My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family's Nazi Past
240
My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family's Nazi Past
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Overview
Now in paperback: The New York Times bestselling memoir hailed as “unforgettable” (Publishers Weekly) and “a stunning memoir of cultural trauma and personal identity” (Booklist).
At age 38, Jennifer Teege happened to pluck a library book from the shelf—and discovered a horrifying fact: Her grandfather was Amon Goeth, the vicious Nazi commandant depicted in Schindler’s List. Reviled as the “butcher of Plaszów,” Goeth was executed in 1946. The more Teege learned about him, the more certain she became: If her grandfather had met her—a black woman—he would have killed her. Teege’s discovery sends her into a severe depression—and fills her with questions: Why did her birth mother withhold this chilling secret? How could her grandmother have loved a mass murderer? Can evil be inherited? Teege’s story is cowritten by Nikola Sellmair, who also adds historical context and insight from Teege’s family and friends, in an interwoven narrative. Ultimately, Teege’s search for the truth leads her, step by step, to the possibility of her own liberation.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781615193080 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The Experiment, LLC |
| Publication date: | 04/05/2016 |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Sales rank: | 187,798 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Nikola Sellmair graduated from Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich and has worked in Hong Kong, Washington, DC, Israel, and Palestine. She has been a reporter in Hamburg at Germany’s Stern magazine since 2000. Her work has received many awards, including the German-Polish Journalist Award, for the first-ever article about Jennifer Teege’s singular story.
Read an Excerpt
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 Plaszów 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.
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 Fiennes, 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?
Suddenly I can no longer bear people drinking beer near me. The smell of beer alone is enough to make me sick: It reminds me of my mother's first husband. When he was drunk, which he usually was, he would beat my mother.
For two weeks after discovering the book, I hardly leave the house. Sometimes I manage to pull on a pair of jeans instead of the usual sweatpants, but I'm soon overwhelmed by crushing tiredness and wonder why I have bothered to shower and get dressed when I am not going out anyway.
My husband does his best to look after our children. He gets the groceries on the weekends, fills up the freezer and cooks meals in advance. I don't want to be a bad mother who just leaves her sons to watch TV in the afternoons. Instead I go online and order some Legos for them; it will keep my children busy for a few hours while I get some rest.
Finally I try once again to go out, to look after my family, but I falter at the smallest hurdles. In the supermarket, the crowds make me nervous. Baffled, I find myself staring at the different types of coffee on the shelf. Surely I have much more urgent business to do at the post office? So I go to the post office instead, but once there I find that the line is too long, and I hurry back to the supermarket, back to the coffee shelf. I remember that I had actually wanted some milk and bread. But much more important is lunch — now where am I going to get that? It is getting late, and I need to go and fetch the children from preschool soon. The pressure is rising, my head is my prison. Once again, I've gotten nothing done.
I never had a real mother myself, and so I've tried to give my children everything I never had, but now I'm deserting them. I make sandwiches for them and heat up TV dinners. Simple, functional things; nothing more. My older son Claudius craves my company. At bedtime, he wants lots of cuddles and talks to me, fast and nonstop, so as not to allow any gaps in the conversation where I might turn away again. I try to concentrate on what he is saying, but I can't. I nod my head every now and then to pretend I am listening. I would love to just pull the blanket over my head.
Why didn't I discover that I am the granddaughter of some great Nobel Prize winner?
* * *
Anybody who is related to Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Goering or an Amon Goeth is compelled to deal with their family history. But what about all the others, the many unnamed followers and accomplices?
In his research study Grandpa Wasn't a Nazi, social psychologist Harald Welzer came to the following conclusion: The generation of grandchildren, today's 30- to 50-year olds, tend to know the facts about the Holocaust and often reject the Nazi ideology even more strongly than the previous generation. Their critical eye, however, is only directed at political issues — not at private affairs. The grandchildren in particular sugarcoat the role their ancestors played: Two-thirds of those questioned even stylized their forebears into heroes of the Resistance or victims of the Nazi regime themselves.
Many have no idea what their own grandfathers were really up to. To them, the Holocaust is a history class, the victims' story memorialized in films and on TV; they don't look at it as the history of their own family, their own personal history. So many innocent grandfathers, so many suppressed family secrets. Soon the last witnesses will be gone, and it will be too late for the grandchildren to ask questions.
* * *
WHEN I LOOKED IN THE MIRROR as a child, it was obvious that I was different: My skin was dark, my hair frizzy. All around me there were only short, blond people: my adoptive parents and my two adoptive brothers. By contrast, I was a tall child with skinny legs and black hair. Back then, in the seventies, I was the only black child in Waldtrudering, the tranquil, leafy neighborhood in Munich where I lived with my adoptive family. At school we sometimes sang the nursery rhyme "Zehn Kleine Negerlein" (Ten little negroes) — and I hoped that nobody would turn around and look at me, that nobody would realize I didn't really belong.
Since that day in the library I have been looking in the mirror again, but now I'm looking for similarities. I'm terrified of belonging now, of belonging to the Goeths: The lines between my nose and my mouth are just like my mother's and my grandfather's. A thought flashes across my mind: I must do something about these lines, must have them botoxed, lasered, lifted!
I am tall like my mother, like my grandfather. When Amon Goeth was hanged after the war, the executioner had to shorten the rope twice; he had underestimated how tall Goeth was.
My grandfather's execution was recorded on film, so there would be proof that he really was dead. It is not until the third attempt that he ends up swinging on the rope with a broken neck. When I watched the film, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
My grandfather was a psychopath, a sadist. He embodies everything that I condemn. What kind of person takes pleasure in tormenting and killing others, in inventing different ways of doing so? During my research I find no explanation for why he turned out to be like that. He had seemed normal as a child.
On the matter of blood: What did I inherit from him? Does his violent temper manifest itself in me and my children? In the book about my mother, I read that she spent some time as a patient in a psychiatric hospital. The book also mentions that my grandmother kept small pink pills called Prolixin in her bathroom cabinet. I learn that it is an antipsychotic drug used to treat depression, anxiety disorders, and hallucinations.
I no longer trust myself: Am I going mad, too? Am I already mad? At night I am plagued by terrible nightmares. In one I am in a psychiatric hospital, running through the corridors trying to escape. I jump out of a window into a courtyard and am free at last.
I make an appointment with the therapist who used to treat my depression when I was still living in Munich, and I travel to see her.
Before the appointment, I have some time, so I decide to take a detour to Hasenbergl, the poor neighborhood of Munich where my biological mother used to live. Sometimes she would come and take me home for the weekend. It still looks just as it did then, only the façades of the buildings are more colorful now, the dirty gray and beige walls have been painted yellow and orange. The balconies are strung with laundry; the lawns are littered with trash. I am standing outside the apartment block where my mother used to live when someone comes out of the building and holds the door open for me. I walk up and down the different corridors, trying to remember which floor she used to live on. I think it was the second floor, where I feel a familiar sense of trepidation. I was never happy here.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Jennifer Teege and Nikola Sellmair.
Excerpted by permission of The Experiment Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Prologue The Discovery 1
Chapter 1 Me, Granddaughter of a Mass Murderer 5
Chapter 2 Master of the Plaszów Concentration Camp: My Grandfather Amon Goeth 23
Chapter 3 The Commandant's Mistress: My Grandmother Ruth Irene Kalder 59
Chapter 4 Living with the Dead: My Mother Monika Goeth 97
Chapter 5 Grandchildren of the Victims: My Friends in Israel 155
Chapter 6 Flowers in Krakow 199
Further Resources Books, Films, and Online 217
Reader's Guide 222
Interview with Jennifer Teege 225
About the Authors 230
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