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

by Jennifer Teege

  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.

  ■ ■ ■

  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 sever
e 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.

  ■ ■ ■

  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.”

  ■ ■ ■

  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.

  ■ ■ ■

  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.”

  ■ ■ ■

  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.

  Chapter 2

  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 cont
inue 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.