Eugene Lazowski

Eugene Lazowski born Eugeniusz Sławomir Łazowski (1913 – December 16, 2006) was a Polish medical doctor who saved thousands of Polish lives during World War II, particularly by being one of two physicians who created a fake epidemic which played on German phobias about hygiene. Lazowski gained fame from an article that mischaracterized the thousands of lives saved as being Polish Jews, although Lazowski did save many Jews by clandestinely providing medicine to them which was prohibited and punishable by death.

Early life, family and education Eugeniusz Łazowski was born in Częstochowa, Poland, to a Catholic family.

The doctors' fake epidemic has been estimated to have saved about 8,000 people from being sent to German concentration camps, although his own memoir The journalist of the article on a scholarship from the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1984, and translated to English by his daughter Alexandra.

In media

In 2001, Ryan Bank began work on A Private War, a documentary about Lazowski which chronicles Lazowski's visit to Poland as well as recorded testimonies of people whose families were saved by the fake epidemic. It is unknown if the film was ever completed or released.

In 2019, journalist Barbara Necek directed In Search of the Polish Schindler, a documentary film about Lazowski which examines and debunks the legend of the doctor saving Jews with the typhus injections, including interviews with the journalist who propagated the myth and Lazowski 's daughter who recounted her father enjoying his fame and never disputing the myth, even though his memoir proved the impossibility of the claim: Jews infected with typhus were shot and their homes were burned, and the area where the Lazowski family resided had nowhere close to 8,000 Jewish people to be saved.