The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis (46 page)

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 Opie
ska-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 Pleszczy
ska, 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,” Pleszczy
ska 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.

Rudolf Weigl, meanwhile
, was coming to the end of his road. The Polish Ministry of Health had decided to entrust manufacture of the louse vaccine to his former aide Kry
ski, who had taken a position in Lublin, and to Przybyłkiewicz in Kraków. This decision broke Weigl’s heart. He made no effort to ingratiate himself with the new order. He refrained from putting his name to petitions of socialist solidarity that scientists were expected to sign; he did not go along to get along. The authorities tolerated him because of his scientific reputation, but did nothing to acknowledge his contributions or the merit of his ideas. The government withdrew its long-standing nomination for the Nobel Prize, and he was never named to the Polish National Academy, a cruel omission. Polish science students did not learn about his work. “Young Polish intellectuals know who Schindler was, but have no idea who Weigl was,” a co-worker wrote in 1994. Like the rest of Polish Lwów, Weigl was shunted aside. How could one defend what had never existed?

He died of a heart attack on August 11, 1957, while resting in Zakopane, in the Carpathians.
At Weigl’s memorial
service in Kraków, Henryk Mosing, who had obtained special permission to come to Kraków from Lviv, gave a powerful eulogy, drawing together the strands of Weigl’s personality, his bravery and brilliant scientific and technological mind. Mosing was a deeply religious man: he was secretly ordained in Poland by Cardinal Stefan Wyszy
ski, at a ceremony attended by the future Pope John Paul II. He appeared suddenly at the grave site—delays at the Russian–Polish border had kept Mosing from arriving at the service—and gave an emotional, impromptu speech that tremendously moved those who were there. At first, many of them didn’t recognize Mosing at all—he was an apparition from Lwów, their past, a city that no longer existed for them. “Rudolf Stefan Weigl transformed the louse, a symbol of dirt, misery, and aversion,” Mosing concluded, “into a useful object of scientific research and a lifesaving tool.”