The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis (44 page)

The U.S. Army held
Eyer at a military prison in Augsburg and Mannheim until November, when he was released and immediately became chief of the microbiology department at the University of Bonn. A year later, he was arrested again, this time by British officials at the request of the Poles, who accused Eyer of having mistreated Polish employees and stolen or wrecked Polish equipment. The Brits held Eyer in four different military prisons for nearly a year while his case was investigated. His wife collected positive affidavits from 20 people, mostly former German subalterns but also a few Poles and Ukrainians who had worked under him in Kraków. In late 1947, the British allowed him to return to Bonn. His wartime work had been clean, it seems, in every sense except that it had supported history’s most genocidal force. Unlike too many of his colleagues, Eyer had stood up for Polish colleagues, had stuck out his neck to do the right thing. Would he have performed differently if he had overseen wretched ghettos, like Walbaum and Kudicke, rather than directing what was essentially a pharmaceutical laboratory? Perhaps. The German federal chancellor Helmut Kohl once acknowledged the moral failure of Germany when he spoke of his own gratitude for “the mercy of a late birth”—the fact that his generation was too young to have been called upon to kill unjustly. Eyer’s fortunate record must have owed something to the mercy of a less freighted military assignment. “My father was proud,” Peter Eyer stated during a long interview in 2011, “that during the Nazi years he did not have to commit any injustice.” Eyer felt intense remorse for the fate of the Jews after the war. But it would be his good deeds that made trouble for him. The friendship he showed Poles, Rudolf Weigl in particular, would be turned against both men, in a shabby story of Cold War politics.

Poland is a country
cursed by a difficult past in which historical figures tend to be tarred with the brush of treason or, if they die, gilded in overly bright halos. As a flawed, flesh-and-blood man of science, Weigl found no place in the romantic narrative of sacrifice that dominated postwar Polish culture. Ryszard Wójcik, a journalist who has done much to bring Weigl posthumous acclaim, explains this in his book
Pact with the Devil
. Here, he quotes a former louse feeder who, having become an important postwar scientist, spoke in the late 1970s on condition of anonymity:

You ask about how far a compromise can be stretched. I’ll tell you frankly. In this country, in which for the last two hundred years its citizens have been doomed to have their dignity violated and where there is a permanent divide between fruitless steadfastness and rational collaboration in the name of survival, there has been for a long time a place for those in the steadfast category: The sweet and cozy sands of the cemetery. All the steadfast, flawless people lie in the cemeteries. They were executed, shot, freed by suicide.

Weigl had lent his assistance to the Germans in a concrete way during the three years of the occupation. He oversaw the production of millions of vaccines designed to protect an army bent on the mass murder and subjection of Poles among others. By Hermann Eyer’s postwar estimate, the production of the Weigl vaccine in Kraków and Lwów during World War II saved the lives of 10,000 Wehrmacht soldiers. The vaccine did not keep the soldiers entirely well, but it kept them from dying. And thus it bolstered, to a small extent, the fighting capacity of Germany, thereby extending the war, the killing, and the misery of the Jews and other subject peoples behind German lines. Weigl saw a way for his life’s work to provide two kinds of protection—to those who took the vaccine, and those who made it. We do not know whether he questioned the ethics of producing a vaccine that protected those who killed his friends. We do know that the thousands of people saved by his vaccine included the scientific and artistic intelligentsia of Lwów, and that his laboratory smuggled thousands of vaccines to the desperate ghettos of Poland, while providing a haven for the Polish resistance movement. The Weigl lab was a force for good. It could not achieve moral perfection.

The postwar years
were difficult for Weigl, politically and professionally. As the Soviets approached Lwów in April 1944, he packed some of his equipment and retreated to the mountain town of Kro
cienko, while the Germans took the rest and headed west. Several months later, a squad of Soviet soldiers accompanied by an NKVD officer arrived at his house in Kro
cienko and took him to Kraków.
In 1945, he was
offered a position as a professor at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, but was required to teach at least five hours of lectures and two hours of laboratory courses each week—a heavy load for any professor, especially a famous one who preferred to teach as little as possible. Weigl lacked the energy and disposition to engage in the kind of politicking that would have been required to maintain his status. During the first four years after the war, an NKVD colonel lived on the same floor of his apartment building and kept constant watch on his comings and goings. The colonel was amazed, a friend of the Weigls named Henryk Gaertner said, that the professor kept refusing Soviet offers to make his vaccine in Moscow. “He’d say, “You could have your own apartment, your own driver, a good salary,’” recalled Gaertner. Weigl, as always, refused the offers. Meanwhile, his position worsened as he lost a power play with a younger scientist who wanted his place.

Weigl found himself
tangling with Zdzisław Przybyłkiewicz, a microbiologist whom he had trained in the late 1930s and who went on to become Eyer’s top Polish assistant in Kraków during the war. Weigl did not think much of Przybyłkiewicz’s work, and in 1946 refused to approve the latter’s
Habilitationsschrift
, calling it second-rate. Przybyłkiewicz managed to win
Habilitation
anyway because the second committee member who might have vetoed it (Ludwik Hirszfeld, as it happened) excused himself on the grounds of unfamiliarity with the subject. Having received his
Habilitation
, Przybyłkiewicz became a full professor, and he had powerful allies in Kraków. The influx of Lwów professors into the city had led to feelings of insecurity and resentment among academics at the Jagiellonian University. In this atmosphere, it was easier for Przybyłkiewicz to rally support to his side of the conflict.

Colleagues over the years
would accuse Przybyłkiewicz of requesting bribes to treat patients, of fathering children out of wedlock, of sleeping with students and driving away competent scientists—including Jan Starzyk, Weigl’s former assistant—if he saw them as competition. He was a mediocre scientist and a terrible teacher, they said, and by the early 1960s he’d become a police informer, according to his secret police file. Sofia Bujdwid, who had protected Przybyłkiewicz in the final months of the war by giving him a job at her father’s lab, claimed that he later orchestrated the confiscation of her lab, house, and other property. In a letter she left for posterity, Bujdwid described Przybyłkiewicz as a callow, scheming ignoramus loaded with hatred for his betters—“a louse,” she called him.

But a louse
, if that’s what he was, with influence. Przybyłkiewicz became director of the Department of Public Hygiene at the Jagiellonian University medical school in 1946, and a short time later the government sent him to Munich to retrieve Polish lab equipment. Among the materials, he found a signed portrait of Weigl, with the caption, “to my young friend Hermann Eyer.” Przybyłkiewicz accused Eyer of stealing Polish property—it was this accusation that lay behind Eyer’s arrest in the British sector. Przybyłkiewicz used the photograph to stigmatize Weigl as a collaborator, though he himself had worked more closely with Eyer than had any other Polish scientist.
*
He also claimed
(falsely) that Weigl had met Eyer in Ethiopia in 1939, and had at that point begun cooperating with the Germans.

Weigl’s name started
to fall into ill repute. Most of his old associates made themselves scarce and stopped using his name as a reference. In late 1940s Poland, it was poisonous to be associated with the career of a collaborator. It did not help that many members of the Lwów circle, including Weigl’s son, Wiktor, were increasingly antagonistic toward Weigl’s second wife, Anna Herzig who, some claimed, jealously guarded access to him.

Most of Weigl’s students were searching for their own places in postwar Poland.
Perhaps the most loyal
among them, the epidemiologist Henryk Mosing, remained in Lwów and led rickettsial research that helped end typhus’s reign in the Soviet Union. Mosing did much to keep his mentor’s work from slipping into obscurity. He studied the mechanisms by which typhus persisted in nonepidemic periods, and used a test designed by Weigl to diagnose unsymptomatic carriers. In the immediate postwar years, a certain moral ambiguity colored many survivors’ memories of the Weigl laboratory. The Soviet line on Polish “collaborators” muddied the distinction between those who had shown great bravery in difficult circumstances and those fortunate enough to have avoided imperfect choices. Andrzej
uławski’s powerful 1971 film,
The Third Part of the Night
, presented a somewhat jaded version of life at the institute. The mood of the young lab workers and louse feeders living reluctantly in Weigl’s safekeeping is somber, morbid, and full of self-loathing.

Weigl with his second wife, Anna Herzig, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren, in Kraków, 1950s. (Courtesy of National Museum, Przemy
l. Photograph of original by S. Kosiedowski.)