not to move the cages, because then the lice lose their place and have to bite again.” Marek Zakrzewski was one of the youngest members of Szybalski’s group. His career as a feeder started on a rough note: he got blisters from the bites. The condition resolved, fortunately, and Zakrzewski returned to feeding, and found himself looking forward to the daily discussions. He especially liked listening to Mieczysław Kreutz, a chatty psychologist. One winter day, Kreutz turned to Banach and Knaster and asked them the following question: “Gentlemen,” he said, “when my wife used to make ice cream, she would pour some liquid and ice into the container, then pour in salt and turn the crank. I asked her, why do you use salt? She says it makes the ice cream freeze. Coming over here today, I see the tram conductor throwing something on the tracks. What is it? Salt. Why? So the rails don’t freeze. So how is it? One throws salt to cause freezing, the other to prevent it.” A passionate, uninformed debate followed. Zakrzewski, an engineering student, knew the answer, but traditional Polish academic protocol called for students to speak only when spoken to. So the problem remained unsolved. (Answer: in both instances, salt lowers the freezing point. This melts ice on roadways; the ice cream is mixed while surrounded by colder-than-freezing water.)
Banach usually sat quietly chain-smoking while Knaster yakked on, whether mathematics or politics was the subject. The Krzemieniewskis explained the life habits of the creatures they were feeding. Aleksander Kosiba, a meteorologist, regaled them with tales from his polar exhibitions. Sushi being known only to the Japanese at this time, the feeders were thrilled by his descriptions of eating raw fish and whale meat. Even in this lugubrious atmosphere, their legs clasped with cages of hungry insects in a room reeking of wood alcohol, smoke, and their own blood, the feeders wrinkled their noses at these exotic flavors. It was intellectually stimulating but also surrealistic to listen to the long discussions about the frontiers of mathematics, topology and the theory of numbers. But Szybalski had to make sure that in the fervor of discussion they did not overfeed the lice. The mathematicians, especially, were generally too distracted to know when to stop, and the Weigl laboratory lice had lost their natural instinct to stop feeding. This could have disastrous consequences. Overfed lice were hard to handle. They would burst and create a sticky mess.
As for the feeders, “they never complained,” said Szybalski. “They were happy to be
able to survive, or to hope they would survive—it wasn’t guaranteed. Every day you said goodbye you never knew if you’d see them again. Your life was unprotected. It depended upon the whims of soldiers and policemen and militia.” Szybalski and his friends kept their wits by imagining that the war would end. It would be only another month or two, they said, over and over again. They were young and unafraid because death happened to other people, not them.
Lice feeders during the war. (Courtesy of the Emil-Behring-Bibliothek, Philipps-Universität Marburg.)
Szybalski was particularly fond of Banach, who told him that mathematics was the most magnificent expression of the human soul. They shared a passion for learning and for Lwów, and they called each other “brother,” which was strictly against academic tradition. Banach was like that. He liked nothing better than to thumb his nose at hauteur. He also appreciated Szybalski because every day the young man related to him all the latest, forbidden radio news from around the world. Banach’s love for Lwów was epitomized in the possibly apocryphal story told about Banach and his Hungarian-born friend John von Neumann. In the late 1930s, as the walls closed in on Poland, von Neumann came to Lwów on three occasions to transmit a message from Norbert Wiener of MIT. The university would pay Banach generously to emigrate to the United States and teach in Cambridge. “How much?” Banach asked, finally. Von Neumann wrote a 1 and told him, “as many zeros as you want after that.” Banach looked at the paper for a moment and then said, “It isn’t enough.”