by Arthur Allen
Despite all he had done to hold his family together during the war, history had one final trick to play on Ludwik Fleck. As a 20-year-old citizen of a city that Stalin had declared capital of western Soviet Ukraine, Ryszard Fleck in April 1945 was immediately drafted into the Red Army and trucked from Buchenwald to a mustering site in Chemnitz, Germany. He found himself the only Jew in a group of Russian and Ukrainain farmers who’d been sent to Germany as slave laborers. A Soviet general harangued them for “cooperating” with the Germans and said they would need to be rehabilitated before they could return home. Since by then it was harvest time, they would redeem themselves by bringing in the German wheat, after which they would be drafted into the army. Everyone enthusiastically cheered, “Long live Stalin!”
After several months, Ryszard fell ill—he had developed tuberculosis in the camps—and was mustered out of the Red Army. In early 1946, he finally arrived in Lwów to find the city nearly empty of friends and acquaintances. His old house was occupied by Russian soldiers; his parents had come and gone and were living in Lublin, a city in central Poland. Ernestyna had arrived first in Lwów, after surviving the Auschwitz death march and Ravensbruck concentration camp. Ludwik, after spending a month in the infirmary at Buchenwald and several more weeks in a hospital halfway home, had gone immediately to see his old mentor Groër. He found Ernestyna waiting for him in the doctor’s anteroom. In the statement he gave years later at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel, Ryszard spoke little of being reunited with his parents. Certainly there were strains—Ryszard had never been a good student, and had nothing of his father’s charm or intellect. Enduring the misery and terror of the war years had not brightened his prospects. After receiving a high school diploma in Lublin, Ryszard registered for a kibbutz and left for Germany, where he was held in a displaced persons (DP) camp for a year before being smuggled to Sète, France. There, in early July 1947, he and 4,500 other Holocaust survivors boarded the American steamer President Warfield. Halfway through its famous voyage, the ship was rechristened Exodus. Two Jews died fighting British troops who boarded the Exodus near Palestine, and global news coverage of the combat, between British riot troops and miserable refugees, ignited a wave of sympathy for the Jews and their desire for a homeland. (In 1960, Exodus became a film epic directed by Otto Preminger, with Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint, and a famous score by Ernest Gold.) At Haifa, the British removed the refugees and returned them to Germany. When he finally got to Israel, Ryszard lived on a kibbutz and then worked in a lab at a hospital in Petach Tikva. Once his father had said to him, “Never have children, because it will break your heart trying to protect them.” Ryszard obeyed.
The fate of Fleck’s Lwów team was mixed and at times heartbreaking. Bruno and Anna Seeman were separated from her husband, Jakob, and assumed for many months that he was dead. Finally he found them, in Kraków. The Umschweifs had perished. “Dad always said, he didn’t eat the grass and that’s why he survived,” Bruno Seeman recalled. The Seemans ended up in France, where Bruno would become an engineer, with many patents to his name, for the multinational oil field company Schlumberger. He moved frequently, from France to Texas to the Mideast and elsewhere. His friends in the company called him “the Wandering Jew.”
Ciepielowski, the chief of the vaccine-making crew at Buchenwald’s Block 50, made the best of a difficult life. For two years, he worked as a doctor for refugees in the American zone in Germany. At one point, a large German pharmaceutical company approached him about production of the rabbit-lung vaccine, asking for his help. The laboratory was following the instructions Ding had published in 1944, the company official said, but the lungs yielded no Rickettsia. Ciepielowski explained, with a laugh, that the vaccine had never been meant to protect anyone. He would marry a beautiful Polish woman and emigrate to New Jersey, where he was a doctor at Roosevelt Hospital in Metuchen. He died in 1972 of a lung disease contracted at Buchenwald.
Another Block 50 inmate, the former Communist activist August Cohn, also emigrated to the United States, but had a rougher time of it. After working with U.S. occupation forces to hunt Nazis in the Kassel area, Cohn despaired of European communism and moved to New York in late 1946, at age 36. Two years later, while working as a cabinetmaker, he was arrested for allegedly failing to identify himself as a former Communist in his immigration papers. This was untrue; Cohn had never hidden his past from U.S. officials. But it was the height of the McCarthy era, and some of those diplomats did not want to admit what they had known. After a long and expensive legal battle, Cohn was permitted to remain in the United States.
Eugen Kogon helped found the Christian Democratic Union, Germany’s most influential postwar political party, but left it in the early 1950s because of his opposition to the stationing of U.S. nuclear weapons on German soil. His portrait of camp life, The Theory and Practice of Hell, sold 300,000 copies in Germany and was translated into 11 languages. He was a well-known figure on German talk shows and newspaper feuilletons. In later years, Kogon grew bitter over the country’s rush to forget the past. He was “an angry old man” who couldn’t stomach the moral levity of consumerist Germany.
Unlikely friendships sprang up in the scorched soil of Germany. In November 1950, the Block 46 capo Arthur Dietzsch was released from an American prison where he’d been sentenced for his part in the typhus experiments. He wrote to his former conspirator at Buchenwald, the British “White Rabbit,” Wing Commander Yeo-Thomas. The old spy was an immensely loyal individual and provided great help to Dietzsch, a man whom he viewed, whatever his faults, as his personal savior. Yeo-Thomas and his wife visited Dietzsch and his wife, Lilly, in Germany, found him jobs, and sent him gifts and hundreds of deutschmarks in financial help over the years. Dietzsch’s wife wrote to Yeo-Thomas that her husband frequently woke up screaming with nightmares. “The SS is torturing me again,” he told her. But the friendship with Yeo-Thomas was a rock of comfort. “Tommy,” wrote Dietzsch in a 1957 letter, “I must confess that I never met a man like you. You have always helped me at the right moment. For my part, this means a bond for lifetime.” Many of the Buchenwald inmates who had considered Dietzsch a brute reconsidered later. In the 1960s, he was invited to attend inmate reunions in West Germany—a prematurely aged man with a pot belly, a crew cut, a small dog, and a hearing aid. “Of all my saviors, it is to Dietzsch to whom I have been most unjust in my consideration,” the SOE agent Stéphane Hessel wrote in a 2007 memoir. His early assessment of Dietzsch, no doubt influenced by Balachowsky, was “deformed by the Manicheism of the camps. What would we have done without his courage and loyalty?”
On April 17, 1945, at Buchenwald, Ludwik Fleck declared on an American military questionnaire that he intended to “emigrate to one of the overseas democratic countries,” and gave the address of a distant relative in New York and two other American references. But his destination plan was at some point crossed out and replaced with a handwritten word: “Moskau.” Perhaps Fleck did this to assure that he would be able to reconnect with Ryszard and Ernestyna in now-Soviet Lwów. More likely, a Soviet representative, jealously enforcing control of some sort, made the change. Fleck’s vision of life after the war was probably fluid. Some acquaintances—and correspondence in his secret police files—say he wanted to emigrate to Israel immediately. But despite his experiences, including postwar Polish anti-Semitism, Fleck never stopped “feeling” Polish. And he always pined for Lwów.
The new Soviet rulers of Lwów estimated that half the city’s 300,000 prewar residents had died of murder, illness, or hunger. Poland, the Big Three had agreed at Yalta, was a republic on wheels whose borders would now roll west. Poland surrendered the lands east of the 1921 Curzon line to the Soviet Union—an area that included the cities of Lwów and Vilnius (in Soviet Lithuania)—and gained much of Silesia, including the former German cities of Breslau (now Wrocław) and Gleiwitz (Gliwice). At a huge rally at the Lwów Opera House on July 30, 1944, the Ukrainian Communist leader Khrushchev announced t
hat Lwów was a Ukrainian city. He did not mention Jewish or Polish suffering there. About 800 Jews came out of the sewers and other hiding places, but they only spooked the people of Lwów, who offered little help. Meeting with Polish intellectuals on December 6, 1944, Communist officials said the city’s schools would hencefore teach in Ukrainian. Those who wanted their children to speak Polish should take them to Poland. By March 12, 1945, only 30,000 of the estimated 87,000 Poles who were present at war’s end had departed voluntarily. Having failed to persuade the rest to leave their homes, the Soviets began massive deportations. Eventually, 1.5–2 million Poles would move west from Ukraine, while 500,000 Ukrainians would move east. Banach, the mathematician, remained behind; he died of lung cancer in 1945.
Where the Lwowites settled was often a matter of chance. If the train stopped long enough for a family to locate an empty apartment, they’d stay. The trail of deportees ended up distributed along the rail line that ran through southern Poland—in cities like Przemyl, Gliwice, Kraków, and Katowice. Many went to Wrocław, although the city had been leveled in the final days of the war. The Poles had suffered, proportionately, more than any other nation during World War II, losing 6 million of their 30 million citizens, 3 million of them Jews. They received scant justice. Their Allies permitted Stalin to take half their territory, the hundreds of thousands of partisans who’d fought the Nazis were murdered, jailed, or forced to keep quiet. There was even less justice for the former residents of Lwów. As Polish citizens of a city that was no longer Polish, and which furthermore had been “reclaimed” for Ukraine after centuries of “occupation,” the Poles of Lwów were an inconvenient people. There could be no justice for the loss of life and property. The Germans who killed the Lwów professors, for example, were never prosecuted; Poland was not permitted to prosecute Nazi crimes that occurred east of the Soviet–Nazi demarcation line of September 1939.
“They did everything possible to erase Polish Lwów from history, to pretend that it didn’t exist,” says Wacław Szybalski. “That really hurt me. I loved my city.”
The way forward for Lwowites in socialist Poland was to renounce the past, but it was extremely painful. The poet Adam Zagajewski, born in Lwów in 1945, grew up hearing the Lwów dialect and recollections of his parents and their friends. He wrote,
There was too much
of Lvov, it brimmed the container,
it burst glasses, overflowed
each pond, lake, smoked through every
chimney, turned into fire, storm,
laughed with lightning, grew meek,
returned home, read the New Testament,
slept on a sofa beside the Carpathian rug,
there was too much of Lvov, and now
there isn’t any. . . .
Fleck, after stopping briefly in Kraków, ended up in bleak Lublin, wrecked during the war, its Jews gassed at Majdanek. Ludwik Hirszfeld, who had been named to head the Department of Medical Microbiology at the new Marie-Curie University there, instead took a position in Wrocław. After helping Fleck obtain his Habilitation, Hirszfeld handed off the job to him. Lublin was a postwar desert, poor and culturally barren, Fleck wrote to his friend Hugo Steinhaus in November 1946. Cold winds whistled through the broken windows of the immunology laboratory and classrooms. There were no cafés, and students came to early lectures hungry and stayed that way all day. Intact apartments were hard to find, and Fleck lived in a converted room in the medical faculty. The building had been the Chachmei Lublin Yeshiva, the biggest Talmudic school in the world when it opened in 1930. The Nazis burned the books and torahs of its remarkable library in the town square in 1939, then painted the building in camouflage and used it as a military police barracks. “Lublin is a true Ultima Thule,” Fleck wrote Steinhaus; “it is inhabited by anthropods whose reaction time is so slow that you can speak with three of them at the same time. Before the first answers, you can listen to the second and ask the third a question. In addition, people here are very pious, and priests take part in all parts of daily life.”
Despite the poor contrast Lublin made with Lwów, Fleck took up his work with enthusiasm and was popular with students. To save money on clothes, he wore his red-striped shirt from Buchenwald around his apartment. A friend pointed out that the government provided money for people who’d been held in the camps, but Fleck shrugged. “I used to be rich, and I know the taste of being so,” he said. “Now I am passionately interested in other things.” In the laboratory, he improvised ways of getting the university to stretch its budget. For example, there was no money for a typewriter until Fleck described it as an “Anthropodattelgraphen.” Once Fleck saw a line of people waiting for something at a store. After discovering it was toilet paper, which was in extremely short supply, Fleck got in line himself. He appeared at his office with several rolls hanging around his neck on a string. In his first lecture, to clear up any ambiguity, he introduced imself with characteristic straightforwardness and defiance: “My name is Ludwik Fleck. I am a Jew, and a bacteriologist.” Those who knew him during this period say that he was a warm, quick-witted presence, a demanding boss but kindly and appreciative of a good joke. Although there are no records of Fleck’s reflection on how concentration camp life had changed him, perhaps he felt something like the German-Jewish Dr. Lucie Adelsberger, whom he had met at Auschwitz:
Once you learn by painful, personal experience how everything vanishes—money and possessions, honor and reputation—and that the only thing that remains is a person’s inner attitude, you acquire a profound disregard for the superficialities of life. . . . We who had to watch 990 out of every 1000 people die are no longer able—and this is a real defect—to take our own personal lives and our own future seriously. On the other hand, we take increased enjoyment in the little things of everyday life. After all that deprivation we consciously enjoy every slice of bread and every piece of cake. We treasure the warm coat that protects us against the cold; every single little amenity of life seems like a gift from heaven. We lap up the kindness of others the way a dry sponge absorbs water. . . . It’s a miracle and a gift of God that we survived Auschwitz; it’s also an obligation. The legacy of the dead rests in our hands.
Fleck remained in Lublin until 1952. He worked primarily on leukergy, the meaningful clumping of white blood cells during infections that he had noted first in the Jewish hospital on Kuszewicz Street during the war. He had lots of visitors, friends, and acquaintances; there were no cafés, so they talked to him in the lab while he tracked his leukocytes. The chemist Janina Opieska-Blauth, who had worked with Fleck at the Laokoon factory in Lwów and now shared a wall with him, remembered that he had a philosophical attitude toward irritating problems. “He was friendly and helpful to colleagues and to assistants, whom he addressed as ‘my children,’” she said.
Fleck traveled on scientific business to Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, the USSR, France, Denmark, and even Boston in 1954, where he attended a hematology conference and was invited by the Harvard pathologist Sidney Farber (founder of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute) to address his lab staff about his research on leukergy. The Polish secret police jealously guarded foreign travel, so Fleck must have enjoyed the support of Communist-linked academics. A 1954 letter in his secret police file says Fleck sought to emigrate to Palestine in the first two years after the war, but after being refused “showed a positive relationship to the present reality.” According to that letter, written to assist Fleck’s election to the Polish Academy of Sciences, he opposed U.S. imperialism at a conference organized to protest alleged U.S. biological warfare in Korea, and favorably contrasted conditions for science under communism to late 1930s Poland.
On the streets of Lublin, children would pass him by and say, “There’s a Jew the Germans didn’t kill. Why not?”
Most of Fleck’s assistants were women, who appreciated his learning and chivalry. “The professor was not really handsome, but that’s the point,” said Ewa Pleszczyska, one of Fleck’s assistants in
Lublin. “Someone once said he was ugly, and I got angry: How could you say that Professor Fleck is ugly? His inner beauty radiated so intensely that it completely erased his looks.” Students were spellbound by his lectures on the history of medicine. He emphasized the importance of clear writing. “A scientific paper is well-written,” he said, “only when it can be understood by a layman.” Said another, “He didn’t speak about himself. He never boasted. The professor was uncomfortable playing the hero, but he was one. Because even in these terrible conditions, he could still help people.” Fleck’s assistants felt that his bravery had saved him during the war, perhaps by showing the Nazis that they were dealing with a formidable person. “You know,” Pleszczyska told an interviewer, “the dog doesn’t chase the cat until the cat runs away.”
After returning from Nuremberg, Fleck defended the principles of the Nuremberg Code and went a step further. Scientists should not conduct experiments on the insane unless the medicines being tested could provide health benefits to the subjects, he wrote in a Polish medical journal. When testing drugs or vaccine in prisons, doctors should experiment only on true volunteers, whose sacrifice to advance science should be acknowledged with rewards such as shorter sentences. Any time a risky experiment was to be carried out, Fleck added, it should be explained by the doctor in plain language—“the way a person talks to a person.” That was an idea ahead of its time. A quick scan of research published in Science magazine, Fleck wrote, showed that U.S. clinicians routinely violated these principles.
Fleck was an ideal person to put medical experimentation in context. Alas, he was also working in an impoverished country behind the rapidly descending Iron Curtain. And context, as Fleck understood, was vital—as was public relations, or what Fleck called the exchange of ideas within a thought community that included “esoteric” (expert) and “exoteric” (wider public) audiences for science. Polish scientists did not communicate well with the world. They were poor and frightened, and it was hard to travel to the West, for political and financial reasons. Many scientists emigrated. Those who stayed struggled with poverty and obscurity. Ah, to be a Frenchman like Balachowsky, at the gilded Pasteur Institute. Bestowed with medals, lavished with laboratory equipment and funds, Balachowsky toured the United States and Mexico in 1946, visiting friends, hiking in the mountains, preaching on the horrors of the concentration camps. His testimony at Nuremberg was fraught with errors, but nobody questioned him.