by Arthur Allen
The Lwów institute teemed with underground activity hidden behind the façade of vaccine production and invisible to those who didn’t need to know. The details usually did not go through Weigl, who, though involved in shipping vaccine illegally to the ghettos, spent much of his time pursuing scientific experiments—on the infectivity of feces, on possible egg cultures of typhus, on epidemiology—and his archery. All the hiring went through Anna Herzig, his tough assistant, girlfriend, and future wife, and she was abreast of all conspiracies. Just after the German occupation, an aristocratic Catholic intellectual named Stanisława Grabska arrived from Warsaw. She had grown up in Lwów, on an estate that had been confiscated and converted to Wehrmacht housing. London had sent her back to Lwów to unify the Warsaw and Galician commands of the Home Army. Some in the institute knew about her mission, but there were no leaks, and she fulfilled it safely. At the institute, her job was to dissect infected lice.
Louse feeding was an effective cover for an underground activist. It justified at least two departures from the house during the day and provided free time for underground activities. The many Home Army louse feeders included the district chief, Army Major Karol Borkowiec, the university docent Stefania Skwarczyska, who managed underground publications, and a leading conspirator named Tadeusz Galiski. About half the dissectors were resistance members, led by the veterinarian Lesław Ogielski. “Almost the entire leadership of the conspiracy was there,” uławski recalled of his days in the institute. “The [London] government-in-exile delegate for the region fed every morning with me. His closest colleague, Wanda, often fed lice for me when I could not come, because she was a healthy, pretty girl and not afraid to get anemia. I am convinced that the professor was informed about the underground, but despite the fact that the Gestapo and Wehrmacht guarded the entrance, he never lost his cool. We often saw him relaxing in the garden, shooting his bow. Archery was his passion.”
Jerzy Sokolowski, who had been a military officer based in Lwów and who joined the resistance after Poland’s defeat, was parachuted into Poland by the British in March 1942 to conduct sabotage behind German lines. Sokolowski met Weigl in Lwów and arranged for vaccines to be shipped to him under a German officer’s name in Smolensk, Russia, where typhus was killing members of the Home Army.
Wacław Szybalski also sometimes carried out missions for the resistance. In 1943, the Home Army ordered him to draw up a map of the railroad station at Belzec, the final destination for hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews, so that Allies could bomb the station. Szybalski and a friend rode their bicycles to the death camp, a distance of about 60 miles through the countryside. He remembered coming over a hill on a beautiful day. “Just as we were approaching Belzec, we encountered this sickening smell, really strong.” A smell of burning human bodies. The friend had contacts in the area who helped them map it so that American or English bombers could destroy the station and prevent transports from reaching the camp. Szybalski drew up a map, and later saw black marketeers trading in gold recovered from murdered Jews’ fillings. Their report went to Jan Karski, the famous courier, and from him to Churchill and Roosevelt. “Unfortunately none of them was really interested in helping Polish Jews and nobody acted on it,” said Szybalski. “Our mission was a total waste.”
Bitter as such experiences were, they did not discourage all of the young Poles. Some mornings, as he sat with his legs stretched out on a bench, Mirosław uławski would imagine that the boxes on his calves were “like little life jackets that were keeping the resistance movement out of deep waters.” Work at the institute provided an unheard-of security for people like him. From time to time, German officials came to uławski’s house with the intention of seizing furniture. “I always greeted them politely, and asked whether they’d been vaccinated against typhus, because unfortunately, typhus-infected lice crawled over me every day. I never saw one of those Germans again.”
The junior Weigl institute employees were cautious around their German supervisors, but the older ones felt a degree of trust in Hermann Eyer, although, as one stated, “you never knew if this was because of his heart, or because he realized the Third Reich wouldn’t last forever.” German officers who worked for Eyer stated that none of the vaccine was ever sabotaged—evidence, they said, of the goodwill the Polish workers had toward their humanitarian boss. But while it is true that Eyer and the Germans were viewed as a generally civilized bunch, the Poles did conduct sabotage. A low-key sort took place in the rooms of the dissectors. Their daily production norm was 1,600 lice in six hours. Working longer than that was impossible because of the intense concentration required. But it turned out that if you dissected 1,200 or 1,300 lice, then warmed the bowl of louse guts with your hands, it would increase its size, so that it looked like 1,600 guts and was viewed as such by those who ground up and neutralized the emulsion. “This trick was used only for the vaccine that went to the German Wehrmacht,” one dissector wrote. “The containers we prepared for Professor Weigl—for the Polish or Jewish underground—had to contain the correct amount.”
Eyer permitted Weigl a private supply of 200 doses of vaccine each month to vaccinate his employees and their families, or anyone else he chose. A total of 8,000 doses more were used for “vaccine trials,” whose “volunteers” included orphans, underground combatants, and the faculty of the Roman Catholic seminary in Lwów. Larger amounts, like the 30,000 doses that went to the Warsaw ghetto, were off the books. Clever bookkeeping allowed extensive pilferage great and small. Once a Volksdeutscher employed in the warehouse surprised the Weigl aide Jan Starzyk by telling him, “Will you please ask them to steal only one dose at a time instead of the whole set? Otherwise someone is going to notice.” Starzyk added, “I didn’t know who ‘they’ were. I didn’t have to know.” Others falsified bills of lading in order to save vaccine for the Home Army or the ghetto. Employees entered the lab over the weekend to gather up louse feces from the cages to make vaccine. It contained high concentrations of typhus germs, but the Germans didn’t include the waste in their account books. Sometimes, the louse feces were used in a form of sabotage—smeared on the headrests of the German-only passenger railroad cars with the hope of infecting and debilitating Nazi officers.
Woman and typhus-afflicted child in the Warsaw ghetto, 1942. (Courtesy United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.)
Eyer’s deputy in Lwów, Josef Daniels, once came by a vaccine filling room and noticed that the number of intestines in each lot was fewer than noted in the records. He said to Zbigniew Stuchly, “Thank God the Wehrmacht runs this place. If this were discovered by the SS there would be terrible consequences.” This warning was often repeated by the Wehrmacht officers. The German in charge of the Potocki Street facility told Starzyk, “Don’t do anything to attract the Gestapo. Once they get in, we’re all lost.”
Some of the dissector units were made up entirely of women, and in a gradually warming atmosphere of trust and friendship, they would talk, listen to music on a gramophone, and even dance in the hall. A German walked by one day and joked that the “Typhus Institute” had become the “Typhus Cabaret.” Not all the Germans thought that was funny. But Eyer had a hands-off attitude toward the Weigl lab, and some of the men he put in place to oversee it were happy to have a laugh. Eyer was a regular churchgoer, which was frowned upon among the Nazi brass. Six of his lab assistants and guards were priests, and other openly religious Catholics served on his staff. The Gestapo in Kraków referred to the institute as “the parson’s seminary.” But Eyer’s success in producing vaccine buffered him from the menacing SS. In 1941, Eyer was relaxed enough to bring his wife from Berlin to Kraków, where she spent a month working as a feeder of healthy lice. They vacationed in the mountain resort of Zakopane, where Peter, their first child, was conceived. Eyer treated the Kraków and Lwów louse feeders as blood donors and provided them increased food rations. They received the highest wage allowed in the Generalgouvernement, with various bonuses. The institute’s doctors provided fr
ee medical care.
For all that, Eyer could be punitive. Odo Bujwid, a renowned Polish microbiologist who many years earlier had founded the Kraków institute Eyer now occupied, ran a private vaccine laboratory with his daughter, Sofia. As the risk of typhus increased in 1941, they decided to create a vaccine for use by Poles. Sofia Bujwid personally collected lice off a group of alcoholics outside a church to start the project, and hired louse feeders to produce a Weigl-style vaccine. When the lab was ready, in May 1941, she sent her teenage son to Eyer’s assistant, Zdzisław Przybyłkiewicz, to purchase two Wehrmacht vaccines to use in quality checks. Eyer had the boy arrested, then visited Bujwid and told her he had had no choice, because the vaccine was only for the German army. Furthermore, Eyer forbade the Bujwids, under threat of arrest, to have future contact with Przybyłkiewicz. Sofia Bujwid’s son ended up in Auschwitz, but was later released, and the Bujwids resumed making their own vaccine.
The Jews of Kraków suffered the same terrible fate as Jews elsewhere in Poland; Eyer said after the war that he simply did not believe the reports he heard about deportations and mass murder. The 70,000 Jews crammed into the Kraków ghetto, in dwellings built for a quarter that number, endured terrible typhus outbreaks with no help from the Wehrmacht, which maintained strict control of their movements. In early 1944, the Gestapo liquidated the Jewish medical service in Kraków, murdering the remaining doctors and shooting patients in their beds. Of the 190 Jewish doctors who had lived in the city when war broke out in 1939, 142 died in the ghetto or in concentration camps.
After showing the factory owner Schwanenberg his vaccine, Fleck was ordered to report to Gestapo headquarters on Pełczyska Street—the most feared building in Lwów. “The way there was more dangerous than typhus,” Fleck said. “A Jew seldom returned living from that address.” Fleck, accompanied by the Jewish hospital director Maksymilian Kurzrock, brought experimental designs, diagrams, and samples. Some uniformed medical specialists questioned them in the presence of the Gestapo. The specialists wrote things down, repeated questions, Fleck said, and “shouted at us and threatened us. Some of the questions were not very intelligent. For example, they asked if the vaccine would work for Aryans. I replied, ‘Of course, but it must be made from Aryan and not Jewish urine.’” The specialists did not respond to Fleck’s sarcasm, if indeed they understood that it was sarcasm, but decided to send the samples to Professor Richard Otto, the leading German typhus expert, in Frankfurt. “We left the room and weren’t sure if we’d get out of the building alive, since they had the samples and the protocols,” Fleck wrote. “They didn’t need us anymore even if the vaccine interested them. However, they let us go, and outside there was only the usual daily risk.”
A week later, a German commission led by Professor Kudicke came to inspect the ghetto laboratory. The German military was in a growing panic over the lack of vaccines for its troops, who were beginning to contract the disease on the eastern front in large numbers. Kudicke treated Fleck rudely, sitting at a desk while the Jewish doctor stood in front of him describing his methods. The Nazi doctors watched Fleck’s team making antigen and then went away. Later the Gestapo sent an official to watch over them. He promised that sick patients who brought in urine would be described as “urine donors” and not threatened with liquidation. The lab workers got a special ID card that said, “involved in the production of typhus vaccine,” which gave them a feeling of security.
Production moved to the Laokoon factory. Sterilized, refrigerated urine from hospitalized typhus patients was poured into 50-liter metal flasks sent to Laokoon every day. The factory had an excellent apparatus to concentrate and filter the antigen, which was combined with aluminum hydroxide, a protein stabilizer and immune system stimulator that is still used in many vaccines, including the DTP shot that prevents whooping cough, tetanus, and diphtheria. A number of Polish and Jewish scientists worked at the plant. The chemist Janina Opieska-Blauth had been ordered to find ways to remove the bitterness of horse chestnuts so that they could be used as food. Others were devising hormonal preparations from animal organ extracts. According to Opieska-Blauth’s account, Fleck and his team were somehow known to be on Professor Weigl’s staff. The Germans were so worried by typhus, she said, that they were even protecting and feeding Jews with expertise on the subject. Schwanenberg was not particularly friendly, but wanted to keep his Jewish employees from being swept up in raids, so he ordered them to live on the factory grounds. This edict offered welcome protection. Out on the streets, each day the occupation grew more dangerous. The SS wanted to finish off the business of killing the Jews, and the Gestapo were less and less likely to respect a Jew’s work papers.
Finally, after about eight months of work, the vaccine was ready for human testing. On August 28, 1942, Fleck injected himself. “Aug. 29,” he wrote in his notebook, “large area of local edema and redness; August 30, the reaction vanishes.” Fleck also vaccinated his wife, child, and two other people, and a week later Dr. Edward Elster injected 32 volunteers with the vaccine at the Zamarstynowska hospital. “The local reaction was slightly painful, no general reaction was observed,” Fleck wrote. Afterward Fleck vaccinated about 500 inmates at Janowska under the supervision of Dr. Kurzrock, who had a protector in the Gestapo, an officer whose wife he had treated.
The “vaccine trial” came at one of the most dramatic moments in the history of Lwów. The Jewish population, somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 before the German invasion, was now roughly half that size as a result of killings and deportations, starvation, typhus, and other diseases. On August 1, Hans Frank said, “With insect powder and other necessary articles, we’re going to make this a place where a German man can live again, after we get rid of the rest of the Jews.” A few days later, the Nazis began their largest murder campaign in Lwów. Raids intensified on the Jewish hospitals. Unlike previous actions, these saw the Nazis kill the patients and also most of the doctors, including Olga Elster and her husband, Edward.
In all, about 50,000 Jews were slaughtered in the August action. Dr. Dopheide, the district medical chief, arrived at the Zamarstynowska hospital while it was being raided. After the SS had taken out the doctors, Dopheide and his aides entered the building and stole its equipment. Dopheide never paid any consequences for his actions. In postwar testimony, he said he was “ordered to take part in such actions in which people were driven together and forcibly deloused. Whether such people, especially Jews, were then taken away, I cannot say. The Jewish measures were not disclosed to us.” On September 1, the final day of the action, a Gestapo spy was found dead near the ghetto. The Gestapo concluded he had been killed by the Jews and in revenge dragged 12 members of the Jewish council from their offices. They were hanged from the balconies of houses along Łokietka Street. The ropes were thin and most of the men fell, while still alive, and broke limbs. One of them had to be hanged three times before he died.
Again, Fleck clung to life. Kurzrock’s Gestapo connection provided a few dozen doctors with new stamps for their passports. Some chose to join their families in death at Janowska. Fleck survived and continued his trial vaccinations on the doomed inmates at the camp, hoping they would be protected from typhus. The shot’s value was never evaluated, however, because the vaccinated inmates were murdered in the following weeks. Kurzrock survived for a while longer. The following summer, the SS officer who had always promised to protect him invited Kurzrock to his villa and shot him in the head.
On September 7, the ghetto was sealed, but a small clinic continued to operate where typhus patients were treated and some were vaccinated. In late 1944, the first description of Nazi-occupied Lwów appeared in an account by Adolf Folkmann, an escapee who told his story to a Swedish political scientist. Folkmann’s account, entitled The Promise Hitler Kept, included a brief account of Fleck’s vaccine. “Dr. Fleck produced his serum at the risk of his life and injected as many Jews as possible. When the German authorities learned of this, they arrested Dr. Fleck and his assistants. T
hey forced those arrested to instruct several German doctors in the production of the new serum, at which point the discoverers of the serum disappeared from the city.” According to Folkmann, Fleck and his assistants had all been murdered. Dr. Franciszek Groër, Fleck’s boss, also believed Fleck had died, for in early 1945 he published a brief research note by his former employee, with an asterisk noting that Fleck had passed away in 1942.
One afternoon in 1942, a young lab worker named Tomasz Cieszyski knocked on the door of Weigl’s office and entered. Weigl had been pacing the room and talking, but stopped when he saw the young man. Anna Herzig, sitting at the opposite end of the room, lost her temper and shouted, “Go away at once!” Weigl came over to Cieszyski and said, “Sit down and don’t disturb us.” Then he resumed the conversation. Stacked in the corner was a pile of boxes full of vaccine, headed for the Warsaw ghetto. The discussion Cieszyski overheard concerned how the institute would smuggle them in to Hirszfeld. When it was over, Weigl turned to Cieszyski: “Go home,” he said, “and keep this a secret.”
Smuggling vaccine to Jews was punishable by death. So was employing Jews. Despite this, Weigl made a concerted effort to protect close Jewish colleagues, sending an aide, Zbigniew Stuchly, to Kraków with an offer to find a place at the institute for Filip Eisenberg, who had been Weigl’s boss at Przemyl during the Great War. Eisenberg demurred, saying he would remain in his home. He was put on a train to Belzec and gassed with thousands of others. Stuchly also offered protection to Adam Finkel, the hematologist who’d been on Weigl’s PhD committee and studied the immunological profile of lice feeders. Perhaps Finkel was disinclined to leave his relatives. Despite repeated discussions with Stuchly, he decided to remain in the Lwów ghetto and perished. “We couldn’t save anyone but Henryk Meisel,” Stuchly later recalled.