The Warsaw Ghetto in 1941 was characterized by hunger, tightness and a deadly plague: typhus. The infection spread rapidly and claimed more than 30,000 lives. But in the fall of 1941, just before the second wave expected for winter, the number of infections suddenly dropped – as if by a miracle. An interdisciplinary team of researchers has now investigated why.
In 1940, the National Socialist occupiers of Poland forced Warsaw’s Jewish population to move to a small part of the city. More than 450,000 people were squeezed into the only 3.4 square kilometers of the Warsaw Ghetto. “With poor conditions, ubiquitous hunger and a population density five to ten times higher than in any city today, the Warsaw Ghetto was the perfect breeding ground for a plague at the time,” says first author Lewi Stone from the University of Tel Aviv.
Spotted-type outbreak in the ghetto
The plague was not long in coming: Spot fever broke out soon after the Warsaw Ghetto was closed. This infection, caused by the bacterium Rickettsia prowazekii and transmitted by lice, was formerly known as war typhus, hunger typhus or simply typhoid due to its frequent occurrence in wars or famines. High fever, headache and body aches and skin rashes are typical, in 40 percent of cases untreated typhus fever ends in death. This was also the case in the Warsaw Ghetto: in the course of 1941, 30,000 people died directly from the plague, and thousands more were so weak from hunger that their bodies could not cope with the infection.
“If you concentrate 400,000 poor souls in a district, take everything away from them and don’t give anything for it, then you create typhoid fever. In this war, typhus is the work of the Germans, ”said Ludwik Hirszfeld, a bacteriologist and Nobel laureate who was also locked up in the ghetto at the time. For the Nazis, on the other hand, the epidemic was a welcome justification for cordoning off the ghetto: “The Jews are the main bearers and spreaders of the typhoid infection,” stated Jost Walbaum of the German General Government in October 1941. “There are only two ways to do this solve: Either we condemn the Jews in the ghetto to death by starvation or we shoot them. ”The people in charge decided on the first thing, until they then vacated the ghetto in 1942 and transported the Jewish residents to concentration camps.
The miracle of autumn 1941
But in all this misery, something unexpected happened in the fall of 1941: “In late October 1941, at the beginning of winter, the spotted-type epidemic started to subside and collapse,” Stone and his colleagues report. “This change was completely unexpected, because the spread of typhus usually accelerates in winter.” At that time, ghetto chronicler Emmanuel Ringelblum noted that the number of cases had decreased by 40 percent. “It was absolutely inexplicable at the time and many thought it was a miracle,” Stone says. But what was the reason for this miraculous stopping of the plague?
As Stone and his team have determined, a collapse of the infection process due to complete infection of the population cannot be the cause. In the fall of 1941, only around ten percent of the ghetto residents were infected – so there were still enough potential victims for the pathogen. Instead, the researchers attribute the decline in cases to countermeasures introduced by the Warsaw Ghetto governing bodies. A system of communal kitchens was set up to ensure that the poor food rations reached the poorest in the ghetto.
Keeping distance and quarantine brought about the turn
“In addition, numerous health courses were initiated to educate people about public hygiene and infectious diseases – at times more than 9000 people took part in these courses,” the scientists report. Hundreds of public lectures informed the ghetto residents about typhus and how to combat it, and an underground university also trained medical students. More importantly, despite the extremely cramped conditions in the ghetto, the residents practiced social distancing and those infected with typhus were quarantined.
“This continued effort by the ghetto doctors and staff paid off in the end. Because there is no other explanation why the epidemic could otherwise have died down, ”says Stone. Co-author Yael Artzy-Randrup added: “As the residents of the Warsaw Ghetto have demonstrated, the actions of individuals with regard to hygiene, spacing and self-isolation in the event of illness can make a huge difference in the spread of a plague.” Most residents of the Warsaw At best, however, the victory over the typhus epidemic brought a delay to ghettos: “Almost all those whose lives were saved by the discipline and the anti-epidemic measures died a little later in the Nazi extermination camps,” Stone says.
Source: RMIT University; Specialist article: Science Advances, doi: 10.1126 / sciadv.abc0927