My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family's Nazi Past (2 page)

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Amon Goeth in 1945, after his arrest by the Americans

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.

Next I take the subway to Schwabing, Munich’s hip and trendy neighborhood. I walk past the beautiful old church at Josephsplatz and turn into Schwind Strasse. My grandmother’s former apartment is in an old, prewar building with a chestnut tree in the courtyard. The front door is open; I climb up the wooden stairs right to the top floor. My grandmother was the first person to give me solace and comfort, but the book has taken away any positive feelings I had for her. Who was this woman who spent a year and a half living with my grandfather in a villa next to the Płaszów concentration camp?

I also have an appointment with Child Protective Services. The social worker is very nice and does her best to help me, but I am only allowed to read part of my file. I ask her if there are any notes in the records indicating that I had any mental disorders as a child.

The thing is, there are things I don’t know about myself that others take for granted. If a doctor asked me what illnesses ran in my family, I could never answer that question. Nor do I know if I had a pacifier as a baby, what songs I used to sing along to, or what my first cuddly toy was. I didn’t have a mother to ask about these things.

No,
says the lady from the agency,
there’s no mention of any strange behavior.
I was a normally developed, happy child.

I just about manage to make it to my appointment with my former therapist in time. What I want to know from her is,
What was her diagnosis back then? Was I really just depressed, or did I suffer from a more severe illness? Do I appear lucid to her now?
She reassures me that it really was just that, depression, and that she never diagnosed anything else. She does admit, however, that she is out of her depth with my current situation and so refers me to her
Munich
-based colleague, Peter Bruendl.

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Psychoanalyst Peter Bruendl remembers Jennifer Teege well. “There was this confident, tall, beautiful woman who asked very specific questions: How do I deal with my history?” Bruendl, an elderly gentleman with a gray beard and in a black suit, has treated several grandchildren of Nazi criminals in his Munich practice. He says, “Violence and brutalization have a deep impact on the generations that follow. What makes them ill, however, is not the crimes themselves but the silence that surrounds them. There is an unholy conspiracy of silence in perpetrator families, often spanning generations.”

Guilt cannot be inherited, but
feelings
of guilt can. The children of perpetrators subconsciously pass their fears and feelings of shame and guilt on to their children, says Bruendl. This affects more families in Germany than one might think.

“Jennifer Teege’s case was exceptional because she suffered a double trauma,” Bruendl says, “first being given up for adoption and then the discovery of her family history.”

He goes on, “Frau Teege’s experience is heartbreaking. Even her conception was a provocation: Her mother, Monika Goeth, had a child with a Nigerian man. In Munich in the early 1970s, this was most unusual. And for the daughter of a concentration camp commandant it was unheard of.”

Often, the grandchildren of Nazis come to him for totally different reasons, says Bruendl: depression, unwanted childlessness, eating disorders, or fear of failure at work. Bruendl encourages them to research their past and to tear down their family’s web of lies. “It is only then that they can live their own lives, their own, authentic lives.”

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HERR BRUENDL REFERS ME
to the Institute for Psychiatry at the University Hospital in Hamburg. Yet the expert he recommends is not available right away, and with every day that I have to wait I grow more and more desperate. I know that I need professional help and that everybody else is unsure how to deal with me. Sometimes I lose my temper and shout at Goetz and the children. I cannot pull myself together, cannot hold myself together anymore.

One morning, when I start to cry just after getting up, my sons ask me,
Mommy, what’s wrong?

Nothing,
I answer—and then take myself to the psychiatric emergency room at the local University Hospital. The doctor on duty prescribes me antidepressants, and I take them straight away.

During the following weeks I feel like I have been superficially restored to my usual self. Then, at last, I have my appointment with the recommended therapist. His professor’s office, where we meet, may be austere, but he understands my internal suffering. When he hears my story, he cries with me, and I feel in safe hands with him. My therapist will not cry with me again, but he will take good care of me in the coming months.

I start running again. I have always enjoyed my own
company
—traveling alone, running alone. One of my favorite places to run is a small wooded area in Hamburg. I start in the cool shade of the trees, and continue along fields and past paddocks with horses in them. I run through community gardens with garden gnomes among the flowerbeds: This pointedly idyllic world has something touching about it, and afterward my head feels clearer.

My adoptive family still don’t know; I will tell them at Christmas, when we all come together at their house in Munich.

My Christmas present to everyone is a copy of the book about my mother, plus the only biography ever written of Amon Goeth. It is a hefty volume, authored by a Viennese historian.

My adoptive parents, Inge and Gerhard—I cannot call them Mama and Papa anymore—are surprised and shocked. When I discovered the book, I had first suspected that they knew everything about my biological family but that they had wanted to protect me, that they, too, had betrayed me. Yet I soon realized that they would never have kept anything so fundamental hidden from me. Their reaction now tells me that I was right: They knew nothing either.

My adoptive parents have always struggled to talk about feelings, and now it is no different. They escape into academic details:
Amon Goeth’s biography has no footnotes,
my father complains, and then asks,
Does the number of dead correspond with other sources?
My life has been turned upside down, and my adoptive parents are discussing footnotes! My brothers, on the other hand, understand straight away what this book means to me.

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Jennifer Teege’s adoptive mother clearly remembers the moment when Jennifer was sitting on the sofa that Christmas Eve, struggling for words. “Jenny announced that there was something important that she wanted to talk about. But then she just looked at us and started welling up. I sensed that something bad had happened.” When Inge Sieber had heard the whole story, she didn’t know how to deal with it at first. “My husband and I felt as if somebody had pulled the rug out from under our feet.”

Jennifer Teege’s adoptive brother Matthias couldn’t sleep that Christmas night. “I was worried about how the discovery would affect Jenny. With this book, a different world had opened up for her. She had found her other self; she had seen where she had come from. She had spent a lot of time dealing with who her grandfather was, and even more so with the women in her family, her mother and her grandmother.”

Suddenly, Jennifer regarded herself less as the daughter of her adoptive parents; instead she saw herself as part of her natural family. Matthias thinks that this upset his parents very much.

He himself was very worried about his sister: “She was so gloomy, so depressed, like I had never seen her before. I had always thought she was so strong. She was always the boldest, the most daring of us three children.”

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IN THE FOLLOWING MONTHS,
my brother Matthias turns into my most important confidant, after my husband. In his research, he digs up more and more details about the Goeth family.

My Israeli friends Noa and Anat keep sending me emails:
Jenny, where are you, what’s going on?
I have neither the strength nor the words to reply. I don’t want to hurt my friends’ feelings. I can’t remember exactly where they lost their relatives during the Holocaust. I’ll have to ask them—but what if they say,
In Płaszów?

The thing is, Amon Goeth’s victims are not abstract figures to me, not just an anonymous crowd. When I think of them, I see the faces of the elderly people I met during my studies in Israel at the Goethe Institute. They were Holocaust survivors who wanted to hear and speak German again, the language of their old home country. Some could not see very well, so I read German newspapers and novels to them. On their forearms I could see their prisoners’ numbers from the camps tattooed on their skin. For the first time my German nationality felt wrong, like something I had to apologize for. Luckily I was well camouflaged—thanks to my dark skin, nobody suspected that I was German.

How would those survivors have reacted if they had known that I was Amon Goeth’s granddaughter? Maybe they would have wanted nothing to do with me. Maybe they would have seen him in me.

My husband tells me,
Go and find your mother’s address and confront her with your anger and your questions. And tell your friends in Israel why you haven’t been in touch.

Not yet,
I reply. I need to think first. And I have to visit some graves. In Krakow.

Master of the Płaszów Concentration Camp:
My Grandfather Amon Goeth

If he liked you, you lived, if he didn’t, you were dead.

—Mietek Pemper, former assistant to Amon Goeth

CAREFULLY I PLACE ONE FOOT
in front of the other. The floor beneath me sways; the rotten wood creaks and yields under the pressure of each step. It is cold and damp in here; the air smells musty. It’s such a squalid place. What’s that over there? Is that rat droppings? There is no proper light in here; not enough light, and not enough air either. Carefully I continue walking through my grandfather’s house, crossing the dark fishbone parquet into the former trophy room. Amon Goeth once had a sign put up here that said
HE WHO SHOOTS FIRST LIVES LONGER
.

I had wanted to see the house where my grandparents lived. A Polish tour guide whose address I found on the Internet told me that it still stood. A pensioner lives there now, and every now and then he shows individual visitors around. The tour guide called the man and arranged for me to see the house.

In the Płaszów neighborhood of Krakow, the only dilapidated house on quiet Heltmana Street stands out like a sore thumb against the other neat and tidy single-family homes. Some of its windowpanes are broken; the curtains are dirty; the house looks unlived-in. A large sign on the front of the house says
SPRZEDAM. FOR SALE.

The front door still looks beautiful; the wood is decorated with ornaments, and the dark red paint has faded only a little. An unkempt man opens the door and leads me up a narrow stairway into the house. My tour guide Malgorzata Kieres—she’s asked me to call her by her first name—translates his Polish for me. I haven’t told Malgorzata why I am interested in the house; she thinks I am a tourist with a general interest in history.

I look around. The plaster is coming off the walls. There is hardly any furniture. But there is a coldness that creeps into your bones. And a stench. The ceilings are underpinned with wooden beams. I hope the house won’t collapse on top of me and bury me beneath it.

Crumbling walls, holding up the past.

Over a year has gone by since I first found the book about my mother in the library. Since then I have read everything I could find about my grandfather and the Nazi era. I am haunted by the thought of him, I think about him constantly. Do I see him as a grandfather or as a historical character? He is both to me: Płaszów commandant Amon Goeth, and my grandfather.

When I was young I was very interested in the Holocaust. I went on a school trip from Munich to the Dachau concentration camp, and I devoured one book about the Nazi era after another, such as
When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, A Square of Sky,
and Anne Frank’s
Diary of a Young Girl.
I saw the world through Anne Frank’s eyes; I felt her fear but also her optimism and her hope.

The history teachers at my high school showed us documentaries about the liberation of the concentration camps, and we saw people who had been reduced to mere skeletons. I read book after book, looking for answers, to find out what drove the perpetrators to act the way they did, but in the end I gave up: Yes, I found some explanations, but I would never understand it completely. Finally, finished with the subject, I concluded that I would have behaved differently. I was different; today’s Germans were different.

When I first arrived in Israel in my early twenties, I picked up books about Nazism again. Yet even there, where I was meeting the victims and their children and grandchildren on a daily basis, more important issues soon took over. I had read so much and asked so many people about it—I felt like I knew everything there was to know about the Holocaust. I was much more interested in the here and now: the Palestinian conflict, the threat of war.

I had thought I knew it all, but now, at nearly 40, I have to start all over.

One of the first books I pick up is a classic from 1967,
The Inability to Mourn
by Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich. I like their approach; they look deep inside each person and try to understand without judgment. In their role as psychoanalysts, they regularly dealt with patients who were active members of the SS or other Nazi organizations before 1945. These people did not appear to have any sense of remorse or shame; they and their fellow Germans continued to live their lives as if the Third Reich had never existed. Reading the book with the knowledge of my family history, I think of my grandmother, who denied Amon Goeth’s actions until the end.

The conclusion the Mitscherlichs drew at the end of the 1960s was that the Germans had denied their past and suppressed their guilt; ideally, the whole nation should have been in therapy. That conclusion no longer applies to today’s Germans.

I also read books by other Nazi descendants, for example by Richard von Schirach, son of Reich Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach, and by Katrin Himmler, great-niece of Heinrich Himmler, Reich Leader of the SS. Their family histories are of great interest to me, and I look for similarities.

I begin to dig deeper, I question family and friends. My adoptive mother’s stepfather in Vienna, for example, served in Africa under Erwin Rommel. On long mountain walks he would tell us children anecdotes from that time, thrilling adventure stories of valiant warriors fighting in the desert, stories of how they collected the early morning dew from the tent sheets for drinking water, or how they once had to dig their car out of the sand dunes. At first we thought that our “Opa Vienna,” as we used to call him, was Rommel’s personal driver, but he put us right: He was only one of the drivers in the German Africa Corps. One day “the Limey got him,” and he would tell us stories in his Viennese dialect about his time as a prisoner of war.

He only told us one horror story from the war: A soldier had been murdered—beheaded—and afterward his decapitated body was still running around like a headless chicken. That story always gave us the creeps.

When it came to talking about his superior, Opa only had words of praise. Rommel, the sly Desert Fox, was a “decent” Nazi? An urban legend. What skeletons are my adoptive family hiding in the closet?

Memories of discussions with my adoptive father are coming back to me. He was a liberal, often volunteered his services to friends and neighbors, and played an active part in the peace movement. On the subject of the Holocaust, however, he could not let go of the question of whether the number of murdered Jews was really accurate, or if it hadn’t been less. He and his friends would argue fiercely about it. My adoptive brothers and I found the discussion unnecessary and didn’t understand why this issue was so important to our father.

Suddenly I am not so sure anymore: Am I really so different? Have we really left everything behind us? What does it mean for me, for our time, that my grandfather was a war criminal?

My perception of time is changing. Events that happened a very long time ago are suddenly feeling very recent again. In the last few months I have read so much, have watched so many films; everything seems so immediate. Maybe it’s because, to me, this old story is now very new, very fresh. Often, when I delve into this world my grandfather inhabited, it feels as if these crimes happened only yesterday.

And now I am standing here in this dilapidated villa in Krakow. I am not quite sure what I’m doing here, in this house, in this city. Does being here make any sense at all? I just know that I had needed to come to Krakow now. Shortly before I came I was in the hospital—I’d had a miscarriage.

I am feeling sad and exhausted. My therapist advised me not to travel to Krakow in my condition, but I had really wanted to make this trip. First I flew to Warsaw and then I took the train on to Krakow, the city where my grandfather was infamous, where it rained ashes at the end of the war when he had the remains of thousands of people cremated.

I want to see where my grandfather committed his murders. I want to get close to him—and then put some distance between him and me.

On the ground floor, the old man is now showing me the living room. This is where the parties were held, he says with a sweep of his arm. Here they sat, my grandfather and the other Nazis, drinking schnapps and wine. Oskar Schindler was there, too. The old man leads me onto the patio. He explains that my grandfather had some building work done, had balconies and patios added. The view of the countryside was important to him, he says.

The house must have been beautiful once; I like the style. Did my grandfather redesign the building himself? Was he interested in architecture like me? Why am I even thinking about whether we share the same tastes? Amon Goeth is not the kind of grandfather you want to find similarities with. The crimes he committed override everything else. In the book about my mother, I read that my grandmother used to gush about Amon Goeth’s table manners, even long after the war was over. He was a real gentleman, she said.

Amon Goeth’s former commandant’s villa in Płaszów in 1995

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A concentration camp commandant who set great store by table manners.

Emilie Schindler, Oskar Schindler’s wife, later said about Amon Goeth that he had a “split personality.” “On the one hand he played the gentleman, like every man from Vienna; on the other he subjected the Jews under his control to unrelenting terror. . . . He could kill people in cold blood and yet notice any false note on the classical records he played endlessly.”

Amon Leopold Goeth was born in Vienna on December 11, 1908, the only child of a Catholic family of publishers. His parents Bertha and Amon Franz Goeth named him after his father and grandfather: Amon. In ancient Egypt, Amon was the ram-headed god of fertility. In Hebrew, Amon means
son of my people
. In the Old Testament, Amon was a king of Judaea who worshipped pagan gods and was killed by his servants.

Amon Goeth’s parents came from a humble background but had come into money with their bookselling business. They could afford to live in a middle-class neighborhood, have a maid and eventually own a car, too. The Goeths sold religious literature, icons, and picture postcards. Later on they expanded into publishing, producing books about military history which mourned the Germans lost to World War I. Amon Goeth’s father was often away traveling for the business while his mother managed the shop, and as a young boy Amon was often looked after by his childless aunt.

Amon, or “Mony” as he was often called, went to a private Catholic elementary school. He wasn’t a very good student. His parents eventually sent him to a strict Catholic boarding school in the country. His biographer, historian Johannes Sachslehner, suggests that Goeth’s future “tendency to play strange sadistic jokes” might stem from experiences he had during this time, but there is no evidence to support this claim.

Amon Goeth left the boarding school at the end of tenth grade against his parents’ wishes. At 17 he was already enthralled by radical right wing ideas and had joined fascist youth organizations. He was athletic and reckless—characteristics that impressed his new friends.

In 1931 he became a member of the NSDAP, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nazi party for short, and soon after he joined their security force, the SS.

Heinrich Himmler’s SS, also responsible for experiments on humans and mass murder in the concentration camps, was regarded as the elite unit: “The best of the best, you couldn’t be more Nazi if you tried,” journalist Stephen Lebert once described the spirit of this corps in a nutshell. Hans Egon Holthusen wrote, in his 1966 confessional autobiography
Volunteering for the SS
, “This organization with their black uniform and death-head emblem was seen as elite, chic and elegant, which is why it was the organization of choice for the privileged youths who considered themselves too posh to go running around in the ‘shitty-brown colored’ outfit of the SA, the storm battalion.”

The young Amon Goeth, unsuccessful at school and constantly pressured by his parents, was among those drawn to the idea of belonging to an elite. Later he would tell his live-in lover Ruth Irene Kalder that his parents had neglected him as a child and that he had turned his back on the middle-class values that they had tried to instill in him. It is true he returned to the family business for a short period of time, successfully publishing military history with his father. He even married a woman his parents introduced him to, although he wasn’t in love. This “arranged marriage” soon ended in divorce.

An SS man has to start a family though, so Goeth married for a second time, this time to Anna Geiger, a sporty girl from Tyrol whom he had met at a motorcycle race. Since the aim of the marriage was above all the conception of healthy, “Aryan” offspring, the pair had to undergo a number of tests for the SS. For example, they had to have their pictures taken wearing only swimsuits to demonstrate their physical flawlessness. They were married by an SS man. Anna soon gave birth to a son, but the baby died after just a few months.

Shortly afterward, in March 1940, Amon Goeth reported for duty with the Waffen-SS, the military arm of the SS, and left Vienna for Poland. He was ambitious and climbed the ranks quickly. At first he was only charged with administrative tasks. An appraisal from 1941 states that he was an “SS man willing to make sacrifices, fit for service,” “SS leadership material,” and that the “overall racial image” was there, too. In 1942, in the Polish city of Lublin, Amon Goeth was given orders to establish labor camps to accommodate Jewish forced laborers.