Dr. Rudolf Weigl
Heroes of the Holocaust | Dr. Rudolf Weigl
During the Holocaust, Dr. Rudolf Weigl saved Jewish lives with his medical work fighting disease, as well as his covert work sheltering Jews.
While gas chambers and firing squads were the Nazis’ preferred methods of murder, disease also claimed millions of lives during WWII, including typhus, a bacterial infection that claimed many Holocaust victims, including Anne Frank.
But the fight against disease was not the only war Dr. Weigl waged. He also resisted the anti-Semitism common in Poland, even before the Nazis invaded. Many of his friends and peers were Jewish, as were many of his students. When Poles acted out in hateful ways against their Jewish countrymen, Dr. Weigl protested loudly, branding the anti-Semites “barbarians.”
When Hitler invaded Poland, the doctor of German descent refused to cooperate with the Nazis’ insistence that he embrace his inner Aryan. And then his words became actions.
The Nazis, wanting a typhus vaccine for their own, forced Dr. Weigl to set up a production plant. That Nazi facility became a shelter for hundreds of Jews. You see, Dr. Weigl hired his Jewish friends and colleagues to work for the Germans who wanted them dead! Working in the plant meant these Jewish Poles were not deported to death camps.
But even more lives were saved because of Dr. Weigl’s work. As Polish Jews of Lwow and Warsaw awaited deportation and extermination, thousands of doses of vaccine were smuggled into the ghettos. Each of these vaccinations saved a Jewish person from succumbing to the incredibly infectious disease that often strikes during times of war and starvation—both rampant during the Holocaust. And that is how a Christian doctor saved Jewish lives in a multitude of ways, acts for which he was named Righteous Among the Nations.
: wikicommons/State Treasury of Poland
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