A few months back I re-read Exodus by Leon Uris and I had bought at the same time his novel QB VII but I’ve been so slow with reading books lately that I just now got to it. Still it was worth the wait even though Uris is not the best story plotter in the world; Exodus sort of made it easy for him since he was just fictionalizing a true story. That’s true here as well but the real life tale doesn’t lend itself to a traditional plot line. This book came about after Uris was sued for libel by a Polish doctor who was named in Exodus as a Nazi collaborator in their hideous WWII concentration camp medical experiments and the author made the interesting choice of inventing two people much like himself and the plaintiff involved in a very similar libel battle.
QB VII is told in the third person and divided into four parts: a biography of the doctor, a biography of the writer, trial preparations, and the trial itself. The doctor’s biography begins when he turns up at an Allied airforce base in Italy a few months after WWII ended, while the writer’s bio covers his entire life. Both are treated sympathetically, more or less, even though it is impossible for the reader to not know what is coming. The trial itself, as with most of the preparations, takes place in Englad and Uris gives over quite a few pages to describing the Royal Courts in the City of London, their history, and people and he uses language that would have the uncritical reader amazed at their perfection and ability to rise above the human condition. The setting is England because the doctor, a Polish Nationalist, settled there with several thousand of his compratriots after the Communists seized power.
QB VII was also made into what I thought was a great television miniseries in the 1970s, with Ben Gazzara playing the writer and Anthony Hopkins (in his first major american role) playing the doctor, although I haven’t seen it repeated in some time. Amusingly for some reason (probably money and production simplicity), the miniseries moves the doctor’s long sojourn in obscurity, fearing for his life after Poland made an unsuccessful attempt to extradite him in the late ’40s for war crimes, from a tiny British outpost called Sarawak in southeast Asia to the desert sands of Kuwait.
Still, Uris does cover interesting, important ground. Even though people like the doctor did not set out to do horrible things, they must realize that to participate is to forfeit their own humanity. In the end the author perhaps pushes a little too far in the eagerness to prove that evil must be rooted out to forestall future repetition by implying the collaborators were not as unwilling as their words would have us believe. In these months when some of us believe that certain Arabs are out to finish what the Nazis started, this book might be seen as a chilling warning to the European apologists.
BillSaysThis 