During the Holocaust, the Nazis were systematically killing Jews just because they were Jewish. Sometimes the non-Jewish population tried to help their neighbors…to their detriment if they were caught. Some people his Jews, some smuggled them out of the country, as a few, like Dr Eugene Lazowski, born Eugeniusz Slawomir Lazowski, a Polish doctor saved thousands of lives during World War II. He was one of two physicians who staged a fake epidemic to exploit the German fear of poor hygiene. Lazowski became well-known after an article mistakenly claimed the lives saved were all Polish Jews, though he did help many Jews by secretly giving them medicine, an act that was banned and punishable by death.
Eugeniusz Lazowski was born in Czestochowa, Poland, to a Catholic family. He earned his medical degree from Jozef Pilsudski University in Warsaw just before World War II began. During the war, he served as a medic and Second Lieutenant in the Polish Army. Captured by the Soviets, he was sent to a prisoner-of-war camp but managed to escape. He later worked as a doctor on a Red Cross train and then as a military physician for the Polish resistance Home Army.
After the German occupation of Poland, Lazowski settled in the small southeastern village of Rozwadow (now part of Stalowa Wola) with his wife. It was there that their daughter Alexandra was born. In addition to running his medical practice, he also treated travelers passing through a nearby train station. It was this role that gave him the ability to really save lives. While treating travelers, he secretly hid his medicine supply and provided it to Jews in the local ghetto, which bordered his home. In doing so, Lazowski risked the death penalty imposed on Poles who aided Jews during the Holocaust.
He ran his medical practice with Dr Stanislaw Matulewicz, a friend from their days in medical school. Like Lazowski, Matulewicz had worked with the Red Cross. He discovered that healthy people could be injected with the bacterium OX 19, a strain of Proteus, which would make them test positive for typhus without actually contracting the illness. Together, the two doctors staged a fake typhus outbreak in 1941–1942 in and around Rozwadow, leading the Germans to quarantine the area. The doctor’s fake epidemic was believed to have saved around 8,000 people from being sent to German concentration camps, though his memoir and the English translation by his daughter dispute the idea that most of those saved were Jewish. The reality is, however, that non-Jewish people would not have needed saving, for the most part, anyway. The journalist who wrote the article that sparked the legend admitted to a documentarian that the main details weren’t verified, partly excusing this by saying he didn’t know Polish. So, I suppose the story could be disputed, but it has never really been denied either, so I believe it’s true.
In 1958, Lazowski moved to the US with his wife Maria and their daughter Alexandra on a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship. Alexandra had been born in 1942 in Rozwadow. The family settled in Chicago, Illinois, where Lazowski went on to become a professor of pediatrics at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1984. Over his career, he authored more than a hundred scientific dissertations. Though he may have eased his 
medical practice in the 1980s, he didn’t fully retire until 2004. During his semi-retirement, he wrote a memoir, Prywatna wojna: wspomnienia lekarza-zolnierza, Private War: Memoirs of a Medical Soldier, 1933-1944 was published in Polish in 1993 and later translated into English by Dr Lazowski’s daughter, Alexandra. He passed away in 2006 in Chicago, having lived in Eugene, Oregon, with his daughter. His legacy of great kindness, however, will live on.
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