From Atlas Obscura:
How a Fake Typhus Epidemic Saved a Polish City From the Nazis
During World War II, a man went to the doctor in Rozwadów, Poland with a unique complaint. He was one of thousands of Poles forced by the Nazi occupiers to work in German labor camps. The man had been granted a 14-day leave to visit his family, and his time was almost up.
He was desperate to escape the camp, but knew that if he did not return, he would be hunted down and he and his family would be arrested and sent to a concentration camp–a death sentence in many cases. He had considered suicide, but also knew that a serious disease, verified by a physician, would spare him from returning to the camp.The two doctors who saw the man decided to help him in his quest for a diagnosis, and offered to give him an injection. He accepted. The doctors then drew a blood sample and sent it to a German lab. Soon, they received a telegram that read: “Weil-Felix positive.” Their patient had tested positive for typhus. The telegram was given to the local German authorities as proof that the patient had an infectious disease, and the man was subsequently released from his duties at the camp. He was also excluded from future detention, as were any family members he had come in contact with.The doctors did not actually make their patient sick, of course. That would be unthinkable to them, even in the most dire circumstances. The typhus epidemic that they brought to Rozwadów was instead their own unique spin on “faking sick,” a concocted outbreak meant to shield their patients and neighbors from persecution. The doctors had saved the man’s life by giving him a simulacrum of the disease, and by giving the same shot to many others in the area, they would save thousands more.
One of the doctors, Eugene Lazowski, was already an old hand at defying the Nazis when the ruse began. During the German occupation of Poland, around one-fifth of the country’s population was killed in mass executions and concentration camps. Polish physicians, Lazowski said, were “confronted with a special task–not only to prevent diseases and treat sick people, but also to defend their lives and those of their countrymen.”Lazowski began waging what he called a “private war” against the occupiers. After escaping a German POW camp by scaling the wall and riding off on an unattended horse cart, he went back to his home in Rozwadów and worked for the Polish Red Cross. His house backed up against the fence that separated the Jewish ghetto from the rest of the city. Conditions in the ghetto allowed diseases to run rampant, but the doctor was forbidden from treating any Jews, so he arranged a covert way of helping them. When someone in the ghetto was ill, they would tie a rag to the fence, and Lazowski would sneak in at night to bring medical supplies and treat the sick. To keep the Nazis from catching on, he fudged his records and exaggerated the amount of supplies and medicine that he used on his non-Jewish patients.Lazowski’s friend Stanislaw Matulewicz also practiced medicine in Rozwadów, and a chance discovery allowed the pair to protect even more people by playing on the Nazis fears of contamination. After typhus wreaked havoc in the trenches during World War I, the Nazis were terrified of possible outbreaks among their soldiers. German authorities in Poland required doctors to report all suspected and confirmed cases of typhus to them and send blood samples to German-controlled labs for testing. Poles with the disease were quarantined and spared detention in the labor camps, but infected Jews were executed.“When many cases were reported from an area, it was declared by the German Public Health Authority to be an ‘epidemic area,’” the two doctors wrote after the war. “This situation produced some advantages for the people, because the Germans were inclined to avoid such territories and the population was relatively free from atrocities.”....MORE
Here's Dr. Lazowski's obituary in the Chicago Tribune, December 22, 2006:
And Mental Floss with more of the story.
Oddly, the good doctors are not honored as Righteous Among the Nations, an oversight that should be rectified.
