When WWII began, Eugene Lazowski was finishing his medical
studies in preparation to become a doctor. He was drafted into the Polish army,
but the army collapsed after a few weeks. Eventually, Eugene joined the
resistance. Meanwhile, his friend and colleague Stanislaw Matulewicz discovered
injecting patients with dead typhus cells would cause them to test positive for
typhus without giving them any symptoms or disease. Eugene decided to use this
discovery to save Polish Jews who were about to be sent to concentration camps.
He knew the Germans were deathly afraid of communicable disease. He didn’t
inject the Jews with typhus; the Germans would have simply shot them and moved
on. He created a false epidemic by injecting Poles in neighboring suburbs. The Germans
considered the whole village infected, and quarantined them all. Eugene
Lazowski is credited with saving the lives of over 8,000 Jews by making the
Germans believe all their neighbors were sick.
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