Richard Donelan

In the middle of World War Two, German soldiers in southeastern Poland started avoiding a cluster of villages. They wouldn't go in. They wouldn't take people out for forced labor. They put up warning signs and stayed away. They believed the area was infected with typhus. It wasn't. Two doctors had invented the whole thing. The man behind it was Eugene Lazowski, a young Polish doctor working for the Red Cross in the town of Rozwadów. He was watching the Nazi occupation tear his country apart. Executions. Deportations. People shipped off to labor camps, many never coming back. He wanted to stop it. He had no weapons, no army, and no way to fight. What he had was medicine. His friend and fellow doctor, Stanisław Matulewicz, had discovered something strange. If you injected a person with a harmless, dead strain of a certain bacteria, their blood would test positive for typhus. They wouldn't be sick at all. But on paper, they'd look like they had one of the most feared diseases of the war. And the Germans were terrified of typhus. It spread fast, it killed, and it could tear through an army. When the Germans found it, they quarantined the area and kept their distance. Lazowski realized what that meant. If he could make enough people look infected, the Germans would leave the whole region alone. So he started injecting his patients. He chose carefully. He sent the blood samples to German labs for testing, exactly as the rules required. The results came back positive. Again and again. The Germans declared an epidemic zone. Villages were quarantined. Soldiers kept out. People who would have been seized for forced labor or worse were left alone, because nobody wanted to go near them. Lazowski had to be careful. If too many cases looked fake, someone would ask why nobody was dying. So he spread out the injections over time and kept the outbreak believable. Eventually the Germans did get suspicious. They sent a team of doctors to inspect. Lazowski met them with food and vodka and played the gracious host. He guided them toward the sickest looking, dirtiest patients he could find, in the most crowded rooms. The German doctors, worried about catching typhus themselves, took a few samples and left in a hurry. The tests came back positive. The fake epidemic lasted until the end of the war. Estimates say it may have protected around 8,000 people. Lazowski also secretly helped Jews from the nearby ghetto, giving them medical care at enormous risk. After the war he moved to the United States and became a professor of pediatrics in Chicago. For decades he barely talked about what he'd done. Late in life he finally wrote a memoir. He called it My Private War. He died in 2006. He never fired a shot. He beat the Nazis with a needle and a lab test.

October 28, 1940. At three in the morning, the Italian ambassador wakes the Greek prime minister in his home and hands him an ultimatum: let Italian troops march into Greece and occupy it, or face war. The Greek leader, Metaxas, answers in a single phrase, and Greece's answer becomes a national legend. The country then does something almost no one expected: it not only fights, it wins, handing the Axis its first land defeat of the war. Mussolini was behind it, and his motives were vanity as much as strategy. He was jealous of Hitler's string of conquests and wanted glories of his own, a parallel war to show that Italy was a great power in its own right. Greece looked like an easy victim. So in the small hours of the 28th, the Italian ambassador delivered an ultimatum demanding that Greece allow Italian forces to occupy strategic points across the country, in effect to surrender without a fight, with only a few hours to answer. The Greek prime minister, Ioannis Metaxas, himself an authoritarian ruler, gave his reply. The popular memory is that he said simply "Ohi," "No," and that is the name the day carries, Oxi Day. What he actually said, in French, the language of diplomacy, was "Alors, c'est la guerre," "Then it is war." The meaning was the same. Greece would not submit. And when the news spread that morning, the Greek people poured into the streets, not in fear but in defiance, shouting that same word, "Ohi," No, embracing the war rather than the surrender. Italian troops attacked that same day, pouring across the border from Italian-occupied Albania, expecting a quick walkover. They got a shock. The Greeks, fighting in their own rugged mountains, outnumbered and outgunned, not only held but counterattacked, and then they did the unthinkable. They drove the Italians back. They threw the invaders out of Greece and advanced into Albania, seizing a large chunk of it, humiliating Mussolini's army, which proved badly led and poorly supplied for a mountain winter war. Through the winter of 1940 into 1941, little Greece was beating a great fascist power in the field. It was the first time any Axis land offensive had been defeated, a tremendous boost to Allied morale at a moment when Britain stood nearly alone and the news was almost all bad. The gallant Greeks became heroes across the free world, proof that the dictators were not invincible. Churchill is often quoted as saying that henceforth it would not be said that Greeks fight like heroes, but that heroes fight like Greeks. But the defiance came at a terrible price, and it reshaped the war in ways that rippled outward. Mussolini's failure forced Hitler to come to his rescue. The Germans could not have the British using Greece as a base on their southern flank, and they could not leave Mussolini humiliated, so in the spring of 1941 Hitler invaded Greece and Yugoslavia with overwhelming force. The Germans overran Greece in a matter of weeks, and the country fell into a brutal occupation that brought famine and horror, and a fierce resistance. And there is a famous, much-debated consequence. Hitler's intervention in the Balkans, forced in part by the Greek defiance and the need to secure his southern flank, is argued by many historians to have delayed the invasion of the Soviet Union by several crucial weeks, weeks that might have made the difference before the Russian winter stopped the Germans short of Moscow. If so, then the stubborn "No" of a small nation in October 1940 may have helped, in a roundabout way, to save Moscow and doom Hitler in the east. That is why some call Oxi Day a turning point of the whole war. Whatever the truth of that argument, the 28th is a day Greeks still celebrate with fierce pride, the day their country said no to an empire and then beat its army in the mountains. It was defiance in its purest form, a small nation choosing war over submission, and winning, at least for a season, against the odds.