Eugene Lazowski

Eugene Lazowski, born Eugeniusz Sławomir Łazowski in Częstochowa, Poland, was a Polish physician who lived from 1913 to 2006. He took his medical degree at the Józef Piłsudski University in Warsaw before the Second World War, served as a medic in the Polish Army, escaped from a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp and later worked as a doctor on a Red Cross train and for the Home Army. In occupied Rozwadów he ran a practice with his friend Dr. Stanisław Matulewicz, hid medicine in his work at the railway station and passed it secretly to Jews in the nearby ghetto at risk of death. The two doctors injected healthy people with an OX19 Proteus strain that made them test positive for typhus without the disease, creating a fake epidemic in 1941 and 1942 that the Germans quarantined. The figure of about 8,000 people saved is widely repeated, but his own memoir and his daughter dispute the claim that most were Jewish. He emigrated to the United States in 1958 on a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship, became a professor of pediatrics at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1984 and wrote the memoir Private War.