Unfortunately, the well deserved Nobel prize has eluded Weigl because of the politics and WW2. However, he received many honors, including the Order of St. Gregory from the Pope Pius XI, the Leopold Order from the Belgian King, the Order of Polonia Restituta, and in addition he was elected to the Polish Academy (PAU or Polska Akademia Umiejetnosci) and many foreign Academies, and he became an honorary member of several scientific societies (A Monograph, 1994; Krynski, 1967a,b, 1997).

Praises were heaped upon Prof. Weigl, including a kind statement by Charles Nicolle, a Nobel laureate, who established that louse is the typhus' vector; he wrote: "The 'war' with typhus did not appear promising, until it was joined by the brilliant Polish scientist, Professor Rudolf Weigl from Lwów, Poland. Weigl taught us how to cultivate the typhus agent in lice, and moreover, has developed a superior vaccine, which saved many thousands of lives. As person, Weigl deserves highest recognition, as a brilliant intellect, untiring worker and a fanatic of science" (Krynski, 1997).

Weigl's typhus research was continued for a few more decades by his collaborators and students, among them Anna Herzig-Weigl (Herzig, 1939), the second wife of R. Weigl, Stefan Krynski, Stanislawa Woyciechowska (see Krynski, 1987), Henryk Mosing (Mosing, 1947), Zbigniew Stuchly, and Albina Kuchta (A Monograph,1994; Krynski, 1967a), but at present it is mainly of a historical interest.

In 2003, Yad Vashem of Israel honored Prof. Rudolf Weigl as Righteous Among the Nations.

(1) The period before WW2

Most of the methods for the cultivation of lice and production of the Weigl vaccine were developed before WW2 in the Department of Biology of the UJK in Lwów, which was then a Polish city, with several Universities or Schools of Higher Learning, best characterized as a counterpart of Boston in USA or Cambridge in England. It had rich Western and international traditions, as reflected by its many names (Leopolis in Latin; Leopoli in Italian; Lemberg in German; Lvov in Russian; Lviv or Lwiw in Ukrainian, the spelling of Russian and Ukrainian names depending on the transliteration). Lwów was a city with about 600 years of Polish history and tradition and the extremely patriotic Lvovian citizenry. At the eve of WW2 in 1939, its population of about 350,000 was a rather homogeneous 'melt' with various ethnic and religious backgrounds: predominantly (about 60-70%) Roman-catholic, about 20-30% Mosaic (integrated and orthodox Jewish), the remaining about 10% Armenian-catholic (of Armenian origin), Greek-catholic (predominantly of Red Rutenian or Ukrainian origin), Lutheran (mainly Austrian or German) and others. Photo 15. The Old University Building (three storie building on the right) at the Mikolaj Street, where Weigl's Institute was located between WWI and WWII, and during WWII, and where Weigl's vaccine was produced. (To the right is the Church of St. Mikolaj (St. Nicholas), where the author of this essay was baptized and his parents were married.)



(2) The period during and just after WW2



WW2 started on September 1, 1939, and as results Lwów became occupied first by the Soviet and later by the Nazi's Armies. However, Weigl's Typhus Institute became a 'safe haven' for the intellectuals in 1939 - 1944, during both occupations. Otherwise, during this period, Lwowian universities have lost (killed or deported, mainly to Siberia) over 40% of Professors, with highest loss of about 90 % at the Medical School (Albert, 1989a).



(a) The period of Soviet occupation 1939 - 1941: During the USSR occupation period of 1939 - 1941, Weigl did his utmost to protect the Institute employees from the systematic and inhumanely cruel deportation to Soviet gulags in the North (for men), and to Southern Siberia (for women and children, who were arrested at night and exiled by trucks and trains to very primitive kolkhoz'es situated mainly in the wilderness of Kazachstan), where the death rate approached 30% per year, and where I lost many of my friends and colleagues (see also, Kopanski, 1997). About the time when the Soviet secret police (NKVD or KGB) organized their first cruel deportation of Lvovian population to Siberia, the first secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev, has visited Weigl at his Institute and offered him the title of Academician and a directorship of an Academy Institute in Moscow. Weigl has politely rejected it, which fortunately did not cause any negative consequences; instead Weigl has received promises of additional buildings for his Institute in Lwów (Nespiak and Ojrzynski, 1994), and of an exemption for his employees from deportations to Siberia. I learned about the details of the Khrushchev's visit from my father, who spoke fluent Russian (because long before WW1 he lived and studied in the Russian-occupied provinces of Poland, including Warsaw) . My father, Stefan Szybalski, a pre-WW1 graduate of the University of Toulouse, France, was asked by his friend Prof. Weigl (who was unfamiliar with Russian language, similarly as nearly the entire population of Lwów, including myself) to help him in dealings with Russian visitors and the Soviet Russian administration, including Khrushchev and the NKVD (who supervised arrests and deportations, during the 1939-41 period of the Soviet occupation of Lwów). It is a pity that Stefan Szybalski has not written up his memoirs of this period, since many famous Russian professors and Academicians, who were 'starved' of the contacts with the Western world made a pilgrimage to Weigl's Institute in Lwów, considered by Russian as a Vienna-like Western European city, though occupied then by Soviets. Posing as biologist in a laboratory attire, my father played deftly a role of Weigl's translator. Frequently, after a few glasses of vodka, the Russian visitors could not resist temptation of describing their hardships and then share their personal tales of horror related to life in USSR and to Stalin's terror; one of the Russian visitors, after getting drunk, gave the following very characteristic and helpful advice: "Do not ever join the Communist Party and do not steal excessively". He then elaborated: "If you are not a Party member, they will always court you to join, but once you join and then are kicked out of the Party this is your end. If you steal too much this will lead to your demise, but if you do not steal at all, you will starve; thus remember to steal only in moderation, just enough to survive !" Through his influence, and often helped by my father, Weigl was able to help in securing the release and return to Lwów of several of the Siberian deportees. Among those was Stefania Skwarczynska (at that time at UJK, and after WW2 the Professor of Theory of Literature at University of Lódz, Poland, and a member of PAN), who was deported to Kazachstan, because of her "guilt" of having a husband, who was a pre-WW2 colonel of Polish Army and at that time a war prisoner in a German 'Oflag'. Stefania was helped by her UJK major professor, Juliusz Kleiner, and by Weigl to return from Kazachstan in Siberia with her mother and two very young daughters (one of her daughters, Maria Olszewska, is at present a Professor of Cytology and Cytochemistry of Plants at the University of Lódz, Poland, and a member of PAN). Weigl has provided Stefania with a safe employment in his Institute, and I trained her to become a louse breeder. While working with her at adjoining desks in 1941-43, I learned plenty about her own and her mother's and children's hunger and misery of the inhuman deportation. She was an enthusiastic and gifted raconteur, and as an accomplished story teller, she described to me some amazing and cruel experiences in the steppes of the Soviet Kazachstan, hundreds of miles away from the 'civilization' (as represented by the nearest railway station). My family have also been directly threatened by deportation to Siberia at least twice. Our Soviet 'passports' were first confiscated by NKVD and then the dreaded "paragraph 11" was added to them; this meant that we had to be moved to some place located hundreds of miles away from any even smallest town, which 'location' meant the wilderness of Siberia. Again, thanks to Weigl's help, my father was able to nullify this cruel ruling; however, the same happened to us again, but this time our second "paragraph 11" ruling reached us only one day before the Nazi invasion of Soviet Union. Hitler's armies have attacked the Soviet army on June 22, 1941, and entered Lwów on June 29, 1941. During this ghastly last week of Soviet occupation there were massive arrests and all jails became overfilled with Lwowian citizens. Then in the middle of that week the Soviets have initiated the systematic mass murder of the prisoners. Just after June 30, when Soviet retreated, we have succeeded to enter one of the prisons, because I was trying to help my friend in finding his father (who was a lawyer and a lice 'feeder' at the Weigl's Institute, and who was arrested by Soviets a few days earlier). What we found, were the heeps of the partially decomposing bodies stacked four to ten deep on the cell floors. In this prisons alone, the Soviets have murdered about 3500 prisoners before the Soviet retreat (Kopanski, 1997). During the next few days of the unusually hot weather, we searched other prisons, finally finding the body of my friend's father among the progressively more viscous mass of the victims of this Soviet atrocity of systematic ethnic murders. I lost then at least five Lvovian friends or their parents: three Roman catholics, one Greek-catholic and one Jewish. (b) The period of German occupation (1941 - 1944): During the Nazi occupation of Lwów (1941 - 1944), employment in Weigl's Institute provided some degree of protection from the random arrests and deportation to the Nazi concentration camps; Gestapo seemed to prefer to avoid 'dealings' with persons from whom they might accidentally acquire typhus-infected lice (it was well known that carrying lice was our occupational hazard). Moreover, all employees carried an impressive looking identification card ("Ausweiss") from the "Oberkommando des Heeres" (Office of the Commander-in-Chief of the German Army); this "Ausweiss" was another of Weigl's life-saving "inventions" (as partly "engineered" by my father). The Institut's Headquarter was in Krakow and the German microbiologist in charge was Dr. H. Eyer, who had a rather fair opinion as not interfering with Weigl's pro-Lwowian activities. After WWII, Eyer served as Professor at the Max-v.-Petterkofer Institute of Hygiene in Munich. He described the history of his years with Weigl (Eyer, 1967). Another interesting and partially related history of these years is by Lindenmann (2002), a Swiss Professor. Weigl helped to protect many of the unemployed university professors and their associates by employing them as lice feeders; such employment entitled to special food rations and made them at least partially immune from arrests, deportations and/or death during the Nazi occupation. Some aspects of employment in Weigl's Institute had some elements in common with Spielberg's Hollywood movie "Schindler's List". I wonder if it is significant that both Weigl and Schindler were born in Moravia and both were recognized byYad Vashem as "Righteous Among the Nations". Since feeding lice occupied the feeders for only one hour per day, and since the University (with exception of the Institute of Technology, renamed by Germans as "Technische Fachkurse") was closed by Nazis, the 'feeders' had the remaining time left for organizing the underground University courses and for other educational and patriotic activities. For instance, I was supervising a 'breeding unit' consisting of feeders who were mostly mathematicians of the famous Lwów school of mathematics, including the world famous professor, Stefan Banach, and others including Jerzy Albrecht, Felix Baranski, Bronislaw Knaster, Wladyslaw Orlicz, and also other scientists like Tadeusz Baranowski (biochemist), Ludwik Fleck (bacteriologist; Fleck, 1947), Seweryn Krzemieniewski and his wife Helena (both famous bacteriologists), and Krukowski (archeologist). Famous artist Stanislaw Skrowaczewski (with whom I studied piano under Florentyna Listowska) was also a lice feeder; he became a composer and a famous conductor of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, whom I was meeting frequently at his concerts in Madison, WI, in the Sixties or Seventies. Lwów school of mathematics was also known as "Scottish", not because of any direct relation to Scotland, but because of the name of the Kawiarnia Szkocka (Scottish Coffee House), where Lwowian mathematician were routinely meeting and solving their theorems on the paper napkins, on disposable table cloth, or in the famous Scottish Coffee House Volume. The first computer language ("Polish" or "reverse Polish", as used by the Hewlett-Packard Company) was also created by this group. It was intellectually very stimulating but also somehow surrealistic, to listen to their long discussions about frontiers of mathematics, including elements of topology and theory of numbers, while they were feeding lice. However, I had to watch that in the fervor of their discussion they did not overfeed lice, beyond 45 minutes, because our laboratory lice lost their natural instinct to stop feeding, with a disastrous consequence to them, because their guts started to burst due to 'sucking' too much blood. During Nazi occupation of Lwów, 1941-44, Weigl used his fame and the pre-WW2 scientific connections with German biologists to protect all of us from Nazis. To achieve that, however, he also had to play dangerous and potentially questionable humanitarian role by being forced to produce his vaccine for Germans. At the same time, he had to resist a Nazi's offer to become a director of a special Institute to be established for him in Berlin and to become a German citizen called "Reichsdeutche". Despite great personal risks, he made a brave response in 1941/42 to an offer by a high-ranking German Army emissary (as combined with subtle threats); he said that: "As biologist, I know the phenomenon of death; it is to you to accept me as Polish professor of Polish nationality". He also added that "it might appear questionable for the German officer, to offer honors to a Polish Professor, who by accepting the German offer would have dishonored himself". The high-ranking German officer, apparently a Heinrich Himmler's representative, understood that Professor Weigl was neither to be threatened nor to be bought. Professor Weigl has described this dramatic exchange, thereafter, my father, Stefan, who in turn related it to me. There are also more elaborate versions of this exchange between Weigl and Himmler's representative. Weigl had a permission to have a radio, and allowed my father to listen to it and spread the political news among his trusted friends during this very bleak and sad time of the Lwowian history; this access to the radio was a blessing, since otherwise there was a death penalty for having a radio. Weigl was very courageous and not afraid to secretly cooperate with Polish Underground (AK or Polish Home Army) during Nazi occupation. Several shipments of Weigl's vaccine were surreptitiously and illegally delivered to the Warsaw ghetto and to other Nazi-established Jewish ghettos in other major cities, where typhus epidemics were rampant. My father, who was assisting Prof. Weigl in administration of the Exanthematous Typhus and Virus Research Institute, had more than once transported the vaccine to the Warsaw ghetto; I was helping him with that task and delivering the vaccine to Professor Ludwik Hirszfeld, as he describes it in his famous memoirs (Hirszfeld, 1989, pp. 267 and 269). Tomasz Cieszynski [whose father, Dr. Antoni Cieszynski, Professor of Stomatology of UJK, was murdered by Nazi Gestapo in Lwów in July 1941 (Albert, 1989b) as among the 25 massacred Professors of the UJK, Politechnika, and other Academic Schools of Lwów] has described one of the sessions in Weigl's office that preceded the second of the transports of Weigl's vaccine to the Warsaw ghetto by my father and me (Cieszynski, 1994). The importance of Weigl's vaccine in the Warsaw ghetto was stressed in the famous book by Szpilman (1946; 2002), who says that Weigl was "as famous as Hitler in the Warsaw ghetto", Weigl as a symbol of Goodness and Hitler as symbol of Evil. The 'death penalty' threatened all of us engaged in the illegal vaccine transportation, but this did not deter us, since the everyday life was more than dangerous anyway. As an example of an enormous loss of life in general, of 120 Lvovian chemistry students (about 10 Roman-Catholics, 10 Greek-Catholics and 100 Mosaic Jewish), who together with me succeeded to pass the Communist-administered entrance examinations as to enroll in October/November 1939 at the School of Chemistry of the Lwów Institute of Technology (Politechnika Lwowska, with its name being modified depending on the changing occupations), only 14 could be accounted for by 1944.

(3) Re-occupation by Soviet Union in 1944



Although successfully resisting the "enticing" German offers in 1942/43, Prof. Weigl was not able to resist the unavoidable forced move in 1944 from Lwów to central Poland. Soviet army re-entered Lwów in July 1944, and Weigl's beloved city was ethnically cleansed by the Soviet administration, as a consequence of the abominable USA-approved Yalta/Potsdam acts (see Introduction), which authorized the forced and cruel deportations. The annexation of Lwów and its ethnic cleansing were secretly planned in advance and signed by Roosevelt, (later Truman), Churchill and Stalin during the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences. This was done treacherously, behind the back of the Polish Government in Exile in London, the staunch WW2 ally of USA and UK. Thus, USA was in fact promoting the second, practically total ethnic cleansing of Eastern Poland by Soviet Union. Such first ethnic cleansing, even a more cruel one, was perpetrated by USSR in the years 1939-41, as a result of the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939, but involved 'only' about 20% of the Lvovian population (and that of the Eastern half of Poland), because USSR did not have enough trains and time to deport to Siberia the entire population (Kopanski, 1997).

Moreover, by this act USA was also approving all the atrocities inflicted upon Lvovians during and after WW2 by the Soviet Union, although USA could have easily prevented this unnecessary tragedy. A few thousand of survivors and descendants of the pre-WW2 Lwowians (of Polish citizenship) still remain in Lwów (presently Lviv) and try to preserve their heritage, including the Roman-catholic Cathedral, a few churches, and some very monumental and old cemeteries.







CONCLUSIONS AND COMMENTS

Weigl's scientific research flourished in Lwów, and led to the development of new approaches to study ricketsiology (and later virology) and to an effective anti-typhus vaccine. This happened in the period between WWI and WWII. Weigl's Institute remained very active during most of the WWII, but Weigl's association with Lwow became terminated concurrent with the 1944/45 annexation and ethnic cleansing of Lwów and Eastern Poland by the Soviet Union. This annexation in favor of Stalin was very unfair, since Poland, after all, was the first country, which on September 1, 1939 has resisted Hitler's aggression, whereas Stalin's USSR was Hitler's ally between 1939 and 1941. USSR was actively supporting Hitler's war effort by supplying Germany with train loads of war materials and food. On the other hand, a very secret small unit of the Lwowian underground was charged with disrupting the Soviet supplies for Hitler's armies, which were attacking Western Europe; our unit has derailed or destroyed several Russian-German transport trains in 1940 and up to June 1941 (using explosives, which were secretly produced also by myself as the student at Politechnika Lwowska in the laboratory of the Organic Chemistry Department directed by Professor Edward Sucharda and with his 'blessing'). Derailing Soviet trains had a doubly beneficial role for the Eastern Poland and Allies, since the same trains that carried Soviet supplies for Hitler's armies, were used also for cruel deportation to Siberia of the pre-WW2 Lvovian citizenry and that of Eastern Poland (Kopanski, 1997).

During this period of close USSR-Nazi Germany cooperation, the USSR authorities have also confiscated practically all private property in Eastern Poland, including Lwów. These properties were never returned to the rightful owners (like, e.g., Professor Weigl, his family, many University Professors, including those who fed lice, or my family and myself), neither at the end of the WW2, nor even now. Moreover, the over 600 years of Polish history of Lwów and Eastern Poland, including many art galleries, museums, historical and scientific edifices, all that what was the essence of Polish culture, had perished as result of the forced resettlement and ethnic cleansing. This is the sad end to the personal fate of Prof. Weigl and many others like him, who gave so much to the science, medicine, and humanity in general, and as the 'reward' were deprived of their roots and have lost everything, many of them their lives.

One could add here, at the end, that the generally despised insect, louse, has played a double role during the WW2: it was not only a carrier of a dreaded disease, typhus, but ironically it was also protecting lives of those who worked with this insect and of those who were vaccinated with the product of Weigl's brilliant research effort. --- Moreover, one could also conclude that while Weigl was trying to help humanity by developing his insect cultivation methods and typhus vaccine, the Stalin's USSR (1939 - 1941 and after 1944) and Nazi Germany (1941 -1944) were engaged in murders and cruel deportations, whereas the naive and irresponsible USA policies of 1943-1950 were responsible for the further human misery in the USSR-dominated, annexed or occupied, but pre-WW2 independent Eastern and Central European countries, and moreover, for a definite possibility of a nuclear holocaust, which almost by miracle was avoided because of Stalin's death. Most of that seems to be now forgotten, and the insect louse plays practically no role in our lives. But the noble deeds, courage and scientific discoveries of Professor Rudolf Weigl and those associated with him should never be forgotten!





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Dr. Karl (Karol) Maramorosch, originally from the Kolomyja region, has encouraged and helped me to prepare this essay. The technical part of the louse breeding and vaccine production was based first on my imperfect memory, and then substantially rewritten based mainly on the publications of Stefan Krynski, Professor Emeritus of the Medical University of Gdansk (Krynski, 1967a-c, 1997; Krynski et al., 1994; and others below), who also read a late version of this manuscript, all that thanks to the generous help of Prof. Janusz Limon, Chairman of the Department of Biology and Genetics, Medical University of Gdansk. My memory was also refreshed and the manuscript was corrected by my brother, Stanislaw Szybalski, as acknowledged inthe text. Dr. Malina Kuczynska, Professor Emeritus of the Slask Institute of Technology in Gliwice, Poland, was extremely helpful in locating persons connected with the Weigl's Institute, including Dr. Jakub Cieszynski and his father Dr. Tomasz Cieszynski; the latter, a Professor Emeritus of the Medical Academy in Wroclaw, Poland, has spent very many hours correcting the latest versions of this manuscript and adding some crucial details (see also Cieszynski, 1994). Furthermore, I was helped by Profs. Jerzy Wegierski, Katowice (historia konspiracji), Jerzy Chmielowski, Chairman of the Department of Biochemistry of the Slask Institute of Technology in Gliwice, Poland, who is trying to erect a memorial plaque on the edifice of the former Weigl's Institute at the corner of Mikolaj and Dlugosz Streets in Lwów, Poland (presently Lviv, Ukraine), by Dr. Liliana Nitecka, and by my cousin, Dr. Romana Tuma (nee Bogdanska), one of the "feeders" and presently a retired ophthalmologist in Florida. I am also thankful to mgr. T. Burzynski of the Muzeum Narodowe Ziemi Przemyskiej in Przemysl for many references and drawings. Many others who helped me are mentioned in the text.

The present version contains 15 photos, mainly from the Muzeum Narodowe Ziemi Przemyskiej, which were procured by Stanislaw Kosiedowski, who has kindly affixed those to my manuscript and who is very active in gathering the Weigl's history on his Internet pages: http://www.lwow.home.pl. I am very thankful to him.



