In the criminal justice system,
the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups:
The police who investigate crime,
and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders.
These are their stories.
I hope I did the right thing calling you.
I don't want to make any trouble for anybody.
You tried knockir on their door?
I banged on the floor with my foot
but they don't care what time it is.
You see? For two hours, it's been going on like this,
right under my bedroom.
Knock louder. They're old people.
Mr. And Mrs. Steinmetz? It's the police.
Probably dozed off to Leno.
Well, I need my sleep.
I'm getting a root canal at 8:00.
Mr. Steinmetz?
Nobody can see you up here.
You sure?
Course I'm sure.
You stay put.
Then why'd you do it?
I brought you up here for a reason.
I don't get it.
I don't see why you wanted us to bring her
Joey, over here.
...all the way into town here.
And I couldn't drive out to the motel.
So, midnight, that's when Mr. Steinmetz went out?
He opened the door for me downstairs.
He always goes out walking.
Ursula said it's because of the war.
He can't sleep.
Both of them, they're Holocaust survivors.
So, besides the TV,
did you hear anything else from their apartment?
Like, uh, shouts, signs of a struggle?
No. I took a bath and I went to bed.
Every night, they have the TV on,
but never for more than an hour.
Oh. Thanks, Mrs. Franzel.
If we need any more, we'll call you.
Dying alone, it's a tragedy.
$18 in the wallet,
diamond ring on the nightstand,
nobody touched the silverware.
Old lady with MS.
She's been dead three, maybe four hours.
These might have had somethir to do with it.
Two months' supply of lullabies, half of them gone.
Dalmane, 30 milligrams, prescribed to David Steinmetz.
Filled four days ago.
Too old to live.
Yeah, but too scared to die.
Sleeping pills supposed to do that to your face?
Fall out of bed and break your nose, they do.
Please, I want to see her.
Please.
Ursula.
David Steinmetz?
Yes.
Could we talk?
I must call Mara, my daughter, to tell her I did this.
My Ursula, I killed her.
I killed the woman I love.
She was 70. She couldn't walk.
She was losing her sight.
She could hardly work in the store.
She was tired of being an old woman.
Well, she had her grandkids, she had you.
What could I say?
She had to live in that body, not me.
All the time now, Ursula, she was in pain.
She begged me to help her.
So you filled the prescription?
Yes. And I brought her the glass of water,
and I helped her take the pills.
What time was this?
I, uh, I don't remember. Late.
She fell asleep.
I couldn't watch her die. I left.
My daughter Mara. I must talk to her.
Well, we'll, uh... We'll call her as soon as you're done.
Mr. Steinmetz, did your wife
discuss this with anybody else?
No, it was between Ursula and me.
Did she leave anything behind?
You know, maybe a letter?
We didn't think...
This won't take much longer, sir.
Well, uh, he didn't exactly pull the trigger.
But he held the gun.
Man two, assisted suicide.
Come on. You really gonna run with this?
The guy's 70 years old.
It's not like he whacked her for the insurance money.
Maybe he did.
With no note from her, all we have is his word.
Well, we're gonna talk to the daughter.
In the meantime, we charge him.
Maybe she was depressed the past few weeks,
but physically, she was the same
she's always been for the past couple of years.
Your father said she was getting worse.
I didn't know how bad things were.
And she gave no sign? No...
Nothing that could be like a last goodbye?
She was looking forward to Jared's bar mitzvah.
After 12 years of social work,
you'd think I'd be smart enough
to, uh, pick up on the signals.
What about from your father?
Dad's a rock.
It must've torn him apart,
but he didn't let anything show.
He knew what it was like for her
after all she's been through.
The camps.
When I was growing up,
my mother would wake up screaming every night.
I thought every parent had a tattoo on his arm.
Okay, thank you.
We talked to the doctor
and Steinmetz is an insomniac.
The doctor's been givir him Dalmane for 10 years.
Two months at a time?
I mean, this guy didn't get his MD yesterday.
He must have known what was in the works.
Or he was saving a trusted patient
a few trips to the pharmacy.
State Board may slap his wrist, but we can't touch him.
Well, we're just left with
Steinmetz's version of history.
What, the guy writes with an eraser?
According to the daughter,
the old lady was planning her grandsors bar mitzvah.
Now I hear that's a pretty big deal.
Hey, some people would take the bus from Chicago.
Me, I'd just send a check.
Lennie, my guess is the lady would stick around.
Maybe she got tired of being an invalid.
And maybe he got tired of livir with one.
My mother'd get the flu, my old man would go nutty.
Okay, say he killed her,
how'd he get the pills in her stomach?
I doubt he told her they were breath mints.
Keep it simple. Assisted suicide.
I'll talk to Ben.
Read the paper, Ben,
it'll give you a sense of proportion.
He confessed to the murder.
Mob hit is a murder.
Baby left in a dumpster is a murder.
This, a jury will see as an act of love.
And a C felony. We dismiss,
next week, a dozen merll claim
they helped their wives commit suicide with a. 38.
And you'll be there to convince a jury otherwise.
I didn't write the statutes, Adam.
Yeah, mercy has more shadings
than can be grasped by a state assembly.
Steinmetz isn't counting on our goodwill, either.
He's hired Gary Lowenthal.
Plead the poor bastard out.
You want to put a 70-year-old man in prison?
What is it, Ben, payback time for father figures?
I am bound by the laws of the State of New York, Gary.
Mr. Stone, I've already lost my mother.
L... I don't want to lose my father as well.
Can you see your way past those laws?
I can't see my way past a confession.
There I can help.
I'm moving to suppress the confession.
My client was denied his right to counsel.
He asked to see his daughter.
The police refused until they had his statement.
She's a lawyer?
She's a social worker.
Gary,
I've turned the other cheek as far as I could on this.
Mrs. Steinmetz, no matter what her age or her condition,
had a right to expect her husband
to enance her life, not to help her end it.
That's your opinion. I prefer a judge's.
In Fare v. Michael C., a California court held
that asking for your probation officer
is equivalent to asking for a lawyer.
And the Supreme Court overturned.
What Rehnquist takes away,
the State can give back to a defendant.
Uh, Your Honor, even if we were to give to social workers
the same standing we give lawyers or probation officers,
Mr. Steinmetz's relationship to his daughter is personal,
it is not professional.
We can show that Mrs. Feder
helped her father apply for Social Security and Medicare,
and performed any number
of professional services on his behalf.
Mr. Steinmetz asked for his daughter by name.
There's no way you can expect police officers
to know her professional status.
Mr. Steinmetz, did you tell the police
why you wanted to see your daughter?
Yes. I told them she was a social worker
and that she would know what to do.
Sorry, Ben.
Mr. Steinmetz's right to counsel,
as he understood it, was ignored.
The police should've been more cautious.
You have a problem, take it up with them.
What's the problem?
Five cops heard him say he killed her.
Uttered in a moment of grief and confusion.
By the time Lowenthal gets him on the stand,
Steinmetz will explain that he meant to say
he drove his wife to suicide.
ME's report in?
We're still waitir for the tox exam.
I'll lean on 'em.
Ben...
Paul, we know he perjured himself once.
Before I let him walk, I would like to find out how many other lies he's told.
Dr. Ellingwon'th, Det. Carr...
I told you on the phone, what I have is preliminary.
You want it etched in stone, come back in a month.
Come on, Rodgers. We got a DA cracking the whip.
All right, as long as you understand
my boss hasn't signed off on this yet.
Thank you.
Yeah. "Steinmetz, Ursula."
Drug overdose, benzodiazepine.
Found 900 milligrams in her stomach.
Is that enough to kill her?
Hmm, yeah. That's not counting what she'd already digested.
Yeah, respiratory failure, 900 would do it.
Wait a minute, somebody screwed up here.
How's that?
Let me, uh, run these numbers by the lab again.
Hold it. We don't have time for that.
Tell us now. What's it say?
Well, according to the labs,
the amount of Dalmane found in her liver
indicates a level of absorption
insufficient to cause a respiratory failure.
Well, she's an old lady with MS.
I mean, did she absorb enough to give her a heart attack?
No, if you believe this,
she didn't digest enough pills to kill her.
So if she stopped breathing,
maybe it's because somebody choked her.
Yeah, somebody broke her nose, too.
Might not be the only tracks he left behind.
Thank you.
The night she OD'd, they had a big argument,
right out here in the hall,
just before he went to his walk.
And what time was this?
10:30. The door closed, and he left.
You sure about the time?
Mmm-hmm. I was just getting ready to go to work.
11:00 to 8:00 shift at the phone company.
"Operator 842. What city, please?"
Lennie.
Thank you.
She says Steinmetz left at 10:30,
upstairs said midnight.
He came back, and I think I know what for.
Yeah? Watch this.
I open the door, I turn on the light,
I find this.
It matches the armchair.
That's blood, and it's recent.
I got $10 says it's Mrs. Steinmetz's.
Now look, whether he force-fed those pills to her or not,
he came back expecting her to be dead.
She wasrt. Finishes the job with the pillow.
And bloodies her nose in the process.
Takes his lap around the city,
and I guess we're supposed to feel sorry for him.
Well, even if it was her idea to take the pills,
he had to finish her off with a pillow?
He couldn't wait for the pill to do the job for him?
Do you know how many sleeping pills is a lethal dose?
I don't, and I bet Steinmetz doesn't either.
Well, then why didn't he tell us about the pillow?
Because he knew how it would look.
Yeah, like he wanted her dead.
All I know is if I found my wife lying on the floor,
I would do everything I could to save her,
and the hell with suicide.
Any way you slice or dice it,
this guy had no right
to wrap a pillow around his wife's face.
Let's not forget the neighbors heard them arguing.
Hey, you spend 24 hours a day together,
I don't care if you're Joseph and Mary,
you're gonna get on each other's nerves.
Wait a minute, they work together?
Steinmetz has a tailor shop on 30th Street.
All right. Let's assume that they're too old
to argue about sex, so that leaves what? Money?
People treat you like dirt in this business.
Not Mr. Steinmetz.
He has respect for the people who work for him.
How so?
The mars been there, you know what I mean?
Back in Poland, he was a slave for the Nazis.
They had him workir in some ghetto over there,
the Lodz Ghetto, makir uniforms for them.
You got people out sick today?
Yeah, they got recession-itis.
Hard times, that'll press a marriage, huh?
No, not these two.
They've seen worse, you know?
In the eight years I've been here,
the only time they raised their voice
was about somethir in the paper.
What, politics?
Yeah. Polish politics.
Once a week, Mrs. Steinmetz would send me
to the newsstand on 34th
to get this Polish paper.
And about three weeks ago,
she got real upset with Mr. Steinmetz
over some article she read.
This paper got a name?
Novejeneik.
"Warsaw Arts Council Presents Merit Awards."
What else?
"National Tribunal Convicts Nazi War Criminal."
Hold it. Give us the highlights.
"Horst Hilsman, German officer at Chelmno,
"sentenced to death.
"Other war criminals tried in absentia.
"Jacub Skulman, a Jewish policeman
"in the Lodz Ghetto during the war.
Peter Angermeier, staff sergeant in Birkenau..."
Wait a minute.
Lodz Ghetto.
Now, wasrt Steinmetz from Lodz?
Maybe he knew Skulman.
So what? His wife didn't like his friends?
That's something he'd kill her for?
I'd think Mr. Stone would have better things to do
than to hound a sad old man.
Hey, he squeaks, we go running.
Make it easy on us, will you, Mrs. Feder?
They'd argue,
yes, about the war, about the Holocaust.
It was the defining moment of their lives.
Did they ever talk about
people they knew in the Lodz Ghetto?
My mother's from Warsaw.
My father's from Lodz,
but he rarely talks about it with me.
He says he has nightmares enough,
he doesn't need to give me any.
Your mother ever mention the name Jacub Skulman?
No. Who's he?
He's wanted for war crimes in Poland.
No, she'd never talk about anybody like that.
My mother was a very broken...
She found it very hard to shut out the memories,
like my father.
I sent her to a therapist three years ago,
a rabbi who worked with survivors.
She was seeing a therapist, and nobody told us?
She stopped going four months ago.
She wouldn't tell me why.
Much as I'd like to help,
any communication I had with Mrs. Steinmetz is privileged.
I have to consider the feelings of her family.
Oh, which family member are you protecting?
The husband?
Let's, uh, try a little softball here, Rabbi.
The reason that Mrs. Steinmetz stopped coming here,
could it have anything to do
with the reason she committed suicide?
Well, I... I can't discuss what she told me
but I can say the group sessions
can awaken powerful memories.
A name? Jacub Skulman?
Skulman. Oh, yes.
The group discussed his case at length.
Did you discuss it before or after
Mrs. Steinmetz stopped coming?
Before.
One of my clients, Mrs. Liebman,
apparently she knew Skulman.
I don't know, I feel like we're chasing a ghost here.
This guy Skulmars probably dead.
The rabbi wasrt playing catch just to be nice.
He practically said Skulmars name
sent Mrs. Steinmetz running.
So what? I mean, we're digging up stuff
that happened 50 years ago.
What the hell, it's ancient history, Lennie.
Hey, my old man was a GI in World War II.
First regiment into Buchenwald.
And he never forgot how he felt when he saw those people.
I mean, he wasrt religious, but he said after that day
he believed in the devil.
This stuff never went away, Mike.
I knew Jacub Skulman in Lodz
when I was a young girl.
He was an apprentice tailor
before he joined the Ordnungsdienst.
The ghetto police.
The Germans formed a... a Jewish government.
Puppets to rule the ghetto.
Yeah, you let the Jews police themselves,
maybe they'll work harder for you.
Maybe they thought they will let them live.
And believing that makes you a war criminal?
Of course we believed.
Anything to make it stop.
But Skulman took it a step further.
Skulman.
In the sweatshop where we made uniforms for the SS,
Skulman was a brute.
He beat us if we didn't make the quota.
What happened to Skulman?
When the Germans cleared the ghetto in 1944,
him being so... so high-and-mighty,
he finished like everyone else,
on a train to Auschwitz.
Ursula Steinmetz, do you know her?
She was in Rabbi Dworkirs group.
Yes, she, too, asked me about Skulman, his family.
She thought she knew him.
I only told her what I remember.
Skulmars spotty, most of the records are still in Poland.
You know, it's quite historic in a way.
Poland has never before
prosecuted a Jew for war crimes.
Well, I don't understand why a guy like Skulman
would line himself up with the Nazis.
And slit his own throat?
He wasrt the only one who was deceived.
You see, the elders of the ghetto reasoned that
if the Jews could prove their economic value to the Reich,
their lives would be spared.
So each uniform you made added a day to your life.
Does anybody know for sure
that Skulman walked out of Auschwitz?
The Polish government has eyewitnesses.
I guess the virtues that allowed him to survive in Lodz
carried him through Auschwitz.
He'd be an old man by now.
His birth date was 1922, so he's 70 years old.
There's a photograph in the archives.
We'll take it.
Same age as Steinmetz.
Same job, same camp.
Sorry about the quality.
Jacub Skulman, class of '42.
Coincidences add up to probability.
Yeah, and what spooked the wife.
The ultimate evil.
Convince the slaves to run the plantation.
Yeah, hats off to German ingenuity.
If Steinmetz is Skulman, and his wife found out,
he'd want to keep her quiet.
By killing his wife? This guy?
I don't know.
War criminals click their heels.
They don't have numbers tattooed on their forearms.
Arrest him.
Highway 128, 16...
How far can a 70-year-old man walk?
1290 Sixth Avenue. 1290 Sixth...
That looks like him.
Pull over.
Mr. Steinmetz.
Yes?
David Steinmetz, you're under arrest
for the murder of Ursula Steinmetz.
You have the right to remain silent.
Anything you do say can and will be
used against you in a court of law.
You can't make a C felony, so you shoot the moon
and charge him with an A.
Your client shot the moon when he refused a man two plea.
Now he's looking at murder.
My mother took her own life, Mr. Stone.
That doesn't make me proud or happy,
but I respect her memory.
She didn't want this. She wanted peace.
Did she tell you that?
My father told me.
Did he also tell you that he smothered her with a pillow?
You have no idea. My father...
The neighbors are... are paying his bail.
They-they're helping to pay for Mr. Lowenthal's services.
Which means people who know him, believe him.
They haven't seen the evidence.
There's none to see.
Turn up the flame as high as you want,
this one's not gonna boil.
You stir in motive...
You mean speculation?
It's all sound and fury, Ben,
and you know what that gets you.
If I'm right and he is Jacub Skulman,
and he did murder his wife to cover up his secret,
what it gets him is 25-to-life.
What if you're wrong, Mr. Stone?
Look at his arm. He's been branded once.
But what you're doing...
Those same people who are helping us
will turn around and spit in our faces forever.
It'd better be important, Mr. Robinette.
45-year-old files,
I'll be living on antihistamines for a month.
You found something?
Yes and no.
David Steinmetz went eyeball-to-eyeball
with Miss Liberty, May of '47.
What about Jacub Skulman?
That's the no.
If he's eating burgers and apple pie,
we don't have a record of it.
When Steinmetz filed immigration,
did he show any ID?
Hey, if this poor slob had a shirt on his back,
he was lucky.
"Identifying mark: Numbers tattooed on his forearm."
What were the numbers?
Sorry.
In five years, about 150,000 camp survivors
joined the melting pot.
Who had the time to get specific?
The good news, the Nazis were methodical, bordering on anal.
They kept specific records of everything.
The bad news is they were almost as methodical
at destroying the records.
Almost?
Yeah.
Here.
Here it is.
Right here. "August 21, 1944,
"131 men arrived from the Lodz Ghetto at Auschwitz.
"The numbers that were tattooed on their arms
"ranged from 7566
to 7696, inclusive."
Do you have names corresponding to the numbers?
I can't help you with that. But we do know that
Jacub Skulman arrived on that same day.
I'm offering your client a chance to prove his innocence.
And when he does, what?
You tattoo a capital "I" on his forehead?
That number is a symbol of unimaginable suffering.
And if it's not one of 131 numbers,
we'll know for sure he's not Jacub Skulman.
Don't you even see what you're asking, Ben?
Demanding that he use that number
to prove his innocence is an obscenity.
Uh, no, Gary.
The obscenity is a man killing his wife
to save his own skin.
We'll let a judge decide.
I don't understand, Mr. Lowenthal.
If your client isn't this character, Skulman,
why not disclose the number
in the privacy of Mr. Stone's office,
and put the matter to bed?
Because it won't stay in Mr. Stone's office.
What happened to the Fifth Amendment?
If nothing else, Mr. Stone
is asking for possible self-incrimination.
The Supreme Court ruled that the Fifth Amendment
only applies to testimonial evidence.
This is no different from using fingerprints
or an identification in a police line-up.
Look, can we put the law aside for a minute?
We all know that if these numbers are close,
he doesn't stand a chance.
The jury will convict him for the wrong reasons.
Something he may have done in another lifetime.
An elderly woman who couldn't walk is dead
because that man wanted the world to forget what he did.
I'm not talking melodrama here, Ben.
I'm talking tragedy.
Your Honor, it's prejudicial.
Although what Mr. Stone is asking disgusts me,
my intestinal tract is still intact.
Mr. Steinmetz will appear in Mr. Stone's office
no later than 3:00 this afternoon.
Ben, you are walking through history.
God help us if you fall down.
7581.
And we now know that the man
calling himself David Steinmetz,
arrived at Auschwitz the same day as Jacub Skulman.
I was hoping.
Yeah, so was I.
Robinette.
Okay.
Someone from the Justice Department is in your office.
I'm giving you a break.
I'll take Steinmetz or Skulman
or whoever he is, off your hands.
And extradite him to Poland?
Why not? We've had a treaty in effect since 1936.
I have an obligation
to the people of the State of New York.
Ursula Steinmetz was one of those people.
Poland can have him when we're through with him.
One person dies, it's a tragedy.
Millions, it's a statistic, right?
That is not what I'm saying.
Good. Stalin said it 50 years ago.
Look, if you convict the son of a bitch,
he can't be extradited until he serves out his sentence.
Which, for a 70-year-old man, means never.
On behalf of the Polish government we're commencing
an extradition proceeding next week.
Last month, my daughter was reading Diary of Anne Frank,
and she thought it was fiction.
So I'm running in circles with this case.
If I win,
Steinmetz or Skulman
goes to prison for murdering his wife,
but the world will never really know
the extent of his original crimes.
And if I lose, the verdict goes a long way
to bolster Steinmetz's claim
that Poland is trying to extradite the wrong man.
Either way,
I'm helping a mass murderer cover up his crimes.
Ben, a woman was murdered in our jurisdiction.
And that's our only priority.
So we shield him?
Poland is not entitled
to punish him for the greater evil?
Greater evil?
Since when did you get so philosophical?
This office doesn't care about Poles or Nazis
or any more than it does about Serbs or Croats.
We're not in the evil business,
we're in the crime business.
Adam, I may be wrong but I thought that, of all people,
you would want...
The man killed his wife.
Try him, convict him. That's all I want.
United States Supreme Court, Your Honor,
in Younger v. Harris determined
that a Federal court may not interfere
with an ongoing State criminal proceeding
unless the prosecution was
brought in bad faith or as harassment.
The Younger case specified the interference proscribed
was injunctive or declaratory relief, Your Honor.
And the principle is the same, Your Honor.
The State's interest in prosecuting a felon
outweigh the Federal interest.
We're not talking about Federal interests.
We're talking about international treaties.
We are talking about historical debt.
We're talking about a man who brutally murdered his wife.
He aided and abetted
in the extermination of scores of innocent Jews.
The bottom line:
If the State continues with this prosecution,
Mr. Steinmetz will die in prison
and never be tried for crimes against humanity.
And we must allow a suspected murderer to go untried.
He will be tried for the greater evil.
Gentlemen, it appears that whichever way I roll the dice,
it comes up snake eyes.
Your Honor...
Mr. Stone, has the defendant been indicted?
He has, Your Honor.
So, as I see it,
the State has sufficient evidence
to make its prima facie case.
In as much as the burden for granting a restraining order,
is the likelihood of success at trial,
I am obligated to grant Mr. Stone's motion.
The extradition hearing will be delayed
until the State is through with Mr. Steinmetz.
I'm glad I'm not in your 9- and-a-half Ds, counselor.
Several months ago, at half past midnight,
someone killed Ursula Steinmetz.
He held a pillow to the face
of this 70-year-old grandmother
until she could no longer gasp for air.
I will show you that pillow and the bloodstains on it
from her fractured nose.
So there can be little doubt as to how she died.
The issue of this trial is why,
and once we understand why, the who is undeniable.
The Steinmetz residence was not burglarized.
So the motive wasrt greed, and it wasrt envy,
and it wasrt revenge.
It was history.
And Mr. David Steinmetz, Ursula's husband,
was well aware that history can only be written
by the survivors.
And Mr. Steinmetz,
he didn't want his personal history written at all.
If only history was so clear.
If only we had a witness to what had happened,
then we could all just go home and be done with it.
Unfortunately, there isn't such a witness.
And although Mr. Stone's
telling of the story is reasonable,
it's just as reasonable to presume
that after swallowing a lethal dose of sedatives,
Ursula Steinmetz fell from her bed and broke her nose.
Mr. Stone wants to know why.
If anything, history tells us
that the search for explanations
for unimaginable tragedy creates scapegoats.
Why was Germany in the '20s trapped in a depression?
Unthinkable. Blame it on the Jews.
Why were six million Jews massacred?
Incomprehensible.
They must have been somehow to blame.
Ursula Steinmetz took her own life?
Inconceivable.
Her husband must have been involved.
David Steinmetz survived a lifetime of torment.
For what?
Don't blame him for something you might not understand.
From records compiled by the Polish government,
we know that Jacub Skulman resided in the Lodz Ghetto.
He was transported to Auschwitz
on August 21, 1944.
The same day that
Mr. Steinmetz supposedly arrived.
Uh, Mr. Green, can you please identify
People's Exhibit Number 6?
Yes. Uh, this is a determination
of the Polish War Crimes Court
in the matter of Jacub Skulman.
Objection, Your Honor.
Uh, Your Honor, this court can take judicial notice
of the findings of another court
of competent jurisdiction.
Not when those findings are completely irrelevant
and unduly prejudicial.
The verdict of that trial
is relevant to establishing motive, Your Honor.
So, then I will take notice of the verdict alone.
Uh, what was the outcome of the trial, sir?
The court found Mr. Skulman
guilty of crimes against humanity.
Thank you.
In the Polish war crimes trial of which you spoke,
was Mr. Skulman permitted to present a defense?
He was tried in absentia, but there were defense attorneys.
Was there any evidence presented
indicating that Jacub Skulman and David Steinmetz
were in fact the same person?
No.
But there was evidence presented
that Skulman was a Jew?
Relevance, Your Honor?
Mr. Stone offered the verdict into evidence.
I should be permitted
to question the competency of that verdict.
Answer the question.
Yes.
Now, tell me, sir.
Would your center consider Jacub Skulman a war criminal?
You have to understand that, uh,
that men like Mr. Skulman,
were victims before they were criminals.
Please answer the question.
No, I... I couldn't say, unless I saw all of the facts.
But Poland could.
Is that because Jacub Skulman is a Jew?
Objection, Your Honor.
Withdrawn.
I was only 16 years old,
and to put food on the table,
my sister and I had to work 15 hours a day
making Nazi uniforms.
We got no water, we got no rest.
Our shop was forced to produce 25 uniforms a week.
What happened if you fell behind schedule?
Jacub Skulman beat us.
He beat everyone who was not productive.
Mrs. Liebman, please tell the court
what happened to your sister.
Anja...
Anja was rheumatic. She collapsed.
Skulman put her on a train.
Anyone unable to work, he put on a train.
To where?
To Auschwitz.
Mrs. Liebman, what happened when
you spoke of Jacub Skulman to Mrs. Steinmetz?
She asked questions about his father's profession.
About his brother's name.
And if his brother, Chaim, died from polio.
And when I told her that
his mama played a beautiful flute,
Ursula got pale.
Thank you.
You said that the workers who were not productive
were sent to the camps. Is that correct?
He decided who.
And they were replaced by other workers?
Yes.
And if those workers were productive,
they avoided deportation?
Yes.
So it's true then that Skulman saved the majority
by sacrificing the minority?
Look at the defendant, Mrs. Liebman.
Can you say without any reasonable doubt
that he is Jacub Skulman?
Thank you.
We're walking up the down escalator.
Every time we get close to the top,
Lowenthal turns up the velocity.
What'd you expect?
Trying to reconstruct a reality,
that's worse than any nightmare.
Which gives Lowenthal a truckload of reasonable doubt.
As to Steinmetz's true identity,
what's relevant is what his wife thought.
What's relevant is what he thought she was thinking.
And he's not talking, and she kept her thoughts to herself.
Did she?
The rabbi?
If Mrs. Steinmetz talked to him, it's privileged.
But her executor can waive that.
That's the daughter, right?
He's my father, Mr. Stone. He would never lie to me.
And if my mother suspected anything, I would have known.
Maybe she was trying to protect you.
No.
There's a chance she talked to your rabbi.
Whatever you want.
But you'll see. You are wrong.
When Ursula heard
Mrs. Liebmars description of Skulman,
she was convinced.
There were too many similarities.
After her husband denied everything, she came to me.
And how did you counsel her?
I told her to go to the authorities.
But she refused?
She was filled with too much guilt, with shame.
She worried what it would do to her family.
Thank you.
You counsel many survivors, isn't that true?
I conduct weekly meetings, yes.
And is it true that many survivors
live with enormous guilt over the past?
They feel guilty about surviving when so many died.
As a therapist,
would you call this guilt irrational?
No. Ursula Steinmetz wasrt like that.
That's right. She didn't blame herself.
She blamed her husband.
When she got sick, he did everything for her.
He carried her to the bathroom, up the stairs.
On Sundays, he would wheel her through the park
no matter how tired he got.
Not the picture of a murderer.
Objection.
Withdrawn.
What, if any, indications did you have
that your mother committed suicide, Mrs. Feder?
Over the past five months, her condition deteriorated.
She didn't want to burden us anymore.
After...
A few days before she died, I... I went to visit her
and she showed me where she kept her will.
She told me that she wanted to have all her things in order.
No more questions.
She never talked about the will in her deposition.
She's lying.
Recess, Your Honor?
Early lunch. Be back in two hours.
If you're telling the truth,
why did you wait until now to mention your mother's will?
You heard the rabbi.
It's clear he killed your mother.
Knowing what your father did,
how can you live with yourself if you help him go free?
How could I live with myself if I don't?
'Cause you're losing, doesn't mean you can change the rules.
This is called tampering.
I'm not tampering with a witness.
I am now talking to a defendant.
Mrs. Feder, you committed perjury.
As such, you are an accomplice after the fact.
You cannot turn Mara against me.
Things haven't changed much, have they, sir?
50 years ago, you protected yourself
at the expense of others.
Your wife is now dead,
and your daughter's gonna go to prison so you can go free.
Papa.
Against my better judgment, my client will deal
if you drop the charges against his daughter.
We've traveled a long way to come back to where we started.
There's one other condition, Mr. Stone.
The record on my father's trial must be sealed.
Murder two. He serves the max.
25 years. Come on, Ben.
Had he walked the streets for another hour,
nobody would have ever heard of David Steinmetz.
Mr. Steinmetz.
Sir, you really didn't know
how many pills your wife had taken?
She could not live with this.
When I came home, she was on the floor.
And if you confessed to assisted suicide,
nobody would ask any questions.
It'd be one year instead of 25. Right?
Heinrich, an SS officer, he came to our home.
He gave us cake. We barely had bread.
He told me that if I could
convince my neighbors to cooperate,
none of us would be harmed.
I was 19. If I didn't do it, somebody else would have.
People lived a few months, weeks,
days longer. That's what it was about.
People who were not there,
they could never understand.
Your wife was there, sir.
She understood very well what you did.
And that's why you killed her.
Deal?
What happens now, Mr. Stone?
Mr. Steinmetz has confessed to murdering his wife
and he will spend the rest of his life
in the State Correctional Facility at Dannemora,
commencing immediately.
Is Mr. Steinmetz in fact Jacub Skulman?
The District Attorney's office has insufficient evidence
to make such a determination.
Sources inside the State Department
indicate that any further extradition proceedings
have been undermined by today's developments.
Mr. Steinmetz's...
They beat you. They starve you.
Makes me wonder what I would have done.
There's no Supreme Court of Ethics, my friend.
Sometimes the only yardstick is
can you look yourself in the mirror the day after?
What about Mara?
By insisting we seal the file,
she was still protecting her father.
She wasrt protecting her father.
She was protecting her son.