My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family's Nazi Past Read online

  My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family’s Nazi Past

  Originally published under the title Amon: Mein Grossvater hätte mich erschossen

  Copyright © 2013, 2015 by Rowohlt Verlag GmbH, Reinbek bei Hamburg;

  Copyright © 2013, 2015 by Jennifer Teege and Nikola Sellmair

  Translation copyright © 2015 by Carolin Sommer

  The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut which is funded by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

  All photographs are courtesy of the author or in the public domain, except for the following, which are used with permission:

  ullstein bild, Berlin: 8 (AP), 57 (imagebroker.net/Petr Svarc)

  Nikola Sellmair/stern/Picture Press, Hamburg: 45

  Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo, Munich: 28 (Teutopress)

  Yad Vashem Photo Archive, Jerusalem: 33, 39, 51, 53, 63, 91 (Emil Dobel)

  Diane Vincent, Berlin: 194, 196

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or online reviews, no portion of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Some of the names of people, and identifying details, have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

  Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book and The Experiment was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been capitalized.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Teege, Jennifer, 1970-

  [Amon. English]

  My grandfather would have shot me : a Black woman discovers her family’s Nazi past / Jennifer Teege, Nikola Sellmair.

  pages cm

  “Originally published under the title Amon : mein Grossvater hätte mich erschossen”--Title page verso.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-1-61519-253-3 (cloth) — ISBN 978-1-61519-254-0 (ebook)

  1. Teege, Jennifer, 1970- 2. Teege, Jennifer, 1970---Family. 3. Grandchildren of war criminals—Germany—Biography. 4. Racially mixed people—Germany—Biography. 5. Göth, Amon, 1908-1946--Family. 6. Nazis—Family relationships. 7. Concentration camp commandants—Family relationships. 8. Plaszów (Concentration camp) 9. Teege, Jennifer, 1970—Travel—Poland. 10. Teege, Jennifer, 1970—Homes and haunts—Israel. I. Sellmair, Nikola, 1971- II. Title.

  CT1098.T33A3 2015

  929.20943—dc23

  2014046242

  Cover design by Christopher Brian King

  Cover and author photographs by Thorsten Wulff

  Text design by Pauline Neuwirth, Neuwirth & Associates, Inc.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Distributed by Workman Publishing Company, Inc.

  Distributed simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Allen & Son Ltd.

  First printing April 2015

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Y.

  Contents

  Prologue

  The Discovery

  Chapter 1

  Me, Granddaughter of a Mass Murderer

  Chapter 2

  Master of the Płaszów Concentration Camp:

  My Grandfather Amon Goeth

  Chapter 3

  The Commandant’s Mistress: My Grandmother Ruth Irene Kalder

  Chapter 4

  Living with the Dead: My Mother Monika Goeth

  Chapter 5

  Grandchildren of the Victims: My Friends in Israel

  Chapter 6

  Flowers in Krakow

  Further Resources

  Books, Films and Online

  About the Authors

  Prologue

  The Discovery

  IT IS THE LOOK on the woman’s face that seems familiar. I’m standing in the central library in Hamburg, and in my hands I’m holding a red book that I’ve just picked up from the shelf. The spine reads: I Have to Love My Father, Don’t I? On the front cover is a small black-and-white photograph of a middle-aged woman. She looks deep in thought, and there is something strained and joyless about her. The corners of her mouth are turned down; she looks unhappy.

  I glance quickly at the subtitle: The Life Story of Monika Goeth, Daughter of the Concentration Camp Commandant from “Schindler’s List.” Monika Goeth! I know that name; it’s my mother’s name. My mother, who put me in an orphanage when I was little and whom I haven’t seen in many years.

  I was also called Goeth once. I was born with that name, wrote “Jennifer Goeth” on my first schoolbooks. It was my name until after I was adopted, when I took on the surname of my adoptive parents. I was seven years old.

  Why is my mother’s name on this book? I am staring at the cover. In the background, behind the black-and-white photo of the woman, is a shadowy picture of a man with his mouth open and a rifle in his hands. That must be the concentration camp commandant.

  I open the book and start leafing through its pages, slowly at first, then faster and faster. It contains not only text but lots of photos, too. The people in the pictures—haven’t I seen them somewhere before? One is a tall, young woman with dark hair; she reminds me of my mother. Another is an older woman in a flowery summer dress, sitting in the English Garden in Munich. I don’t have many pictures of my grandmother, but I know each of them very well. In one of them she is wearing the exact same dress as this woman. The caption under the photo says Ruth Irene Goeth. That was my grandmother’s name.

  Is this my family? Are these pictures of my mother and my grandmother? Surely not, that would be absurd: It can’t be that there is a book about my family and I know nothing about it!

  I quickly skim through the rest of the book. Right at the back, on the last page, I find a biography, and it begins like this: “Monika Goeth, born in Bad Toelz in 1945.” I know these dates; they are on my adoption papers. And here they are, in black and white. It really is my mother. This book is about my family.

  I snap the book shut. It is quiet. Somewhere in the reading room someone is coughing. I need to get out of here, quickly; I need to be alone with this book. Clutching it close to me like a precious treasure, I just barely manage to walk down the stairs and through the checkout. I don’t take in the librarian’s face as she hands the book back to me. I walk out onto the expansive square in front of the library. My knees buckle. I lie down on a bench and close my eyes. Traffic rushes past me.

  My car is parked nearby, but I can’t drive now. A couple of times I sit up and consider reading on, but I am dreading it. I want to read the book at home, in peace and quiet, cover to cover.

  It is a warm, sunny August day, but my hands are as cold as ice. I call my husband. “You have to come and get me; I have found a book. About my mother and my family.”

  Why did my mother never tell me? Do I mean that little to her, still? Who is this Amon Goeth? What exactly did he do? Why do
I know nothing about him? What was the story of Schindler’s List again? And what about the people I’ve heard referred to as Schindler Jews?

  It has been a long time since I’ve seen the film. I remember that it came out in the middle of the 1990s, while I was studying in Israel. Everybody was talking about Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust movie. I didn’t watch it until later, on Israeli TV, alone in my room in my shared flat, in Rehov Engel—Engel Street—in Tel Aviv. I recall that I was touched by the film, but that I thought the end was a bit kitschy, too Hollywood.

  Schindler’s List was just a film to me; it didn’t have anything to do with me personally.

  Why has nobody told me the truth? Has everybody been lying to me for all these years?

  Chapter 1

  Me, Granddaughter of a Mass Murderer

  In Germany, the Holocaust is family history.

  —Raul Hilberg

  I WAS BORN ON JUNE 29, 1970, the daughter of Monika Goeth and a Nigerian father. When I was four weeks old, my mother took me to a Catholic orphanage and put me in the care of the nuns.

  At three, I was taken in by a foster family, who then adopted me when I was seven. My skin is black, while that of my adoptive parents and two brothers is white. Everybody could see that I was not their biological child, but my adoptive parents always reassured me that they loved me just as much as their own children. They took me and my brothers to playgroups and Gymboree classes. As a child, I still saw my biological mother and grandmother, but we lost contact as I grew older. I was 21 when I last saw my mother.

  Then, at age 38, I found the book. Why on earth did I pick it up off the shelf, one among hundreds of thousands of books? Is there such a thing as fate?

  The day had begun just as usual. My husband had gone to work; I had taken my sons to preschool and then gone into town to visit the library. I go there often. I like the concentrated silence, the quiet footsteps, the rustling noise of turning pages, the reading visitors hunched over their books. I was looking for something about depression in the psychology department. There, at hip level, between Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving and a book with the vague title The Power Lies in the Crisis, was the book with the red cover. I had never heard of the author, Matthias Kessler, but the title sounded interesting: I Have to Love My Father, Don’t I? So I took the book from the shelf.

  When my husband Goetz comes to pick me up, he finds me lying on the bench in front of the library. He sits down beside me, examines the book, and starts leafing through its pages. I snatch it back from him. I don’t want him to read it first because I’ve realized that the book is meant for me, the key to my family history, to my life. The key I’ve been looking for all these years.

  For my whole life I had felt that there was something wrong with me: behind my sadness, my depression. But I could never quite put my finger on what was so fundamentally wrong.

  Goetz takes my hand and we walk over to his car. I hardly say a word on the way home. He takes the rest of the day off and looks after our two sons.

  I collapse onto our bed and read and read, to the very last page. It is dark when I close the book. Then I sit down at my computer and spend the whole night online, reading everything I can find about Amon Goeth. I feel like I have entered a chamber of horrors. I read about his decimation of the Polish ghettoes, his sadistic murders, the dogs he trained to tear humans apart. It is only now that I realize the magnitude of the crimes Amon Goeth committed. Himmler, Goebbels, Goering—I know who they are. But what exactly Amon Goeth had done, I’d had no idea. Slowly I begin to grasp that the Amon Goeth in the film Schindler’s List is not a fictional character, but a person who actually existed in flesh and blood. A man who killed people by the dozens and, what is more, who enjoyed it. My grandfather. I am the granddaughter of a mass murderer.

  ■ ■ ■

  Jennifer Teege has a deep, warm voice with a hint of a Munich accent, slightly rolling her “R”s. Her face is bright, she doesn’t wear make-up; her naturally frizzy hair is tamed into long black curls. Tight fitted pants hug her long, thin legs. When she enters a room she turns heads, and men’s eyes follow her around. She walks upright, with a firm, determined step.

  Her friends describe Jennifer as a confident woman, inquisitive and full of adventure. A college friend says, “If she heard about an exciting country, she’d say, ‘I’ve not been there, I’ll go and visit!’ And off she’d go—to Egypt, Laos, Vietnam, and Mozambique.”

  But when she talks about her family history, her hands tremble and she begins to cry.

  The moment when Jennifer found the book with the library code Mcm O GOET#KESS is the moment that cut her life in two, into a before and an after: A before, when she lived without knowledge of her family’s past, and an after, living with that knowledge.

  The whole world knows her grandfather’s story: In Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List, the cruel concentration camp commandant Amon Goeth is Oskar Schindler’s drinking buddy and adversary: Two men born in the same year, one a murderer of Jews, the other their savior. One particular scene has stuck in the collective memory: Amon Goeth shooting prisoners from his balcony, his personal form of morning exercise.

  As commandant of the Płaszów concentration camp, Amon Goeth was responsible for the deaths of thousands of people. In 1946, he was hanged in Krakow; his ashes were thrown in the Vistula River. Goeth’s lover Ruth Irene, Jennifer Teege’s beloved grandmother, denied his crimes ever after. In 1983 she killed herself with an overdose of sleeping pills.

  Oskar Schindler’s original list, discovered in the attic of a house in Hildesheim in 1999; in the background, a photograph of Oskar Schindler (center)

  That is Jennifer Teege’s personal German history: her grandfather a Nazi criminal, her grandmother a follower, her mother raised in the leaden silence of the post-war period. That is her family, those are the roots that she, the adopted child, had always been looking for. But what about her, where does all that leave her?

  ■ ■ ■

  MY DISCOVERY LEADS ME TO QUESTION everything that had been central to my life: my close relationships with my adoptive brothers and with my friends in Israel, my marriage, my two sons. Has my whole life been a lie? I feel like I have been traveling under a false name, like I have betrayed everyone, when really it is I who was betrayed. I was the one who was cheated—out of my history, my childhood, my identity.

  I no longer know to whom I belong: my adoptive family, or the Goeth family? When I was seven, after the adoption, giving up the name Goeth had seemed easy to do. A document was drawn up. My adoptive parents asked if I was OK with changing my name. I said yes. I didn’t venture to ask about my biological mother after that; I wanted a normal family at last. But now it seems I have no choice in the matter: I am a Goeth.

  During my Internet research on Amon Goeth, I also learn of a TV program on the culture channel “Arte.” An American filmmaker has documented a meeting between my mother and Helen Rosenzweig, a former concentration-camp inmate and maid in my grandfather’s mansion. As it happens, the film is going to be shown for the first time on German television tomorrow.

  First the book, now this film—it’s too much, everything is happening too quickly.

  My husband and I watch the film together. Right at the beginning, my mother appears. I lean toward the television; I want to see everything clearly: What does she look like, how does she move, how does she talk? Am I like her? She has dyed her hair strawberry blonde; she looks haggard. I like the way she expresses herself. When I was a child, she was just my mother to me. Children don’t register whether somebody is simple or educated. Now I realize: My mother is an intelligent woman; she is saying interesting things.

  The documentary also shows a key scene from Schindler’s List, where the Jewish forewoman explains to the newly appointed commandant Amon Goeth that the barracks have not been planned correctly—so Goeth, played by Ralph Fiennes, has the woman shot. She manages to say, “Herr Commandant, I am only doing my job.” And Fienn
es, as Goeth, replies, “And I’m doing mine.”

  My memories of the film are beginning to come back to me. That scene had shocked me, since it shows so clearly what is so difficult to imagine: In the camp, there are no limits and no inhibitions. Common sense and humanity have been abolished.

  But what can I, with my dark skin and friends all over the world, have to do with such a grandfather? Was it he who destroyed my family? Did he cast his shadow first on my mother and then on me? Can it be that a dead man still wields power over the living? Is the depression that has plagued me for so long connected to my origins? I lived and studied in Israel for five years—was that chance or fate? Will I have to behave differently toward my Israeli friends, now that I know? My grandfather murdered your relatives.

  I am dreaming: I am swimming in a dark lake, the water as thick as tar. Suddenly corpses appear all around me: spindly figures, skeletons almost, that have had everything humane taken from them.

  Why did my mother not think it necessary to inform me about my origins? Why did she tell others these things that I, too, absolutely needed to know? She never told me the truth. But I need the truth. I am reminded of Theodor W. Adorno’s famous phrase, There is no right life in the wrong one. He meant it differently when he said it, but it seems to apply perfectly to my life now.

  Ours was a difficult relationship: We met only sporadically, but she is still my mother. The book about Monika Goeth mentions the year 1970, the year of my birth. There is not a word about me; my mother pretends I don’t exist.

  Again and again I look at the picture in the book where she looks just as I remember her from my childhood. Deep inside my head, the drawers of my memory are opening one by one. My entire childhood comes up to the surface, all the feelings from my time in the orphanage, the loneliness and the despair.

  I feel helpless again, like a small, disappointed child, and I am losing my grip on life.

  All I want to do is sleep; often I stay in bed until midday. Everything feels like too much effort: having to get up, to talk. Even brushing my teeth is a struggle. The answering machine is permanently switched on, but I never manage to return any calls. I stop seeing my friends, and I turn down all invitations. What could I possibly talk or laugh about? It feels as if there is a glass wall between my family and me. How can I explain to them what I am going through, when I myself don’t understand what is happening to me?