They had an outbreak on their hands.

It wasn't a new disease, but that didn't make it any harder to deal with.

Typhus, not to be confused with typhoid fever, is a bacterial infection that causes headaches,

rash and fever, and it thrives in cramped spaces with filthy conditions.

They called it jail fever in Tudor, England.

It was camp fever during the American Civil War.

If you have a lot of people crammed into a small space, there's a good chance that you

could have an outbreak of typhus, places like military camps and ghettos, which is where

this particular outbreak was happening.

Poland in 1942 was a horrible place to live if you were a Jew.

The Nazis were systematically rounding up anyone of Jewish descent and sending them to concentration

camps because they had this broken idea that some people were worth less than others.

But there were two doctors in Southeast Poland with an idea about how to stop them.

It turns out you didn't actually have to contract the disease to test positive for it.

All you really needed was a vaccine of the dead bacteria.

It's also important to understand something else.

The Nazis were so afraid of getting sick that they killed any infected Jew they found.

But if enough people tested positive for the disease, they would simply quarantine the

entire area and just stay away.

So these two doctors began to give injections to all of the non-Jewish people living in the

nearby ghetto.

Their goal was to frighten the Nazis away and save the lives of every Jew in the village.

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