Talk about pressure to produce: While other college kids were warming lifeguards’ chairs or thumbing across Europe this past summer, 20-year-old Ryan Bank was promoting his film project about a Polish doctor who helped save thousands of Jews during the Holocaust.

A cinema-photography major at SIUC, Bank spent his summer break drumming up funds to finish a documentary he’s producing on 87-year-old Dr. Eugene Lazowski. During World War II, Lazowski and a physician friend faked a deadly typhus epidemic in a dozen Polish towns to save 8,000 Jews from forced labor and almost certain death in Nazi concentration camps.

"He’s a world treasure," Bank says of the elderly doctor who now calls Chicago home. "Dr. Lazowski fought the war with his heart and mind."

Newspapers heralded Lazowski’s heroism in the late 1970s, when medical journals confirmed the ingenious scheme. Typhus can cause explosive, deadly epidemics in people forced to live in crowded, unsanitary conditions. Because the disease is transmitted by a human body louse that lives in clothing, risks rise in cold and rainy seasons when it’s necessary to use more clothing and blankets.

The Germans were terrified of the disease, which had long been wiped out in their country, explains Bank. Lazowski played on their fears, secretly injecting Jews with a compound that gave false positive readings for typhus and mimicking the seasonal ebb and flow of "outbreaks." Rules required him to share blood test results with the Germans, which led to widespread village quarantines and spared "infected" folks the fate that awaited some 6 million of their peers.

Bank first caught wind of the tale three years ago. Then 17, the young filmmaker appeared on a Chicago television station discussing the award-winning documentary he’d done on homelessness in the city’s ritzy north-shore suburbs.  Shortly after, he got a call from Lazowski, who was getting on in years and was finally ready to let someone document his story. Bank says he "fell in love" with it, and he’s been working feverishly to get it on film.

He formed Clayton Entertainment productions and directed an international film crew on a 16-day shoot in Poland in fall 2000—capturing the joyful reunion of villagers from Rozwadow (one of the quarantined communities), wrenching scenes of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, and Lazowski’s first visit to his homeland in 56 years.

To the 25 hours of video he currently has, Bank hopes to add more archival images and interviews with a member of Poland’s former royal family who lived in the affected area. He’s also trying to raise funds to cover post-production costs such as editing, sound work, and so on. To do that, he’s personally appealing to Jewish and Polish groups and others in hopes of attracting backing.

"I’ve found it just takes persistence and dedication," he says of his efforts. "Dr. Lazowski is 87, and I think we owe it to him to get this done while he can see it."
 

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