Dr. Wladislaw Dering, the Polish-born doctor who has filed a libel suit against Leon Uris, author of the novel “Exodus, ” and the latter’s British publishers, testified in the hearing before the High Court here today that he and his assistants in the hospital of the Auschwitz death camp saved many prisoner-patients from the gas chambers.
Dr. Dering filed his suit because a portion of “Exodus” mentions a Dr. Dehring, as being concerned with experiments on inmates at Auschwitz. He claims that, though the book spelled the name differently, it meant him.
Dr. Dering, who now practices medicine here, said he and his assistants at Auschwitz removed numbers from the chests of the living, and substituting numbers from corpses. He testified that, when the Nazis found he and his staff could wash the numbers off, they introduced tattooing. He said there was an underground through which he had been able to get drugs to help prisoners, though discovery would have meant death for all involved.
Mr. Uris and the publishers, William Kimber and Company have admitted that a paragraph in the book referring to Auschwitz medical experiments was defamatory to Dr. Dering. But they contend that it was true in substance, subject to certain qualifications.
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