Few diseases are more gruesome than typhus. Transmitted by body lice,
it afflicts the dispossessed--refugees, soldiers, and ghettoized
peoples--causing hallucinations, terrible headaches, boiling fever,
and often death. The disease plagued the German army on the Eastern
Front and left the Reich desperate for a vaccine. For this they
turned to the brilliant and eccentric Polish zoologist Rudolf Weigl.
In
the 1920s, Weigl had created the first typhus vaccine using a method
as bold as it was dangerous for its use of living human subjects. The
astonishing success of Weigl's techniques attracted the attention and
admiration of the world--giving him cover during the Nazi's violent
occupation of Lviv. His lab soon flourished as a hotbed of
resistance. Weigl hired otherwise doomed mathematicians, writers,
doctors, and other thinkers, protecting them from atrocity. The team
engaged in a sabotage campaign by sending illegal doses of the
vaccine into the Polish ghettos while shipping gallons of the
weakened serum to the Wehrmacht.
Among
the scientists saved by Weigl, who was a Christian, was a gifted
Jewish immunologist named Ludwik Fleck. Condemned to Buchenwald and
pressured to re-create the typhus vaccine under the direction of a
sadistic Nazi doctor, Erwin Ding-Schuler, Fleck had to make an awful
choice between his scientific ideals or the truth of his conscience.
In risking his life to carry out a dramatic subterfuge to vaccinate
the camp's most endangered prisoners, Fleck performed an act of great
heroism.
Drawing
on extensive research and interviews with survivors, Arthur Allen
tells the harrowing story of two brave scientists--a Christian and a
Jew-- who put their expertise to the best possible use, at the
highest personal danger.