The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis (48 page)

Many documents from Ludwik Fleck’s life disappeared in the upheavals of the 20th century. Letters and documents were lost during the war. Correspondence with the Lublin biochemist Józef Parnas was confiscated by the Polish secret police when Parnas got into trouble in 1968. When Fleck died, he left his papers in the care of his best friend in Israel, Markus Klingberg, deputy director of Ness Ziona. But Klingberg, a Pole who had been an epidemiologist in the Soviet Union during the war, was arrested by Israel’s Shin Beth intelligence service in 1983 as a spy for the Soviet Union. Fleck’s papers were seized and, Klingberg says, destroyed. Luckily, a German sociology student who had visited Klingberg a few years earlier had photocopied many of them.

Klingberg recruited
at least two spies during his quarter-century espionage career in Israel, and some Fleck scholars have speculated that he might have recruited Fleck as well. After all, Fleck never concealed his gratitude toward the Communist inmates who saved his life at Buchenwald. But Klingberg denies such a thing occurred. “Fleck was at Auschwitz! After all he had been through, I didn’t want to complicate his life,” Klingberg told me in an interview in Paris, where he was allowed to join his daughter in 2003 after 20 years in Israeli prisons. It seems doubtful Fleck would have been a willing Soviet spy. He was a man of the left, but no great adept of Marxian versions of the truth. In any case, he did not live long in Israel.

In 1961, less than
four years after his arrival, Fleck suffered a second heart attack, while undergoing treatment for malignant lymphoma, and died a few days later in hospital. Just before his death, he and Ernestyna had received a letter from the West German government announcing the approval of their
Wiedergutmachung
, a payment of several thousand dollars in compensation for their suffering at the hands of the Nazis. They cried with relief, for life was hard, and Fleck worried about Ernestyna’s future.

His body was brought
from their apartment to the institute, and the funeral cortege left from there to the cemetery nearby. Today, the institute’s epidemiology building bears his name.

*
Przybyłkiewicz was the only
scientist affiliated with Weigl’s institute who published with Eyer during the occupation, coauthoring an article about typhus.

AFTERWORD

W
hen the Germans
abandoned Naples in October 1943 under American attack, they dynamited the water supply; a short time later, typhus broke out among the lice-ridden residents who had sought shelter from Allied bombing raids in the subterranean maze of old tunnels beneath the city. The invaders offered typhus vaccine to priests, medical workers, and a few others; the GIs themselves had all been vaccinated with the Cox vaccine, and not a single GI died of typhus. But the vaccine was employed sparsely in combating the Naples typhus epidemic. Most of the work was done with portable metal pesticide sprayers, the kind that suburban dads used to kill garden bugs. GIs sprayed three million lousy Neapolitans with DDT. The U.S. Typhus Commission had tested the powder against typhus in North Africa, where the sprayers came in handy to get at vermin in the robes of modest Muslim women, and they worked just as well in Italy. In the first typhus epidemic encountered by the U.S. Army in World War II, DDT, not vaccine, defeated the disease. The epidemic burned out in February.

The Allies came too late
to stop typhus at Dachau, where the disease killed hundreds in April 1945, or at Bergen-Belsen. Anne Frank and her sister, Margot, were among 17,000 inmates of that camp who died of typhus in the final weeks of the war. Typhus killed hundreds of thousands of Jews and other inmates in hundreds of other concentration camps spread across Europe. These were the last major typhus epidemics in Europe. Everywhere the Allied troops went, they liberally dusted friend and foe with DDT. The miracle powder killed the vector and thus eliminated the spread of typhus, and practically eliminated the disease as a threat to mankind. The Cox vaccine surely had some efficacy, but it was never studied well enough for anyone to know how much. Giroud’s vaccine protected thousands of French POWs, and,
according to Weigl
, 5–6 million individuals were vaccinated with his vaccine, including 1 million civilians. The figure is certainly exaggerated. How many of those who received his vaccine survived because of it? Did the vaccine change the course of history? Perhaps only in small ways. Some hundreds or thousands of concentration camp and ghetto inhabitants, having passed through a thousand deadly threats, may have never known whether it was vaccine or something else that ultimately saved them.

Weigl’s lice
live on. For 40 years, Henryk Mosing continued his master’s research on rickettsial diseases, working for the Ukrainian health ministry at the building on Zelena (formerly Zielona) Street in Lwów, now Lviv, where Fleck had been the boss under the Soviets, IG Farben during the Nazi occupation. He used Weigl’s methodology, but improved diagnostic tests and conducted research on the pathophysiology of louse-carried typhus.
About 10,000 descendants
of the Weigl lice first created in 1939 are kept alive, fed each day by lab workers for a small stipend. These lice are quite different from “wild” lice. Like the scientists who feed them, they have been entirely shaped by the culture of the laboratory.

Advances in knowledge
on lice and typhus have come elsewhere in recent decades. In 1975, U.S. scientists discovered that in addition to humans and lice, the disease is carried by flying squirrels. About 40 percent of the flying squirrels in the southeastern United States are estimated to carry antibodies to
Rickettsia prowazekii
. The germ does not sicken the squirrels or their lice, however, and transmission to people is extremely rare—only a handful of squirrel-to-person transmissions have been documented over the past 35 years. Yet the easy carriage of the causative germ suggests that sometime in the past, the squirrel, or its lice or fleas, may have brought the disease into human circulation. This suggests that typhus was part of the Columbian exchange, traveling back to Europe with Spanish
conquistadores
.

Nowadays fewer people
are lousy, and typhus, when it appears, can be controlled with a single dose of a common antibiotic like doxycycline.
Typhus outbreaks still
occur in a few cold, impoverished pockets of the world—in the Peruvian Andes, in the Atlas Mountains of North Africa, in Ethiopia, and even in Russia. In 1997, a deadly febrile disease broke out in Rwandan refugee camps in the highlands of Burundi, with 100,000 cases and 15,000 deaths. Its cause was mysterious until one of the victims, a Swiss nurse, was flown home sick and died of a hemorrhagic fever. An autopsy revealed she had typhus.
A year later
, typhus broke out in a Russian psychiatric hospital where the patients and nurses had not removed their clothes for months on account of freezing temperatures caused by a broken generator.
Other rickettsial
diseases continue to circulate more abundantly. About a million Asians each year sicken of chigger-borne scrub typhus, which is fatal in roughly 10 percent of diagnosed cases.
Flea-carried murine
typhus—
Rickettsia typhi—
strikes from time to time in the Americas; an outbreak hospitalized 23 people in 2008 in Austin, Texas. Tick-borne rickettsial diseases like Rocky Mountain spotted fever are still around.

Overall, classical typhus
is so unusual that many of the world’s top experts on
Rickettsia
have never seen it. David Walker, a leading rickettsial expert who works at the University of Texas at Galveston, arrived in an Andean village in Peru at the tail end of an epidemic once, and found families where both parents had died. “But I’ve never seen an actual case of the disease,” he says. There are certainly many very poor people in cold places who still carry the typhus germ. The disease is much easier to control than it ever was. Yet in some remote corners of the globe, no doubt, it is only a single catastrophe away from returning.

Walker’s department
in Texas was established by Ludwik Anigstein, a Polish émigré whom Fleck visited during a trip to the United States in 1954. Looking through Anigstein’s papers many years ago, Walker found the story of Fleck’s urine-based typhus vaccine and decided to investigate. He looked for
Rickettsia prowazekii
antigens in the urine of guinea pigs and other animals infected with the disease, but never found any. “Maybe I was incompetent,” he told me. “Or maybe it wasn’t there.”

Fleck’s scientific discoveries have not held up in a significant way, but his ideas about how to think remain very relevant. In the wake of the Nazi intellectual disaster, which festered in a pseudo-Darwinian mishmash of Nietzsche, Spencer, and Galton, scientists like Fleck and Hirszfeld were looking for new scientific metaphors, different ways of interpreting science and sharing its culture with the public. Fleck understood that the vast complexity of biology left room for new concepts and approaches. He wanted scientific thought collectives to be open, democratic communities that allowed in different streams of interpretation.

I visited Lwów recently and wondered at the vitality of a place with so many shattered and buried dreams. I watched smartly dressed Ukrainian men and women—ambling, strolling, trotting purposefully through the streets. Tourist shops sold posters and T-shirts celebrating anti-Semitic Ukrainian nationalists, and the street that once was Sapiehy, a major thoroughfare in a mixed Polish-Jewish part of town, has been renamed for the Ukrainian nationalist (and anti-Semite) Stepan Bandera. These things were troubling, but it struck me there was no denying the continuity of urban life, each and every inhabitant focused on his or her own worries and plans. All cities, even the most peaceful, are built upon the bones of the dead. The lack of memorials to Lwów’s Jewish and Polish forefathers is appalling, yet the dead are, in some sense, always forgotten. From time to time, we stop to share their stories and perhaps allow them to live through us on the streets they once walked. New thought collectives are born continually.

Everything passes
, including greatness. “In my career,” the geneticist Wacław Szybalski told me, “many things I did were great at the time, but now they are passé. I think that if Weigl had lived much longer he’d have been unhappy to be honored for things that no longer had value, things of the past.”
Yet the story
of Weigl’s lab, for the filmmaker Andrzej
uławski, was just as important as the story of the great battles of the war. “Maybe Hiroshima beats it,” he said. “But I’m alive because of those lice. I always say that the blood of those contaminated lice fills my veins, which accounts for part of my mad character.” He keeps a small wooden louse cage that his father used in Weigl’s laboratory. “All his life, my father carried this with him, and it was on his desk,”
uławski says. “It was very, very important to him. Now I have it on my desk.”

There was no return to Lwów, but the exiles carried Lwów with them.

. . . people bade goodbye

without handkerchiefs, no tears, such a dry

mouth, I won’t see you anymore, so much death

awaits you, why must every city

become Jerusalem and every man a Jew,

and now in a hurry just

pack, always, each day,

and go breathless, go to Lvov, after all

it exists, quiet and pure as

a peach. It is everywhere.

NOTES

ABBREVIATIONS

BA	Bundesarchiv
Fleck, Denkstile	Ludwik Fleck, Denkstile und Tatsachen: Gesammelte Schriften und Zeugnisse , ed. Sylwia Werner and Claus Zittel (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011)
Fleck, Genesis	Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact , ed. Thaddeus J. Trenn and Robert K. Merton, trans. Fred Bradley and Thaddeus J. Trenn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981)
DGVG-Ding	Direction Générale des Victimes de la Guerre (Brussels), Ding correspondence, 1934–44
Hirszfeld, One Life	The Story of One Life , trans. and ed. Marta A. Balinska, ed. William H. Schneider (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2011)
HNOC, HLSL	Harvard Nuremberg Online Collection, Harvard Law School Library item no.
IHTP	Institut d’histoire du temps présent, Paris
IPN	Instytut Pami ci Narodowej (Institute of National Remembrance), Warsaw
IWM	Imperial War Museum
Kew	British National Archives–Kew Gardens
Kogon, Hell	Eugen Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System behind Them , trans. Heinz Nordon (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1950)
LFZ	Ludwik Fleck Zentrum, in Archiv für Zeitgeschichte, Zurich
NA	National Archives, Washington, DC
PIA	Pasteur Institute Archives, Paris
RG	record group
Shoah Foundation	USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education
Szybalski, “Genius”	Wacław Szybalski, “The Genius of Rudolf Stefan Weigl (1883–1957), a Lvovian Microbe Hunter and Breeder,” in International Weigl Conference . . . Programme and Abstracts, ed. R. Stoika et al. (Lviv: Sept. 11–14, 2003), accessed at http://www.lwow.home.pl/Weigl/in-memoriam.html
USHMM	United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Weindling, Epidemics	Paul Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe, 1890–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000)
YVA	Yad Vashem Archive