I read in a paper...
that Nuremberg was looking for interpreters--
German/English, English/German, French/English, et cetera.
And I had been a translator at the first United Nations conference...
in San Francisco while I was working at the Office of War Information.
So I went over to the War Department.
The Defense Department was then called the War Department.
So I went over to the War Department for an interview.
The colonel who interviewed me was Colonel Mickey Marcus.
He was the one who was glorified in Cast a Giant Shadow.
He was the first American officer...
who was killed in the Israeli War of Independence.
He was a very nice man.
And then, I was interviewed by him and by the man...
who had been the head of the translation section at the United Nations.
So I had no difficulty.
So then I wrote my parents and said I was gonna go to Nuremberg.
And my parents were not amused.
They thought that I'd been-- we'd been through enough...
and seen enough, and, "You don't need to go."
Well, I said I wanted to go.
So my father wrote me this wonderful letter,
which I've misplaced because my brother asked me for the letter,
in which he said, "You belong to that generation...
"disenfranchised by Hitler.
But as you go to do justice, be just."
And I was only a small potato, you know.
Justice was not the kind of thing that we could affect.
So-- And he also said,
"Don't forget that you're a Jew."
I saw Goring. I was interpreting for him.
He was the number-one man in Germany...
after Hitler.
And he looked terrible, because he had been on drugs and they took his drugs away.
So he was on withdrawal and lost about a hundred pounds.
He wasn't particularly thrilled...
to have a female and a Jew as an interpreter.
But we were there in the interpreting room.
Hess, who was the number three man...
in the German hierarchy,
who feigned--
We thought he feigned amnesia.
So we showed a movie with him in it...
to see what his reaction would be.
And he reacted somewhat.
We also showed movies of him...
at the Nuremberg festivals--
the Nazi festivals, the Party days.
This is why, actually, the trial was held in Nuremberg.
It was sort of the end of the period of their reign.
And, you know, a lot of people committed suicide among the defendants.
Hitler killed himself.
Goebbels, who was the propaganda chief, killed himself...
and his wife and seven children.
We were hoping that this would pave the way...
for the vanquished to be able to try the victors.
It didn't happen. But we thought that...
if you have an outline of kinds of indictments you want to draw--
conspiracy to wage aggressive war,
war crimes and crimes against humanity--
then within that framework,
you could prove almost everything.
And the indictment was based on the Geneva Conventions...
of the century before in the '20s.
So our prosecution was very conscientious...
in referring back to the conventions.
I mean, there were a lot of lawyers who said this was ex post facto.
In other words, they made the laws...
that they asked the defendants to adhere to...
after they had committed their war crimes.
But as you can see now about Bosnia and Kosovo,
the legacy of Nuremberg is still with us.