The AMA honored a physician who created a fake epidemic that spared many of his Polish countrymen from German labor and death camps.
By Damon Adams, AMNews staff. July 5, 2004.
Chicago -- Eugene Lazowski, MD, spent three years of his life with a cyanide pill at the ready. Better to take his own life than to die at the hands of the Germans if they discovered he was saving the lives of fellow Polish villagers during World War II.
"I was afraid, but I controlled it," Dr. Lazowski said.
The Polish doctor and a colleague hatched a plan to inject healthy villagers with a killed strain of typhus bacteria, which made residents test positive for typhus. Germans, who occupied Poland at the time, feared infection and an outbreak among soldiers, so they quarantined 12 villages instead of shipping villagers to German labor or death camps.
Over three years, the fake typhus epidemic saved about 8,000 villagers from camps where scores of their countrymen would die.
"People said I'm a hero. I just found an opportunity to do something good," said Dr. Lazowski, 90, a humble man who appears frail with his shuffling walk but still commands a firm handshake. He was honored for his efforts by the AMA Senior Physicians Group at a luncheon during the AMA Annual Meeting in Chicago in June.
During World War II, Dr. Lazowski was a young physician living in Rozwadow, Poland. The Germans rounded up Polish men and women and sent them to slave labor camps while Jews were deported to death camps.
Dr. Lazowski sought a way to fight back. A fellow doctor, Stanislaw Matulewicz, MD, discovered that, if a healthy person was injected with a killed strain of typhus bacteria, that person would test positive for typhus. It was the weapon they would use to scare the Germans into quarantining Polish villages.
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