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."
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