User Reviews

I knew as soon as saw the title that this was Holocaust related. But I didn't know just how much it would effect me until the last 10 minutes or so of the film where Mac realizes his father saved that man in the video from Buchenwald and goes back to Hannah to give her the broach. I cried for about 15 minutes after wards.

I am a 25 yr old girl who came with her family of five (mom, dad, grandpa, grandma, and me) from the USSR in 1990 when I was just 6. My grandmother's sisters and grandfather's brother live in Israel now (they emigrated shortly after us). When I first went to visit my grandmother's sisters in Israel in 1995, one of them recounted the story of the war. She, my grandmother, and her other sister ran from their town to escape the Nazi's with nothing but the clothes on their backs and bare feet. They took one cow with them for milk. As they ran thru the forest the Luftwaffe dropped bombs all around them. They finally made it to a train station and jumped on a moving train but had to leave the cow behind. It was heartbreaking for them. They survived. My grandfather meanwhile was in the Red Army (this was before Stalin pulled a Hitler and decided to annihilate all the Jews too) and threw Nazi's out of our town with his bare hands. He was shot 5 times but this July is turning 86! Unfortunately, not all of our family members were so lucky. Distant cousins of my grandparents were herded into a Ghetto like sheep where they were forced to live in cramped quarters with almost no food. Because the man of the family couldn't bare to see his family suffer from hunger anymore, he decided to go see what he could find. An SS guard caught him stealing a loaf of bread and shot him in the head in front of his family as a lesson. Most of the family perished before the war was over.

Even though this brought me face to face with my own family history once again, I'd like to thank the writers for making this episode and it's not a coincidence that it was aired on Israel's 61st Birthday. I would recommend for anyone to see this episode. It's very powerful. I would also recommend for CSI's main actors to visit the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem as well as the Children's Memorial.

In the words of Elie Weisel we must "Never Forget".

From the very beginning of the episode, you could tell that this particular one was going to based less on the murder, but on the historical events. Not only was this the best episode of CSI:NY, it was one of the few episodes out of the 3 spin off shows that has ever made me cry more than once. You could see the passion in the acting from all of the actors and how each of them were effected differently to the circumstances. One example was when Sheldon reacted so calmly to be called many slang racist names and how he connected it to his late uncle testing him to see if Sheldon was taught anything. it also showed so many emotional stories of the holocaust, which made it even more moving. But the one part of the show that hit me the most was when Klaus Braun said "Wir sollten sie alle getötet haben" or We should have killed them all, it just shocked me to think that there are actually people in this world today that still think that... All together I think that this episode of CSI:NY remains to be one of the few episodes that will stick with a person for awhile and will not be forgotten. It is one of the few TV episodes that captured the horrors of the Holocaust justly.

Ed Asner really steals the show here as a supposed holocaust survivor, a jeweler who has allegedly renounced his faith, while having a very religious son.

It is most shocking that after a white supremacist is killed, it seems obvious when the attention is focused on another skin head. Not only is the latter innocent but the unbelievable is proved. Asner was really a Nazi who wiped out a Jewish family in Germany after promising them freedom only to deceive them and deliver them to Auschwitz.

Gary Sinise as always is very good here. His face shows the emotions that he is going through as a non-Jew facing the realities of the holocaust period.

Anyone notice that Asner's accent is similar to that of his Axel Jordache in 1981's television mini-series "Rich Man, Poor Man?"

The show opens with a murder of an auction employee who dies of a gunshot wound. We are introduced to various suspects such as a white supremacist. We also meet an older Jewish watchmaker, Abraham Klein who put an old brooch at the victim's auction house.

We follow the investigation to find some very deplorable collections of items taken from the Holocaust. Mac follows this lead amongst others to an office dealing with white supremacists and Holocaust based items auctions. We begin to see another side to one of the suspects through the use of Shoah testimony.

The suspect is ultimately arrested and confirmed to be a Nazi hiding in the U.S. Mac views Shoah testimony about the good that his father did as a WW2 soldier helping a survivor. It ends with the return of the brooch to the rightful owner, who says Kaddish with Mac for those lost in her family.

This episode moved me at the end to tears. I would definitely recommend viewing it.

In an interesting twist, we see an old Jewish man who is anything but that, a man who cleverly disguised himself after World War II and got away with it....until now, when a piece of jewelry gives him away. Although he is Jewish, it's odd to hear actor Ed Asner speak with an old Jewish/German accent. Somehow, he'll always be "Lou Grant" to me.

Even 65 years later, Hollywood cannot get over their hatred of the Nazis, and what they did to the Jews during WWII. Stories like this are still shown on a regular basis on TV and in the movies. It's too bad so little is shown about the Japanese and how they treated POWs. Some of those stories are worse, believe me....just horrendous, yet I've never seen a TV drama (CSI, in this case) dealing with that subject. I'm just saying....if the writers of this show and others would remind us of the atrocities committed by more than just the Nazis, it would further emphasize the brutality of war....period.

.....because it touches on the Holocaust and the six million Jews who died in the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Dachau at the behest of Adolf Hitler. Mac Taylor (Gary Sinise) and his team swing into action when the murder of auctioneer Xander Green (Rick Marcus) leads the CSI crew to white supremacist Michael Elgers (Matt McTighe) who declares himself a fourth-generation American and who had done time behind bars for two years. Well, it turns out this character is innocent. Mac pays s visit to elderly antique shop proprietor Abraham Klein (Ed Asner who turned in a brilliant performance) who is showing his son David (Modi Rosenfeld) the ropes, and by the way, shows off a set of numbers on his arm that indicates that he had been an unwilling resident of the Nazi-run camp at Auschwitz. Mac and detective Don Flack (Eddie Cahill);investigate a break-in at Xander Green's apartment and discover a secret closet that has a Nazi flag and assorted precious items stolen from survivors of the Holocaust, including a menorah! Mac and Don raid Michael Elgers' place and discover more Nazi memorabilia; it turns out Elgers has been auctioning those items online, including a lampshade made of human skin! Mac mentions to researcher Aaron Lesnick (Scott Cohen) that his father, U. S. Army private McKenna Boyd Taylor helped liberate the camp at Dachau. And there was a videotaped deposition made by elderly survivor Hannah Schnitzler (Rita Zohar) where she recounted her planned escape to freedom along with her fellow Jews (this was during the Second World War, of course) only to be betrayed by a so-called good German named Klaus Braun to the Nazis who shoved them into boxcars on the train bound for Auschwitz. Braun's father was a Nazi. Like father, like son. Thanks to some age-progression software used on a group photo of a Hitler Youth gathering including a chunky boy in uniform, Mac Taylor finds out that Abraham Klein is actually escaped Nazi Klaus Braun! And it's thanks to a brooch that once belonged to Hannah Schnitzler, and it was situated at Klein's antique shop. Klein/Braun managed to keep his Nazi past hidden for sixty years. Until now. Looks like Braun's sorry ass is off to the jailhouse. Another videotaped deposition is of elderly survivor George Savar (Shelley Berman) who had weighed a mere eighty pounds at the time of his liberation, and he had been carried out of the camp by Private McKenna Boyd Taylor. Mac returns the missing brooch to Hannah Schnitzler, and he observes kiddish with her. Greatest episode ever of this show. Or any show for any matter. I remember an observation made one time that what happened to the Jews under Hitler's unholy rule was an extreme version of prejudice. I believe it. God, I hope this doesn't happen again. We better make sure of that. This episode needs to be required viewing for young and all.