Authors: Leon Uris
In his brief to counsel, Jacob Alexander prepared a massive document containing the statements of witnesses and all other relevant material.
The brief began with the year 1939 when Poland was attacked by Germany, then backtracked to a few slim facts on Kelno’s prewar life. He was followed into Jadwiga Concentration Camp as a prisoner/doctor.
The document continued that in the middle of the war two Nazis, SS Dr. Colonel Adolph Voss and SS Dr. Colonel Otto Flensberg, induced Himmler to allow them to establish an experiment center in Jadwiga with the use of human guinea pigs. Voss’s main experiments were directed to finding a method of mass sterilization of Jews and others whom the Germans deemed “unworthy of normal life.” Such sterilized persons could be used as a labor force for the Third Reich with controlled breeding to keep the slave ranks filled. All others would be exterminated.
The brief cited some fifty books and war crimes trials for reference. Voss had committed suicide before his trial and Flensberg had escaped to an African country where he now resides and practices. A number of minor doctors and orderlies including Flensberg’s assistant stood trial. Half of them were hanged and the others sentenced to prison.
Assisting Voss in his experiments were named three prisoner/doctors, Adam Kelno, Konstanty Lotaki, and a Jew, Boris Dimshits.
The brief contained an exhaustive study of the medical experiments, the facility, the doctors who refused to cooperate.
When all the material had been gone over and all the discussions weighed and the various defenses studied, a plea of “Justification” was entered to the effect that what was said in
The Holocaust
was substantially true. The plea stated an admission that the defendants were the writer and publisher of the book. They further stated they could not support the figure of fifteen thousand experiments without anesthetic. They contended that the number was unimportant in that many experiments were carried out and carried out in a brutal manner and therefore the plaintiff had not been seriously libeled.
In the first week of April 1967 Abraham Cady arrived in London. Vanessa was there to greet him. Her fiancé, Yossi, and Ben would come from Israel shortly.
Samantha had remarried a squire type, Reggie Brooke, who was good with horses and hay, and accounts. The years had mellowed her bitterness toward Abe. When she knew he was coming she offered the flat at Colchester Mews for his stay.
The Crown Office of the Supreme Court informed the Sheriff of London to summon seventy-five persons from the Jurors Book.
The undersheriff selected a panel by a random lottery and the perspective jurors were informed and the list of their names made public for inspection.
The challenging of a jury in England is rare because a prima facie evidence must be produced against the juror. A lot of days and weeks of unnecessary courtroom haggling are thus avoided by the acceptance of the jury without challenge.
In Israel four frightened men and two women and their doctor continued to justify the coming trip.
In Warsaw, Dr. Maria Viskova picked up her visa.
In Rambouillet, in Brussels, in Trieste, in Sausalito, in Amsterdam ... doubts raged, nightmares recurred. It would all take place soon. The whole thing would be relived.
The time of trial was drawing near with neither side showing an inclination to negotiate a settlement. The case that would “never go to court” was close at hand and each party wondered how much the other really knew.
The Cady camp was engaged in a huge and urgent manhunt for the long disappeared Egon Sobotnik, the medical clerk of Jadwiga.
In Oxford, Dr. Mark Tesslar drew back from the microscope and set his glasses straight. His hand did not even tremble, which was rather remarkable for a man who had just seen the evidence of his own cancer.
“I’m sorry, Mark,” his colleague said.
“I guess well have to do an exploratory. The sooner the better.”
Tesslar shrugged. “After two massive coronaries, I really don’t think I’m going to escape this one. I want you to do the operation, Oscar. I’m not in great pain as yet whether the cancer is terminal or not. You are to keep me alive somehow, until I give my testimony. Afterwards, we’ll discuss what is necessary.”
iv/the trial
1
April 16, 1967
THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
QUEEN’S BENCH DIVISION QUEEN’S BENCH COURT #7
Before Mr. Justice Gilray
Sir Adam Kelno, M.D. vs. Abraham Cady and others.
Jesus, Solomon, and King Alfred rated status over the front entrance of the Royal Courts of Justice, which fronted five hundred feet where the Strand becomes Fleet Street at Temple Bar. These three were joined by twenty-four lesser bishops and scholars.
Moses brought up the rear entrance on Carey Street, a block away.
The bell tower, which soared a hundred and sixty feet over Bell Yard, looked down on an enormity that could be described as neo-Gothic, neo-monastic, and neo-Victorian. A seemingly aimless scramble of spires, towers, oriel windows, cone-shaped steepled buttresses, Norman ornamental moldings, and ribs all in bulky gray stone blackened under years of soot.
On both sides of the entry stood the barrister’s robing room. To the left, cameras are checked in. At the entrance to the mosaic-paved great hall is posted the Daily Cause List. The hall, two hundred and fifty feet in length, soars eighty feet in height and all of it is properly garnished with statues of the renowned. Running the lengths of a stone vaulted ceiling is a series of perpendicular tracery windows bearing stained glass coats of arms of all the Lord Chancellors of England.
The office of the Tipstaff stands on a balcony at the far end of the great hall. Once an official who carried a tipped staff to denote his office, today he maintains order within the court as a sergeant at arms.
All of this cumbersome building stands on six acres of wound flanked by St Dunstan’s in the West and St Clement Danes, churches of old and stately stature.
The court stands as a giant planet of law with its satellites, the surrounding Inns and Chancery Lane.
The first law court was in Westminster Hall, daring from the thirteenth century, the trial place where Charles I and the martyr Thomas More found mock justice, and from whose bowels thundered history from the installation of Cromwell to the condemnation of Guy Fawkes and Essex. It is here that the royal, the noble, and the eminent lay in state before burial in the abbey over the way. Westminster Hall became outdated and inconveniently located to the proximity of the Inns of Court and so the Royal Courts came into existence in the mid-Victorian times.
Thomas Bannister and Brendon O’Conner, already wigged and gowned, crossed the Strand past a busy knot of assembled journalists, into the court and up the stairs to the consultation room opposite QB VII where Jacob Alexander, Mr. Josephson, and Sheila Lamb had already assembled.
Now Sir Robert Highsmith and his junior, Chester Dicks, in bowler, pin stripes and carrying umbrellas and red and blue bags of stuff gowns and silk gowns, made off to the robing room.
Sir Adam Kelno arrived with his wife and Terrence Campbell pushing into the building abruptly. In his hand he clutched a cable from his son.
“There’s Cady and Shawcross.”
“Mr. Cady, would you say a few words on ...”
“Sorry, fellows. Strict orders. No comment.”
“Who’s the girl?”
“I think that’s Cady’s daughter.”
Samantha and Reggie Brooke arrived unnoticed.
Ushers, court reporters, associates, journalists, spectators, buzzed around QB VII in a cold stone hallway as the hour approached.
A narrow polished hallway separates the row of judges’ chambers from the rear of their courtrooms. Justice Gilray adjusted his wig and the ermine collar on his scarlet robe. Gilray, a hawk-faced man, was long trained to appear emotionless and seemingly bored, a judge’s role he enjoyed. Many judges and barristers sought membership in the Garrick Club, where they could hobnob with theatrical people for they in turn used the courtroom as their own special stage. This was particularly true of libel lawyers, many of whom were frustrated actors.
The courtroom filled slowly through a twin entry of green draped alcoves. Dead ahead was the Queen’s Bench on a raised dais looking down an austere wooden benches and tables for the associate, the solicitors, barristers, the press, jury, and spectators. It was all heavily paneled in oak, topped with a series of leaded cathedral windows high up on the balcony level. A pair of chandeliers with bellshaped shades hovered from a stone ceiling and the monotony of the wood was broken here and there by a wrought iron rail, a row of lawbooks, a relentless clock.
Cady and Shawcross took their places behind Brendan O’Conner in the first row of the spectator’s benches. David nudged Abe and nodded down their row to where Angela Kelno and a handsome boy, Terrence Campbell, were seated.
Abe smiled to Samantha and Vanessa, who moved up behind them with Lorraine Shawcross and Geoffery, Pam, and Cecil Dodd. Then he looked down to the solicitor’s table, where Adam Kelno sat with unwavering calm. Abe had interviewed thousands of people and was shrewd in finding a betrayal of that calm as Adam looked around for his wife and son.
Suddenly Kelno and Cady were staring at each other across the roam. The first exchange was hostile and then they probed and pondered. Abe continued to feel anger, but Kelno had a sudden puzzled expression of “What are we doing here?”
Their attention was diverted by the jury filing in. Eight men, four women. They seemed totally nondescript. Twelve commonplace Englishmen and women to be found on any street.
A last flurry of whispers between barristers and solicitors and a shuffling for papers.
“Silence!”
Everyone arose as the Honorable Mr. Justice Anthony Gilray entered from a door behind the Queen’s Bench. The entire court bowed to him as he took his seat in a deep, high-backed leather chair.
Sir Robert Highsmith bounced to his feet and informally charted with the judge in reckoning it would be a long trial.
Thomas Bannister arose. Of average build and good English looks, the power generated from within him. His voice was soft and seemingly monotone until one began to find its rhythm. He agreed that the trial would be lengthy.
Gilray swung his chair toward the jury box and advised them in the matter of serving under undue hardship. No reply. “I should like to ask if any of you lost relatives in a concentration camp?”
Both Bannister and O’Conner came to their feet. Bannister turned and looked over his shoulder to his junior to advise him he had the matter in hand. “If his Lordship establishes this kind of condition for the jury then we will have to establish opposite conditions, namely any peculiar sympathy in behalf of physicians, knights, former Polish nationalists ... all kinds of conditions.”
“I meant,” the judge answered, “I would not wish anyone who has lost a relative in a concentration camp to have to undergo undue suffering because of the revelations of this trial.”
“In that case, I have no objection to the question.”
It was asked without reply from the jury and they were sworn in.
The clock ticked audibly between rows of lawbooks on the left wall as Sir Robert Highsmith unfolded his notes on the rostrum on his table and stretched his back with his hands on hips. He studied the jury for a long moment and cleared his throat several times. In an English court the barrister is obliged to remain standing behind the rostrum which limits his physical gestures and mobility. Unable to parade all over the courtroom he must be a quick thinking orator whose elocution is clear and in a manner easily grasped.
“My Lord, members of the jury,” Highsmith began, “this is an action for damages for libel. A libel, I suggest, as damning as ever came before an English court. We are going to be asked to take ourselves out of the comforts of London in 1967, for what we are concerned with is a nightmare of a Nazi concentration camp that existed over two decades ago against a background of the most incredible hell ever created by man.”
He held up a copy of
The Holocaust
and with deliberate slowness opened it to page 167. Another beat in time passed as he looked directly at every man and woman of the jury individually. He read, pausing carefully, “ ‘Of all the concentration camps none was more infamous than Jadwiga. It was here that SS Dr. Colonel Adolph Voss established an experimental center for the purpose of creating methods of mass sterilization, with the use of human guinea pigs, and SS Dr. Colonel Otto Flensberg and his assistant carried on equally horrendous studies on prisoners. In the notorious Barrack V a secret surgery was run by Dr. Kelno, who carried out fifteen thousand or more experimental operations without the use of anesthetic.’ Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, let me repeat this passage ...‘fifteen thousand or more experimental operations without the use of anesthetic.’ ”
He slammed the book shut and let it drop from the rostrum to the table with a thud and stared at the ceiling.
“What!” he shouted, “could be a more horrendous and defamatory and dastardly an insult,” he said, rolling his r’s mightily and bouncing off his toes and jabbing at the air like a boxer. “What greater libel to a physician whose reputation goes far beyond the confines of his clinic. I should like at this time to read the words we have set out in the Plaintiff’s Statement of Claim. I suggest, therefore, you be given this bundle of pleadings.”
“Do you have any objection, Mr. Bannister?” the judge asked.
“Just what do you intend giving the jury?”
“Pleadings,” Highsmith answered, “an agreed bundle of pleadings.”
Thomas Bannister took a bundle and handed it back to O’Conner, who thumbed through it, then whispered a few words. “We are satisfied with reservation. There have been a number of interlocutory proceedings and addendums and there may be other relevant things.”
Each of the jury was given a bundle. Mr. Justice Gilray asked them not to read it on their own. It was the first in what was to be a number of confusing steps in their legal education.