Eugeniusz Sławomir Lazowski was a Polish physician and former Polish Army medical officer who practiced in Rozwadów, in German-occupied Poland, during World War II. He became widely known as the “Polish Schindler” because of reports that he and fellow physician Stanisław Matulewicz created a fabricated typhus epidemic to protect residents from the German occupation. Later accounts frequently claimed that the operation saved thousands of Jews, but the available evidence does not support that version of the story.
When World War II began, Lazowski was completing his medical training and serving in the Polish Army. After escaping captivity and completing his medical examinations, he joined a Polish Red Cross clinic in Rozwadów and assisted members of the Polish underground.
In his memoir, Private War: Memoirs of a Doctor Soldier, 1933-1944, Lazowski wrote that his home bordered the local Jewish neighborhood and that Jews seeking medical assistance would signal him by hanging a rag near a hole in the fence. He said that he crossed the fence at night to provide treatment and medicine despite the German prohibition against Polish doctors treating Jews. No survivor testimony confirming this activity has been located, and Yad Vashem did not pursue a request to recognize Lazowski as Righteous Among the Nations because firsthand testimony was unavailable.
Lazowski and Matulewicz separately described an operation intended primarily to protect non-Jewish Polish civilians. Matulewicz discovered that injecting a person with killed Proteus vulgaris OX19 bacteria could induce antibodies that produced a positive result on the Weil-Felix test then used to diagnose epidemic typhus. The injection did not give the recipient typhus, but blood samples sent to German laboratories appeared to confirm the disease.
The doctors reportedly administered the preparation to Polish patients already suffering from mild, fever-producing illnesses. They increased the number of supposed cases during the winter to imitate the normal pattern of an epidemic. German authorities, fearful of typhus, treated Rozwadów and surrounding villages as an epidemic zone. This apparently reduced forced-labor conscription, food seizures, and visits by German personnel.
The scale of the operation remains uncertain. Popular accounts often say that 8,000 people were saved, but this figure appears to refer to the approximate population of the affected villages, not a documented number of lives rescued. Nor should the operation be described as saving 8,000 Jews. Lazowski himself wrote that Jews diagnosed with typhus could be executed and that it was therefore too dangerous to give them false-positive results. Most of Rozwadów’s Jewish population had also been murdered or deported by the time the doctors expanded the operation.
The surviving evidence nevertheless supports the basic occurrence of a fabricated epidemic. Local witnesses interviewed by journalist Barbara Necek recalled the quarantine, and a priest’s independent account written before Lazowski and Matulewicz publicly disclosed their operation described fabricated typhus cases, a German investigation, and relief from forced labor and requisitions. A 2026 peer-reviewed medical-historical study concluded that the doctors’ method was scientifically plausible and that the available evidence supports the credibility of the core story, while leaving its precise extent unverified.
Lazowski immigrated to the United States in 1958 and later became a professor of pediatrics at the University of Illinois. He and Matulewicz first published an account of their “private immunological war” in 1977, and Lazowski published his memoir in English in 1991. He died on December 16, 2006, in Eugene, Oregon.
Sources: “Righteous Among the Nations,” Yad Vashem.
The Chicago Tribune.
Eugene S. Lazowski and Stanisław Matulewicz, “Serendipitous Discovery of Artificial Positive Weil-Felix Reaction Used in ‘Private Immunological War,’” ASM News, Vol. 43, pp. 300-302, (1977); reprinted in U.S. Navy Medicine, Vol. 70, pp. 26-28, (April 1980).
Eugene S. Lazowski, Private War: Memoirs of a Doctor Soldier, 1933-1944, University of Illinois Chicago Digital Collections, (1991).
Juliette Bretan, “The Faked Epidemic that Saved Hundreds of Lives,” Culture.pl, (April 29, 2020).
Matt Lebovic, “How a faked typhus outbreak spared 8,000 Poles from the Nazis,” Times of Israel, (June 17, 2020).
Barbara Necek, “Investigation on a Fake Polish Just,” K., (March 22, 2021).
Justyna Nunes-Biesiadecka, Dominika Drzewiecka, Sören Gatermann, Jonathan Jantsch and Gerd Fätkenheuer, “Resistance by Applied Immunology: Fabricated Typhus Epidemic as Civil Protection in Occupied Poland During World War II,” Infection, Vol. 54, pp. 637-644, (February 6, 2026).