QB VII (37 page)

“You certainly are not suggesting Dr. Lotaki was a Nazi?”

“I suggest that Dr. Lotaki is a genius at the art of survival, and he has not only worked his passage once, but twice.”Dr. Lotaki, you say you went to Dr. Kelno as your superior and discussed the operations. What would you have done if Dr. Kelno had refused?”

“I ... also would have refused.”

“No further questions.”

10

A
BE SAT IN THE
darkness. A car stopped before the mews, the door was unlocked.

“Dad?”

Ben felt around for the light switch and flicked it on. His father was across the room, legs stretched out straight, a stiff glass of whisky balanced on his chest.

“You drunk, Dad?”

“No.”

“Tipsy?”

“No.”

“Everyone’s been gathered at Mr. Shawcross’s for almost an hour. They’re all waiting for you. Mrs. Shawcross has put on a beautiful spread, and they have a pianist playing for everyone ... and ... well, Lady Wydman sent me here to get you.”

Abe set the glass aside, pulled himself up, and hung his head. Ben had seen his father like this before, many times. In Israel he’d come into his father’s bedroom, which also served as his office, after a long day of writing. His father would be wrung out, sometimes in tears about a character in the book, sometimes so tired he was unable to lace his shoes. He looked like that now, only worse.

“I can’t face them,” Abe said.

“You’ve got to, Dad. From the minute you meet them, you’ll forget about their mutilation. They’re a lively bunch, and they laugh and carry on and they want so badly to see you. The other man arrived from Holland this morning as well as the women from Belgium and Trieste. They’re all here now.”

“What the hell do they want to see me for? For bringing them to London and putting them on display like freaks in a side show?”

“You know why they’re here. And don’t forget, you’re their hero.”

“Hero, my ass.”

“You’re a hero to Vanessa and Yossi and me, too.”

“Sure.”

“Don’t you think we know why you’re doing this?”

“Sure, we’ve done you a damned great service. Accept the gift of my generation to your generation. Concentration camps and gas chambers and the rape of human dignity. Now, accept our gift, you kids, and get in there and be civilized.”

“How about the gift of courage.”

“Courage. You mean fear of not going through with it and trying to live with yourself afterwards. That’s not courage.”

“No one’s in London because they’re cowards. Now come along, I’ll put your shoes on.”

Ben knelt before his father and laced his shoes up. Abe reached out and patted his son’s head. “What kind of a goddam air force would let you run around with a mustache like that. I wish to hell you’d shave it off.”

From the moment he arrived he was happy that Ben had made him come. Sheila Lamb continued to take the awkwardness out of the situation by whisking him to the six men and four women she had adopted as her wards. They were there with him, Ben and Vanessa to help his slipslod Hebrew and Yossi was there adoring his daughter. The presence of the three young Israelis put a certain kind of courage into them all. There were no handshakes. There were embraces and kisses and they were all brothers and sisters.

David Shawcross presented each of them signed sets of Abraham Cady’s collected works and the air was that of soldiers on the eve of battle. Abe became himself with Dr. Leiberman and joked about the fact he had only one eye and that made them all even closer.

Abe and Leiberman moved off by themselves. “I was called in by your solicitor,” Dr. Leiberman said. “He felt that because most of this testimony will be in Hebrew it would be better if I acted as the translator.”

“What about your medical testimony?” Abe asked.

“They feel, and I agree, that the medical testimony will be more effective coming from an English doctor.”

“They were reluctant at first,” Abe said. “You know how doctors are about testifying against each other, but a number of good people came forth.”

It had been an evening of unexpected pleasantness, but a sudden weariness struck them all and, with it, an awkwardness. Everyone began looking toward Abraham Cady.

“I’m not drunk enough to give a speech,” he said.

And then without signal they were standing before him, looking at their non-hero, who in turn looked at the floor. Then he looked up. David Shawcross, his cigar stopped, and Lady Sarah, much like a saint. And soft Vanessa still much an English lady and Ben and Yossi, the young lions of Israel. And the victims ...

“Our side of this case begins tomorrow,” Abe said, now finding strength to address those ten particular people. “I know and you know the terrible ordeal before you. But we are here because we can never let the world forget what they did to us. When you are in the witness box remember, all of you, the pyramids of bones and ashes of the Jewish people. And remember when you speak, you are speaking for six million who can no longer speak ... remember that.”

They came to him one at a time, shook his hand and kissed his cheek and filed from the room. And then there was only Ben and Vanessa beside him.

“God,” Abe said, “give them strength.”

11

“Y
OU MAY PROCEED
, Mr. Bannister.”

Thomas Bannister turned his attention to the eight men and four women who had undergone their task as jurymen without visible emotion. Some were still wearing their “one suit.” And nearly all of them filed into court with some sort of cushion.

Bannister played with his notes until the room hushed. “I’m sure the members of the jury have suspected that there are two sides to this case. A great deal of what my learned friend, Sir Robert Highsmith, has said to you is entirely true. We do not dispute that the defendants are the author and publisher of the book or that the passage is defamatory and we agree that the person in the book is Dr. Adam Kelno, the plaintiff.”

The press box was now so overfull, the front row of the three row balcony above was fixed with writing clipboards for those who had no room downstairs. Anthony Gilray, who had taken volumes of notes, continued burning out pencils.

“My Lord will address you on all questions of law. But, there are really only two issues. We say in our defense that the gist of the paragraph is true and the plaintiff is saying two things. He says the gist is untrue and because of that he is entitled to very large damages. Now our position is that because of what Dr. Kelno did, his reputation really hasn’t been damaged, and even though he has been libeled he should not be awarded anything but the lowest coin in the realm, a halfpenny.

“A libel does not depend on what the author meant but how people who read it understood it. We assume that most of the people who read it never heard of Dr. Kelno or associated it with a Dr. Kelno practicing in Southwark. Certainly, many people did know it was the same Dr. Kelno. What did this mean to them?

“Now, I agree with my learned friend that Dr. Kelno was a prisoner in an undescribable hell and under German domination. Quite easy for us in jolly, comfortable England to criticize what people did then, but when you consider this case, you must certainly bear in mind how you might have acted under similar circumstances.

“Jadwiga. How did something like this ever happen? Where in the world are the most civilized, advanced; and cultured countries? It would show no disrespect to the United States or our own Commonwealth to say, ‘the Christian countries of Western Europe were the flower of our civilization, the highest place to which man has come.’ And if you would have said, ‘Do you think it possible that within a few years one of these countries would drive millions of old people naked into gas chambers? Well, everyone would have said, ‘No, it’s not possible. Come now, be serious. The Kaiser and all that militarism have gone. Germany has an ordinary Western democratic government. We cannot conceive of why anyone would want to do anything like that. It would bring the loathing of the world on them?’ If it were peacetime and they did it, they’d soon be at war with those trying to stop it. And even in wartime, what could they possibly hope to gain with this kind of conduct?”

Thomas Bannister repeated his single gesture of rolling his fee bags and his voice now modulated with the subtlety of Bach counterpoint.

“You’d never get people to do it,” he continued. “The German Army is made up of people from offices and factories and shops. They have children of their own. They would never get people with families to drive children into gas chambers. And ...if it had been suggested on top of all this that human guinea pigs would have their sexual organs removed in front of their eyes while they were conscious as part of experiments in mass sterilization, again we should have said, should we not ... ‘it’s not possible’ and furthermore, we should have said, ‘this kind of thing has to be done by doctors and you could never find any doctor who would do it.’

“Well, we would have been wrong because it did happen, all of it, and there was a doctor, an anti-Semitic Polish doctor who did it. And off the evidence it’s clear that he had a dominating position and a dominating personality. You heard Dr. Lotaki say that if Dr. Kelno had refused, he would have too.

“We would have been wrong to think this could not have happened because there was a cause to support and justify what happened. That monstrous cause is anti-Semitism. Those among us who have no religion would rely on their intellect. But all of us, religious or not, have a concept of right and wrong.

“But once you allow yourself to think that there are some people, because of their race, their color, or religion, who are really not human beings you have established a justification for imposing every sort of humiliation on them.

“This ploy becomes quite useful to a national leader who needs a universal scapegoat, someone to blame when anything goes wrong. And then you can whip the masses into a frenzy, put them in a state of mind that such people are animals ...well, we slaughter animals just the way it was done at Jadwiga. Wasn’t Jadwiga West the logical end of this particular road?

“We should have been wrong,” Bannister went on with an oration that mesmerized every man and woman who heard it, “because if you had ordered British troops to drive children and old people into gas chambers, none of whom had done anything wrong except they were the children of their parents, can you imagine British troops doing anything but mutiny against such orders?

“Well, as a matter of fact there were some Germans, soldiers, officers, priests, doctors, and ordinary civilians who refused to obey these orders and said, ‘I am not going to do this because I would not like to live and have this on my conscience. I’m not going to push them into gas chambers, and then say later I was under orders and justify it by saying that they were going to be pushed in by someone anyhow, and I can’t stop it and other people will push them more cruelly. Therefore, it’s in their best interest that I shove them in gently.’ You see, the trouble was, not enough of these people refused.

“So there are three views, are there not, which may be taken by people reading this paragraph in this book.

“If we consider the case of the SS camp guard whom we hanged after the war. That SS guard would say in his defense, ‘Look here, I was conscripted and found myself in the SS, in a concentration camp and not realizing what was going on.’ But, of course he learned what was going on and if he was a British soldier, he would have staged a mutiny. I am not suggesting these SS guards should have gone free after the war, but if we put ourselves in their place, conscripts in Hitler’s army, perhaps hanging was a bit severe.

“Now, there is a second view. There should have been those who would have risked and taken severe punishment and even death by refusing because this is what we owe future generations. We must say to the future, if this thing happens again you cannot make the excuse that you feared punishment for there comes a moment in the human experience when one’s life itself no longer makes sense when it is directed to the mutilation and murder of his fellow man.

“And the final view that this was not a German at all but an ally in whose hands were placed the lives of fellow allies.

“We know, of course, there were risks and punishments for prisoner/doctors. We have also learned, have we not, that the prisoners ran the medical facility and that one in particular, Dr. Adam Kelno, was held in high esteem by the Germans and he himself considered himself their associate. We cannot be made to believe that a German medical officer would have cut his own throat by disposing of the one most useful to him. And we know that the orders to remove this most valued doctor to a private clinic came from Himmler himself.

“The defense says that the gist of the paragraph was true and the plaintiff is only entitled to contemptuous damages of a halfpenny for if the paragraph had read so and so had committed twenty murders when in fact he only committed two, then how much real damage is done to the murderer’s reputation.

“The paragraph was wrong to state that over fifteen thousand experiments were carried out by surgery. It was also wrong to state it was done without anesthetic. We admit that.

“It is for you, however, to decide what kind of operations were performed, how they were performed in the case of Jews, and how much Dr. Kelno’s character is worth.”

12

B
ECAUSE OF THE IMMEDIATE
and close relationship Sheila Lamb had established with the victims, she was questioned closely to determine a possible order of testimony. He needed a woman first so that the men would be charged to courage and he needed the one with authority, bearing, and common sense, who would not break on the stand. Sheila reckoned that Yolan Shoret, although the quietest of the lot, was the strongest.

Yolan Shoret, smallish and trimly attired, appeared much in control of herself as she sat and waited with Sheila and Dr. Leiberman in the second consultation room.

In the courtroom, Mr. Justice Gilray turned to the press. “I cannot give directions to the press,” he said. “All I can say is that I, as one of Her Majesty’s Judges, would be appalled, simply appalled, if any of the witnesses who had undergone these terrible operations were identified or photographed.”