11

The Typhus Epidemic

The camps at Strelnica and Majówka had been hastily thrown up in the weeks before the liquidation of the Wierzbnik ghetto. One consequence of their hasty construction, at minimal expense by people inexperienced in either building or managing camps, was the total lack of adequate hygiene facilities. The toilets were nothing more than boards with holes over an open trench that was emptied periodically by the prisoners.¹ Water came from a few spigots.² There were no showers or baths in camp, and the only opportunities to bathe were provided by rare visits to the former Jewish baths in town. One survivor remembered making the trip once per month, another just once every three months, and yet another just once in two years.³ The prisoners had only the clothes they wore or carried into camp, for which they likewise lacked washing facilities and soap. Further aggravating the systemic uncleanliness was the nature of the work; people returned each day from the factories very dirty from the smoke, oil, and heat.⁴ The inevitable result was that Strelnica and Majówka were utterly filthy places to live, where no one could cope with what one survivor called the “impossible dirt.”⁵ In terms of comparison, survivors were emphatic that, measured against the Starachowice camps, Płaszów and Auschwitz-Birkenau were much cleaner.⁶ None was more emphatic than Icek Guterman, who described his response to going through the shower and disinfection procedures at Birkenau after two years of unremitting filth in Majówka: “I thought there is a God, I am clean.”⁷

The “impossible dirt” of Strelnica and Majówka was matched by yet another condition of misery—infestation. The phrase that appears time and again in the testimonies is that the vermin “ate us alive.”⁸ “Huge lice”⁹ could be picked off the prisoners’ clothing by the “handful,”¹⁰ though they invariably returned. And at night, the moment the lights were turned out, masses of bedbugs “descended” or “parachuted” down from the woodwork upon the beleaguered prisoners.¹¹ The overcrowding of people into lice-infested barracks without the possibility of washing either their bodies or their clothing could have only one result in the environment of wartime Eastern Europe—the outbreak of a devastating epidemic of typhus.

Exanthematic typhus—what the Germans called spotted fever or Fleckfieber—is caused by a rickettsia carried by body lice.¹² It was a public-health threat that Germans encountered not in Germany itself but primarily during their military forays into Eastern Europe in both World War I and World War II. Many German public-health officials studied the medical data concerning typhus epidemics through the prism of race as a biological reality rather than as a social construct.¹³ Noting the prevalence of typhus outbreaks among the impoverished and overcrowded populations of urban Jews in Eastern Europe, they mistook correlation for causality, ignored the obvious environmental factors, and attributed the spread of typhus to alleged Jewish cultural and genetic defects. In a 1940 article on “spotted fever and ethnic identity,” the German chief of public health in Nazi-occupied Poland, Dr. Jost Walbaum, proclaimed: “The Jews are overwhelmingly the carriers and disseminators of the infection. Spotted fever endures most persistently in the regions heavily populated by Jews, with their low cultural level, their uncleanliness, and the infestation of lice unavoidably connected with this.” One of his associates, Dr. Erich Weizenegger, similarly argued: “The sickness occurs…especially among the Jewish population. This is caused by the fact that the Jew totally lacks any concept of hygiene.”¹⁴ German doctors were also generally convinced that typhus, if it spread among the German population, would have a far higher fatality rate than among the Jews, who had developed greater resistance to it.¹⁵

The response of German public-health officials in Nazi-occupied Poland to the typhus threat was consistent with their warped perceptions. They advocated that the Jews, as natural carriers and disseminators, should be quarantined in ghettos. The result was an entirely predictable self-fulfilling prophecy. Forced into vastly overcrowded ghettos, without adequate food, medicine, and hygiene facilities, the Jews sealed up in the major ghettos experienced the very outbreak of typhus epidemics the Germans feared.¹⁶ Wierzbnik, as an unsealed small ghetto in which conditions did not deteriorate to the level of Warsaw or Łód, experienced some cases of typhus but not an epidemic. When the Jews selected for labor were incarcerated in the squalid and lice-infested camps of Strelnica and Majówka, however, the inevitable occurred. In December 1942, a typhus epidemic broke out, and the disease swept through the prisoner population with incredible ferocity.

Those afflicted experienced extremely high fevers of 105 or 106 degrees and throbbing headaches. This lasted for up to two weeks, with the climax usually coming around the eleventh or twelfth day. At that point, the typhus victim was usually delirious and hallucinating if not unconscious. Even after the fever broke and the crisis was over, the person recovering was weak and debilitated for up to three months.¹⁷ For people who were kept alive only for their labor, typhus posed a twofold danger—from the disease itself and from the Germans.

From those who survived both typhus and the Germans to give postwar testimony, one theme occurs over and over in their accounts of the ordeal—that they could not have survived alone and without help. Since many of those who entered the Starachowice camps did so through the purchase of work permits as a family strategy of survival, they were in the camps with other family members. Usually they came down with typhus not simultaneously but one after another. As a result, family members cared for one another in succession.¹⁸ Those who had had typhus earlier and were now immune were especially important as caregivers.¹⁹ Some without family connections were fortunate enough to have friends who helped.²⁰ Insofar as family or friends had managed to smuggle money and valuables into camp, they purchased medicines.²¹ Insofar as patients could eat, family and friends brought food—usually soup or tea, since those stricken with typhus could eat little else during the worst days.²² If this had been a camp in which individual prisoners had been thrown together randomly rather than a family camp from a particular community, the fatality rate from the typhus epidemic clearly would have been much higher. As it was, the lesser danger was dying from typhus itself. During the first wave of the epidemic, from December 1942 into March 1943, the far greater danger came from the Germans.