QBVII

   Queen’s Bench VII is the courtroom in London where a libel trial was held against American novelist Leon Uris in 1964. The libel action was brought by a Polish physician, Dr. Wladislaw Alexander Dering, a prisoner in Auschwitz, who was accused by Uris of performing 17,000 medical experiments in surgery without anesthetics on prisoners in the death camp in Uris’s 1958 best-selling novel Exodus, where he referred to the physician as Dr. Dehring and substituted the fictional Jadwiga concentration camp in place of Auschwitz.

   During the trial, survivors of Auschwitz who had undergone the ordeal of irradiation and mutilation of their sexual organs by surgery were brought forth to provide testimony. Although the evidence pointed to Dering’s guilt, he won the case because the defense could not prove that he had performed the large number of surgeries Uris had accused him of. The award, however, brought no solace to Dering inasmuch as he was compensated with the smallest coin of the realm, one halfpenny. The trial was one of the earliest of its kind to expose the intolerable medical abuses performed on the mostly Jewish victims in Auschwitz. Uris published his version of the trial in his novel QBVII (1970).