The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis (13 page)

The delicate balance between ethnic conflict and normality is exemplified in a May 1929 outburst that began when a Catholic procession passed by a Jewish school. As the Jewish girls craned their necks to get a view, one fell off a stool and started to cry, causing her companions to laugh.
People in the procession
took the laughter as a Jewish profaning of their faith, and after it was reported in the anti-Semitic press, thugs supporting the anti-Semitic Endeks (National Democratic Party) began smashing windows of Jewish businesses on the thoroughfares of Legionów and Kopernika. When a crowd raided the school and started beating students, police intervened and made 40 arrests. Piłsudski’s interior minister flew into Lwów and quashed the violence, but he refused to meet with the students or their teachers.

Jews and Poles who were polite enough toward each other in public tended not to associate in private—though there were plenty of exceptions to the rule. The causes of this coolness were complex. Frank Stiffel, a Lwowite who would survive both Treblinka and Auschwitz, recalled that as a young man he lived on the same floor as the mathematician Stefan Banach. The two families never greeted each other, which Stiffel attributed to anti-Semitism on Banach’s part.
But Banach’s wife
was Jewish and what the Stiffels assumed was prejudice was just as likely the distracted behavior of a man with his head in abstract clouds of thought.

For Jews, the interwar
period in Lwów and Poland in general was also a period of thriving cultural expression when many great ideologies and movements were born or came of age. Yiddish theater took off, Zionism and the socialist-motivated Bund expanded, and the mainstream Jewish political movement, Agudat Israel, grew in power.
Few Jews joined
the Polish Communist Party, but the tiny party’s leaders were disproportionately Jewish.

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism in any form has an equally powerful taint. In the Poland of the 1930s, however, anti-Semitism was usually less hate-filled than it was in Nazified Germany. It was more of a symptom of economic competition between two largely segregated communities that viewed prosperity as a zero-sum game. To a large degree, the new Polish state saw ethnic Poles as its sole constituency. It discriminated against Jews as a backlash against the racial tolerance of the empire, which had not favored Poles over other subjects who lived in the lands that were now Poland.
Up until the the start
of World War I, some 70 percent of the lawyers and 60 percent of doctors in Lwów were Jews, as were many traders and shop owners. During the economic turmoil of the 1930s, nationalists portrayed Jews as outsiders who hogged Polish resources. Especially in the 1930s, the state encouraged them to emigrate to Palestine. Its other actions against the Jews were relatively mild when compared with those of the Germans.

More alarming were the outbreaks of violence, especially on college campuses.
Eleven of 600
Jews who applied to the Lwów medical school in 1930 were accepted; by 1937 the quota had shrunk to zero. Members of anti-Semitic student clubs, who displayed their politics with green boutonnieres, menaced the remaining Jewish students in the streets and the halls of the university, armed with razor blades slotted into wooden sticks. Of the many Jewish students beaten and attacked, at least three died. The Lwów rector dealt with such incidents by closing the university. Between October 1931 and November 1938, the university was closed about a third of the time.
When a nationalist student
died after attacking a Jewish self-defense group, senior university administrators attended his funeral, as if a “great national hero had fallen for God and country,” a witness noted.
Yet it is worth
pointing out that 12,000 Lwowites, including many non-Jews, showed up in May 1939 for the burial of Markus Landesberg, a murdered Jewish polytechnical student.

The growth of institutional
anti-Semitism hurt Ludwik Fleck. Though thoroughly assimilated into Polish culture, Fleck “looked Jewish.” Nationalists occasionally baited him in the streets, and associates felt that he suffered psychologically from such torments. More to the point, the nationalistic policies put a dent in his professional life. In 1935, the Social Security Hospital fired Fleck, under a new law removing Jews from senior public service. Over the first decade and a half of his career, he had been excluded first from the university, then from any and all official positions. His world, like that of all Polish Jews, was shrinking.
Fleck joined an
antifascist movement in Lwów and his son, Ryszard, then 11 years old, took part in a Jewish self-defense group. Yet despite the ostracism, the late 1930s were fruitful years for Fleck. His three-room laboratory at Ochronek 8, on a shady street near a busy downtown thoroughfare, was thriving.
His lectures
on biology and philosophy, given to the Lwów historical society and the Jewish Medical Society, were praised and well attended.

In 1933, Fleck sent
a manuscript copy of his new book,
The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact
, to Moritz Schlick, the leader of the Vienna Circle, a prominent group of philosophers who believed that scientific statements were always verifiable, and in that sense ahistorical. This ran counter to Fleck’s thought but he hoped that Schlick would find his book interesting enough to engage with him. Schlick, however, returned the book with the comment that while it was certainly scholarly, the ideas in it were wrong. German publishers had stopped printing books written by Jews around this time. A Swiss publisher released the book in 1935.

As the end of the decade approached, Poland was doing everything wrong for a nation that many could see was on the verge of being plunged into war. The country was in no way prepared to face the might of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. Students drilled on the grounds of the High Castle with 19th-century rifles, while mustachioed legionnaires—Piłsudski’s men from the previous war—marched proudly through the streets or rode on old nags. Meanwhile, the government squeezed the Jews, the only allies it could possibly have counted on to form a wall of solidarity against the Nazis. “
Poor Poland, you are
too weak to try to imitate Hitler,” wrote Wiktor Chajes, an assimilated, wealthy Jew who was vice president of Lwów’s municipal council.

Weigl may have been absent-minded, but he was by no means oblivious to what was happening. Though he mistrusted politicians and shunned politics, he read the papers, listened to the radio, and predicted long before many others that Hitler would threaten Poland. He hated the bravado of the military, was a radical pacifist, and had no time for the nonsense of racial hatred. In 1937, when the nationalist government passed a law requiring that Jews stand in university classes, Weigl was one of the few professors to reject it. He walked into his lecture hall one day and saw some students standing alone against the wall. “What’s going on here? Why don’t you sit down?” he asked. One of the nationalists explained that the standing students were Jews.
“In that case,” Weigl said
, “I will stand until they sit.”

It was during this period that Weigl became a fanatic of archery. One day he was visiting his favorite hunting shop and noticed a bow. Before long, Weigl had mastered the sport and started a Lwów archery association. He trained his son and several of his friends, including Jan Reutt, Franek Schramm, and Szybalski, who later became mainstays of Weigl’s wartime laboratory.
They set up their first
targets in the Botanical Garden, behind his lab, and eventually began practicing on the grounds of the Eastern Trade Fair.

“Weigl was very good,” recalled Szybalski. “He’d shoot from 90 meters away, while I was standing at 30. To shoot 90 meters you have to have a good strong bow. I would be shooting and his arrows would be whistling over my head—‘pffft. pffft’—into the target. And he continued to do this until the end of the war.” Weigl started buying bows from all over the world and began designing and producing his own arrows, which he sometimes grooved so that they shot straighter, like bullets from a threaded barrel. He would collect data on how each type of arrow moved and correct his stance to adjust its flight. Soon Weigl’s archers were among the best in Poland. As his archery skills improved, Weigl began to lose interest in firearms. On duck-hunting trips with friends he would sit in the blind and admire the sky and water and the bugs in the grass, while his friends blasted away with their shotguns. It was as if he had a premonition of what was coming. Later, he would tell a sympathetic German officer, “When I saw the NKVD and Nazis hunting people, I lost any desire to kill things.”

Weigl at play. (Courtesy of National Museum, Przemy
l. Photograph of original by S. Kosiedowski.)

CHAPTER FOUR

T
HE
N
AZI
D
OCTORS AND THE
S
HAPE OF
T
HINGS TO
C
OME

T
he ethnicity of Fleck and Weigl had meant less when they were both scientists in a peaceful country working on related problems. But, if we were thinking like Fleck, we would say that he and Weigl, Jew and Pole, entered different thought collectives when the war began. Both men conducted work under the profound duress of a Nazi system that viewed them as subservient. But there were gradations in the degree of enslavement. Weigl would produce his vaccine in the service of the German army, whose medical division, though certainly not free of anti-Semitism and other corrupting influences, had as its principal objective the protection of the German fighting man. Fleck would be commandeered by doctors of the SS, whose objectives were racial, genocidal, and confused. Weigl at one point described his German overseer as “my younger colleague.” Fleck’s term for his boss, Erwin Ding, was “dummkopf.”

In 1935, the year
that Fleck’s
Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact
was published, Dr. Ding was working as a spy for the
Sicherheitsdienst
(Security Service), one of the most fearsome of the many police agencies operating under the SS chief, Heinrich Himmler. Ding carried out his missions in the baroque streets of Leipzig, Germany, filing detailed expense accounts for each one—“Streetcar ride, phone calls, investigation case 2145 (Franz)”; “phone discussion of case 2714 (Richter).” He seems to have been diligent in his work, for he earned marks of
gut
and
sehr gut
(very good) from his superiors. It is peculiar to think of secret police work as a stepping stone to eminence in medical research, which was Ding’s dream. But work for the higher police units of the SS represented a bona fide in the Nazi medical thought collective. In a Nazi state that practiced mass murder to cleanse “unhealthy” elements from the body politic, the medic’s responsibility was to help cure the
Volk
—the German race—not the individual patient.
When Himmler heard
in 1941 that German doctors were caring for prisoners slated for experiments at concentration camps, he wrote, enraged, to the senior SS doctor that medicine should “not keep the sick alive but reduce their numbers.” The very idea of keeping them alive, “would cause a dog to cry,” he added. Thus, Ding’s occupation in 1935 was far from unusual for an SS doctor on the rise.
Obersturmbannführer
Joachim
Mrugowsky, who was later Ding’s boss, also took 1935 off from his medical studies, in order to head the
Sicherheitsdienst
station in the northern German city of Hanover.

Ding was the type of man whom Himmler wanted to form into an elite class of ardent Nazi professionals. He was born in Bielefeld in 1912, the bastard son of a minor noble of Saxony-Anhalt, Baron Karl von Schuler, a doctor and African explorer who left a host of illegitimate children. Illegitimacy was not an impossible hurdle on the path to success as a Nazi—Adolf Hitler, after all, was, among other things, the son of a bastard—but it was a complicating factor, especially if one’s paternal bloodline could not be fixed beyond doubt. The Wehrmacht, for example, did not generally accept men born out of wedlock into its officer corps. While the SS higher ranks viewed themselves as the Third Reich’s aristocracy, bitterness and social exclusion flung certain ambitious young men, including Ding, into the arms of the SS.