1939年德国入侵波兰，第二次世界大战全面爆发。许多波兰人被送进劳动营，成千上万的人因为劳累和饥饿死在了里面。波兰的犹太人则被带进集中营，受尽纳粹的虐待与折磨。1942年马图列维奇医生的一位朋友被传令到纳粹劳动营报到。怎样才能帮助友人呢？马图列维奇医生想到了一个办法。当时有一种流行病叫斑疹伤寒，纳粹担心这种病会在军队里传播，所以他们不会将斑疹伤寒检测呈阳性的人送到劳动营。那时，波兰科学家已经发现斑疹伤寒抗体不仅能和该病毒的病原体反应，也会和一种叫变形菌OX19的细菌发生反应。由于斑疹伤寒病原体非常危险，所以德军用变形菌OX19作为替代来检测病人血液中的斑疹伤寒抗体。马图列维奇医生发现了其中的可乘之机，他给朋友注射了一剂变形菌OX19，成功让其血液检测呈阳性，故不必再去劳动营报到。后来，马图列维奇医生将这个办法告诉了自己的同事尤金·拉佐夫斯基医生，他们用这个方法挽救了8000名波兰人的性命。虽然两位医生手无寸铁，但是他们依靠智慧和勇气，成功抵制了纳粹的暴行，书写了历史上的一段传奇佳话。

Foiled

By Karen Gunnison Ballen

Illustrated by Tord Nygren

Dr. Matulewicz wasn’t sure his trick would work, but it was the only chance to save his friend. If the Nazis found out, the penalty would be death. It was worth the risk. 

In 1942, physician Stanislaw Matulewicz was working for the Polish Red Cross in the rural villages of Rozwadow and Zbydniowie, about 150 miles from Warsaw. After Germany invaded Poland in 1939, launching World War II, hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens, many just in their teens, had been rounded up to provide slave labor for German factories, railroads, mines, and farms. Tens of thousands died of exhaustion and starvation in the labor camps. Polish Jews were taken to special concentration camps, either to be exterminated immediately or worked to death. Now, in 1942, Dr. Matulewicz’s friend had been ordered to report to a Nazi labor camp. The poor man was desperate to avoid going, but if he did not report on time, his whole family would be imprisoned and probably killed. To get out of this bind, he was even considering suicide. 

There was one hope. Dr. Matulewicz knew that the Nazis would not send anyone testing positive for epidemic typhus to a labor camp. Sometimes called “war fever,” epidemic typhus spreads rapidly in crowded, unsanitary conditions, causing its victims to suffer miserably from high fever, extreme weakness, delirium, and organ failure. Millions of Eastern Europeans died from the disease during World War I. When French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Russia in the early nineteenth century, he lost more of his army to typhus than in combat.

The Germans feared that an outbreak of typhus was a greater threat to slowing or wiping out their army than lines of Allied tanks. When anyone showed possible symptoms of the disease, Polish physicians were required to send a sample of his or her blood to a German lab to be tested for typhus antibodies. Produced by the immune system to fight disease, antibodies are Y-shaped proteins that attach to invading bacteria, enabling other cells of the immune system to engulf and destroy them. If the lab workers found antibodies to the typhus bacteria, Rickettsia prowazekii, in the blood, they would know that the patient was fighting a typhus infection. 

Dr. Matulewicz had an idea how the test for typhus might be exploited to help his friend. R. prowazekii was so dangerous and difficult to grow in the lab that the Germans used a substitute in their test to detect typhus antibodies. Although antibodies are usually highly specialized, attaching to only one kind of bacteria, Polish scientists had discovered during World War I that typhus antibodies also attached to Proteus OX-19, a type of bacteria that was much easier to grow and safer to handle than R. prowazekii. In the test used by the Germans, a blood sample containing typhus antibodies would turn cloudy when mixed with Proteus OX-19, as the antibodies attached to the bacteria. 

Dr. Matulewicz thought there might be another way to make a blood sample turn cloudy when tested. He reasoned that if he gave his friend an injection of Proteus OX-19, his friend’s immune system would form antibodies to that bacterium, and a sample of his blood would then turn cloudy when mixed with Proteus OX-19 in the Nazi lab. The blood would test positive for typhus, even though there were no typhus antibodies in the sample and his friend did not have the disease. 

Dr. Matulewicz worried about possible side effects from the injection, but his friend didn’t hesitate to take the risk. So Dr. Matulewicz coached him in how to fake the symptoms of typhus and sent him home, where his friend soon began to act confused and complain of bad headaches. His family asked Dr. Matulewicz to treat him. The doctor gave his friend an injection of Proteus OX-19, and several days later, sent a sample of his blood to a Nazi lab, along with a report explaining that this patient was suffering from symptoms of typhus. 

The trick worked! Although his friend was not really ill, his blood sample tested positive for the dread disease. Neither he nor his family would be taken to the Nazi camps. 

Dr. Matulewicz told his colleague, Dr. Eugene Lazowski, how he saved his friend. Dr. Lazowski had already risked his own life by providing medical care to Jews and to others working against the Nazis. Eager to save more lives, Dr. Lazowski suggested that the two physicians create a fake typhus epidemic. 

Dr. Matulewicz agreed. Every time the doctors saw a patient with symptoms that even hinted at typhus, they injected him or her with Proteus OX-19 and sent a sample of the patient’s blood to a Nazi lab, where it tested positive for typhus. The doctors increased the injections in the fall and winter months and decreased them in spring and summer, to mimic the behavior of a true epidemic. Sometimes they injected patients with Proteus OX-19 and then sent them to other doctors—who were not aware of the hoax— for blood samples, so that the Nazis would not become too suspicious about so many typhus cases being reported by only two doctors. The doctors were careful, however, not to inject anyone who was Jewish with Proteus OX-19, since Jews who tested positive for typhus were immediately killed. Indeed, most of the Jews in the district had been taken to concentration camps before the fake epidemic could be started. 

As more and more blood samples tested positive for typhus, the Nazis quarantined about a dozen villages where the two doctors practiced. The German army avoided the area, sparing the villagers many of the horrors of Nazi occupation and the threat of forced labor. 

These doctors were taking a tremendous risk. If the Nazis found out what was going on, they would have tortured and killed them. So the doctors did not tell anyone—including their wives and the patients whose blood they sent to labs—what they were doing. When they injected patients with Proteus OX-19, they told them that it was just a shot to strengthen their immune system. Of course, village residents wondered why, since they were supposedly experiencing a typhus epidemic, no one died, but the doctors did not admit anything. “If someone asked me why he recovered so quickly from such a serious disease, I just told him he was a lucky man,” said Dr. Lazowski. Many villagers did not believe him, but they kept quiet because they suspected that the doctors were protecting them. 

In late 1943, the Nazis finally became suspicious and sent a team of doctors to investigate. The Poles welcomed the Nazi doctors and entertained them with a good dinner and lots of vodka. The most experienced doctor in the group didn’t want to leave the party, so he sent his younger colleagues into the village to examine the “typhus sufferers,” who were really people with other illnesses that had been given injections of Proteus OX-19. Dr. Lazowski later remembered, “I told them to be my guest and examine the patients, but to be careful because the Polish are dirty and full of lice, which transfer typhus.” The Nazi doctors, worried that they might become infected, took some blood samples, and left without closely examining any of the villagers. Of course, all of the samples tested positive for typhus. 

After Dr. Matulewicz left the area, Dr. Lazowski continued to conduct the fake typhus epidemic alone. Loyal to his duty as a physician, he treated anyone who needed medical care, including a German soldier who, in the summer of 1944, repaid the doctor’s kindness by warning him that the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police, was planning to arrest him. Dr. Lazowski took his wife and daughter and fled the area. 

About one-fifth of the population of Poland, close to six million people, would lose their lives at the hands of the Nazis during the war. But 8,000 Poles living in a rural district in central Poland were protected by the intelligence and courage of Dr. Matulewicz and Dr. Lazowski. “The basic duty of a physician is to preserve life, and this was a way of saving lives,” Dr. Lazowski later said. “I was not able to fight with a gun or sword, but I found a way to scare the Germans.” 

本文刊登在《英语沙龙》（原版阅读）2022年9月刊

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