QB VII
Authors: Leon Uris
QB VII
Leon Uris
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1970 by Leon Uris
cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
978-1-4532-2580-6
This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media
180 Varick Street
New York, NY 10014
I dedicate this book to my darling wife
J
ILL
On her twenty-third birthday
And to
Charlie Goldberg
A
SPEN,
C
OLORADO
A
PRIL 16, 1970
Contents
AUTHOR’S NOTE
THE ENGLISH LEGAL PROFESSION ADHERES TO AN EXTREMELY FORMAL PROTOCOL AND A RICH ETIQUETTE. I HAVE NOT ATTEMPTED TO BIND MYSELF TO ALL THESE CUSTOMS BUT HAVE USED A REASONABLE LITERARY LICENSE SO LONG AS THE NOVEL REMAINS WITHIN A FRAMEWORK OF BASIC TRUTH AND CREDIBILITY.
THE CHARACTERS CONTAINED HEREIN ARE PURELY FICTITIOUS.
LEON URIS
i/the plaintiff
1
November 1945-Monza, Italy
T
HE CORPORAL CADET STEPPED
out of the guard hut and squinted out over the field. A shadowy figure ran through the knee-high grass toward him. The guard lifted a pair of binoculars. The man, half stumbling, carried a single battered suitcase. He waved and gasped a greeting in Polish.
It was a familiar sight these days. In the backwash of the war, all of Europe had become a tangled river of refugees, east going west, west going east, and burgeoning refugee camps all but collapsed under the swell. Hundreds of thousands of liberated Polish slaves roamed about desperately seeking contact with their countrymen. Many wound up here in Monza at the Fifteenth Free Polish Fighter Wing of the Royal Air Force.
“Hello! Hello!” the man shouted as he crossed out of the field and over a dusty road. His run had slowed to a limp.
The corporal cadet stepped up to him. The man was tall and slender with a high-boned face capped with a head of solid white hair.
“Polish, Free Polish?”
“Yes,” the guard answered, “let me take your suitcase.”
The man leaned against the guard to stave off fainting.
“Easy, father, easy. Come, sit down inside my hut. I will call for an ambulance.”
The guard took him by the arm and led him. The man stopped suddenly and stared at the flag of Poland which flew from its staff just inside the gate and tears came to his eyes. He sat on a wooden bench and held his face in his hands.
The corporal cadet set the suitcase down and circled the handle of the field phone. “Post number four, send an ambulance. Yes, a refugee.”
As the man was driven into the confines of the camp, the guard shook his head. Ten a day? A hundred some days. What could be done but put a few hot meals into their shrunken bellies, scrub them, give them shots against the raging diseases, a set of ragged clothing, and then dispatch them to a refugee center girding for a terrible winter. Europe would be one large house of death when the snows came.
The bulletin board in the officer’s club carried a daily list of refugee arrivals. These Free Polish sought the miracle of contact with a relative or even an old friend. On some rare occasions there would be an emotional reunion of old schoolmates. Almost never was there a meeting of loved ones.
Major Zenon Myslenski entered the club, still dressed in flight jacket and fur-lined boots. He was warmly greeted, for Myslenski, with twenty-two kills of German aircraft, was one of the few quadruple aces of the Free Poles and a legend in a time of legends. He stopped automatically at the bulletin board and glanced at the new orders, the list of social events. There was a chess tournament he must enter. He was about to turn away when be was drawn to that frustrating catalogue, the new refugee list. Only four arrivals today. It was so futile.
“Hey, Zenon,” someone called from the bar. “You’re late.”
Major Myslenski froze, eyes fixed on a name on the refugee list. Arrived, November 5—Adam Kelno.
Zenon knocked once, then burst the door open. Adam Kelno was half asleep on the cot. At first Zenon did not recognize his cousin. God, he had aged. At the outbreak of the war he didn’t have a gray hair in his head. He was so bony and drawn. Through a haze, Adam Kelno felt the presence of someone. He groggily propped on an elbow and blinked his eyes.
“Zenon?”
“Cousin—”
Colonel C. Gajnow, Commander of the Fifteenth Fighter Wing, poured himself a stiff shot of vodka and lifted the pages of a preliminary interrogation of Dr. Adam Kelno, who had petitioned to be allowed to join the Free Polish Forces.
ADAM KELNO, M.D.
—Born near the village of Pzetzeba, 1905. Educated—University of Warsaw, Medical College. Entered practice as a physician/surgeon in 1934.
There was testimony by his cousin, Major Zenon Myslenski, that Kelno was always identified with Polish Nationalist movements even as a student. At the beginning of World War II, with Poland occupied by the Germans, Kelno and his wife, Stella, immediately went into the Nationalist underground.
After several months their activities were discovered by the Gestapo. Stella Kelno was shot to death by a firing squad.
By a miracle Adam Kelno was spared and sent to the infamous Jadwiga Concentration Camp located midway between Krakow and Tornow in the southern region of Poland. It was an enormous manufacturing complex to feed the German war machine and manned by hundreds of thousands of slaves.
The report continued on that Kelno became a leading figure among the prisoner/doctors and did much to lift the primitive medical facilities. Kelno personally was a selfless and dedicated physician.
Later in the war when extermination facilities were introduced into Jadwiga, Kelno was responsible for saving thousands of lives from the gas chambers by falsifying reports and death certificates, through the underground and by his medical skill.
He became so prominent that toward the end of the war, the chief German medical officer, SS Dr. Colonel Adolph Voss, took Kelno, against his will, to help him run an exclusive private clinic in East Prussia.
At the end of the war, Kelno returned to Warsaw, where he ran into a shattering experience. The Polish Communists had betrayed that country to the Soviet Union. During his stay in Jadwiga, as a member of the Nationalist underground, he was constantly in a life and death struggle with the Communist underground. Now, many Communist doctors, most of them Jews, had rigged a conspiracy against Kelno with statements that he had collaborated with the Nazis. With a warrant out for his arrest, Adam Kelno fled immediately and made his way across Europe to Italy, where he made contact with the Free Polish.
Colonel Gajnow set the report down and called for his secretary. “On the Kelno matter,” he said, “I am declaring a commission of inquiry to be composed of five officers with myself as chairman. We shall inquire immediately to all Free Polish Forces and organizations which may have knowledge of Kelno and we shall convene for consideration in three months.”
When Poland fell in World War II and was divided between Germany and the Soviet Union by pact, many thousands of soldiers were able to escape. A government-in-exile was formed in London and fighting units put into the field and in the skies under British command.