Spanish flu in the Polish lands

On 24 October 1918 the decision was taken to close all schools in Kraków for two weeks, from 27 October to 10 November. The Kraków newspapers had been demanding this for almost two weeks, because many of the sick were pupils. The reasons given were the spreading “Spanish lady” and the lack of coal to heat the classrooms. The Spanish flu epidemic, which at the end of August had set off in a second wave from the ports of France, America and Africa, was by then present throughout Galicia, in the Kingdom of Poland and in the Province of Posen. The Polish lands, ravaged by four years of war, requisitions and hunger, were exceptionally easy prey for it.

Kraków

The first reports of the flu in Kraków appeared in mid-September. On 18 September Czas (PL) was still writing only about a new epidemic in Spain, but just two days later Głos Narodu reported that “Spanish influenza now prevails in Kraków with great intensity”. According to municipal statistics, six people fell ill in the week from 8 to 14 September, three of whom died. By the end of the month several hundred people a week were falling ill, and on 26 September the Ilustrowany Kuryer Codzienny wrote that “a quarter of the local population has fallen victim to the Spanish lady”, that doctors were “dropping off their feet”, and that the pharmacies were short of aspirin and quinine. The newspapers asked readers for understanding, because the delivery men were ill and issues were not reaching subscribers.

The epidemic’s chief adversary was the municipal physician, a lecturer in hygiene at the Jagiellonian University, Tomasz Janiszewski (PL). At a meeting of the City Council on 3 October he complained that the medicines office was not supplying drugs. He praised the obligation to report and isolate the sick, the division of the city into districts run by trusted officials and the new hospital beds, but he also demanded a thorough clean-up of the dirty city. He believed that the disease killed few of the sick, between half a per cent and one per cent, but mainly people aged 16–32. In St Lazarus’s Hospital, however, where the most seriously ill were taken, one in four of the 320 people treated there died in the last four months of 1918. Most deaths were recorded in Kazimierz and Podgórze. Rumours went round the city that this was not flu but pneumonic plague. On 17 October the National Health Council announced that tests had not found the plague bacillus. On 13 October thousands of people came to the Jewish cemetery on Miodowa Street for a “black wedding”: the marriage of two orphans conducted on the grave of the latest victim of the Spanish flu, which according to an old Jewish custom was meant to halt the plague.

Galicia, the Kingdom, Posen

Things were bad throughout Galicia. In Lviv the first cases were recorded as early as the summer, and in the autumn sick people sometimes waited a dozen hours or more for help, lying in bed beside dead relatives. In Przemyśl and Rzeszów schools and cinemas were closed, in Tarnopol a dozen or more people were dying every day, and in October the flu also prevailed in the Kielce region and in the Dąbrowa Basin. The Kraków Czas reprinted from Gazeta Wieczorna a description of the Sokal district: “Carpenters in the villages and small towns do nothing but make coffins”, and the undug potatoes would soon start rotting in the fields. The Kraków newspapers also wrote about Vienna, where 814 people died of the Spanish flu between 6 and 12 October.

In Warsaw the Kurjer Warszawski had written as early as 21 July about “Spanish fever”, which it considered an ordinary flu brought in from the east. The paper readily described the epidemic in the capitals of Europe, but wrote little about the situation in Warsaw itself. The wave that hit the city in September lasted until February 1919 and claimed the most victims in December. According to municipal statistics cited by doctors, between 400 and almost 600 people died of influenza in Warsaw in 1918, and many more of pneumonia. On 17 October, however, the Kurjer admitted that people were now dying of flu quite easily.

We know most about the Posen region, because the Kurjer Poznański (PL) wrote about the flu at length. Because of sickness among staff, the Prussian railways cancelled trains, in small towns postmen stopped delivering mail, and post offices opened for only a few hours a day. In Śrem the flu in a company of eighteen-year-old recruits was deemed collective malingering meant to save them from being sent to the front, and they were refused help. Sixteen of them died. In Posen itself the peak came in the penultimate week of October, when 97 people died.

How many died

No one counted the victims. Influenza was not a disease that doctors had to report, and the newspapers, absorbed by the collapse of the monarchy and the rebirth of the Polish state, wrote less and less about it. Many deaths were hidden in obituaries of young people, of whom it was written that they had suffered briefly but grievously. The historian Łukasz Mieszkowski estimates that in the lands that became part of reborn Poland, the first great wave of the epidemic in Poland, in the autumn and winter of 1918/1919, affected at least 3.4 to 6.6 million people and killed between 68,000 and 130,000. The Spanish flu accompanied the birth of independent Poland, although in collective memory it was overshadowed by political events. In January 1919 Janiszewski became minister of public health in the government of Ignacy Jan Paderewski, and the epidemic returned in further waves until 1920.