Moral Courage: Eugene Lazowski's Life

Children learn from a very young age that heroes are people with extraordinary courage who save others. Naming a hero would be an easy task for a child, but naming someone with moral courage provides a whole new and unique challenge for these children. A person with moral courage is selfless and puts their own life at risk in order to save others. They do not think of their own needs. Instead, they focus on how they can use their abilities to aid others. Eugene Lazowski is the perfect example of someone who exhibited moral courage because he risked his own life and the life of his family in order to save members of the Jewish community who feared being separated from their family and sent to a concentration camp daily during World War

He decided to remain committed to his physician’s oath and care for any patient, including members of the Jewish community, who were being persecuted by the Germans at this time. The Red Cross eventually stationed Lazowski in Rozwadow, Poland just outside the village’s ghetto. He created an alert system with the Jews living in the ghetto. If one of them needed medical help, they would place a white cloth on Dr. Eugene Lazowski’s back fence. Every night, Dr. Eugene Lazowski attended to the medical needs of the ghetto residents, but this was not fulfilling enough for Dr. Lazowski. He desired to do something more to save the Jewish population. After discussing his ambition of saving the Jewish community with Dr. Stanislav Matulewicz, Dr. Matulewicz shared a pivotal medical discovery. If a human was injected with a dead strain of typhus, he or she would test positive for the disease without experiencing the disease itself. The Germans were extremely fearful of an outbreak of typhus and because of its epidemic nature, they would not transfer anyone with typhus to a concentration camp. Dr. Lazowski targeted this fear of the Germans and successfully saved the lives of over 8,000 Jewish residents by injecting them with the dead strain of typhus and creating a false typhus epidemic in the Jewish ghetto of Rozwadow,

Eugene Lazowski provides an admirable example of moral courage because he not only risked his own life to aid the Jewish community, but he also risked the life of his family. His only explanation for this was, “I was not able to fight with a gun or sword, but I found a way to scare the Germans” (PAGE). Creating a false typhus epidemic was Dr. Lazowski’s method of saving the lives of thousands of members of the Jewish community. His selflessness allowed him to contribute to the effort to save the Jewish community in an impactful way that can only be attributed to his possession of a unique characteristic, called moral