How Polish professors let infected lice feed on them to avoid concentration camps in WWII

During the Nazi occupation of Poland, some intellectuals were able to avoid being sent to Nazi concentration camps by volunteering for the potentially deadly job of allowing typhus-infected lice to feed on them. The Lviv Institute for Study of Typhus employed over 4,000 "louse-feeders" — people who strapped wooden boxes containing hundreds of infected lice to their legs for 45 minutes daily to help produce typhus vaccines.

The institute's director, Rudolf Weigl, transformed this risky but essential scientific work into a remarkable rescue operation. As reported in historical accounts, he hired prominent Polish professors, resistance fighters, and Jews who were at risk of deportation to concentration camps. The special identification cards issued to louse-feeders, noting both their work for the German military and potential typhus infection, provided rare protection from Nazi persecution.

"Almost the entire University of Lwów worked at Weigl's," recalled Alfred Jahn, who would later become a university rector. Among the feeders were mathematician Stefan Banach and poet Zbigniew Herbert. While the lice feeding only took an hour per day, the rest of the time was used for underground education and resistance activities.

The work was dangerous — feeders risked contracting typhus despite being vaccinated. Each wooden box held 400-800 lice that would feed through a screen pressed against the person's flesh. Women typically placed the boxes on their thighs where skirts could hide the bite marks, while men preferred their calves. As Wacław Szybalski, who supervised the feeding program, noted: "A nurse had to watch over the feeding process as the lice would feed beyond the point of being gorged on the blood and could burst if left on the human flesh for too long."

The institute officially produced vaccines for German forces, but workers secretly diverted supplies to Jewish ghettos and concentration camps. According to Holocaust survivor Władysław Szpilman (the Polish-Jewish protagonist of the 2002 movie The Pianist), "Weigl became as famous as Hitler in the Warsaw ghetto — Weigl as a symbol of Goodness and Hitler as a symbol of Evil."

Previously:
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