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

by Jennifer Teege

  Then gradually my feelings faded into the background and suddenly I saw Helen. I saw her, after all those years, returning anxiously to this house that used to be her dreadful prison. I saw how she is still plagued by her memories. She recounts how Amon Goeth used to beat the maids, how he pushed them down these very stairs, how he screamed at them and called them slut, bitch, dirty Jewess.

  Helen’s boyfriend was a member of the Jewish Resistance in the camp and was shot by Goeth. Helen also talks about the man she loved after the war, a camp survivor like herself. They were married for 35 years, moved to Florida and had children. Yet her husband could not get over the experience of the camp, and one day he took his own life. In his suicide note he wrote, “The memories haunt me every day. I just can’t go on.”

  I am standing in the basement of my grandfather’s house, in the darkness of Helen’s room, where the only light comes from a small window. You can see a small patch of the garden. It was warm here; she didn’t have to sleep on straw in the drafty barracks and was certain to have had more to eat than the other detainees. She didn’t have to perform hard labor in the quarries like most of the other women in the camp; she wore a black dress with a white apron and served roast meat and wine. Yet she was living beneath the same roof as the man who could kill her at any time. She expected to die in this house.

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  When you saw Goeth, you saw death, one survivor said. The Płaszów camp became the stage for Amon Goeth’s cruelty.

  There are many eyewitness reports relating to this. Goeth’s Jewish assistant, Mietek Pemper, described how once, in the middle of a dictation, the commandant suddenly grabbed his rifle, opened a window, and started shooting at prisoners. Pemper heard screams; Goeth then returned to his desk and asked calmly, as if nothing had happened, Where were we?

  When Amon Goeth killed somebody, he would have their relatives killed, too, because he didn’t want to see any “unhappy” faces in his camp.

  In her memoirs, Płaszów survivor Stella Müller-Madej writes about Goeth, “If there was somebody he didn’t like the look of, he’d grab him by the hair and shoot him on the spot. He was a giant of a man, a powerful, imposing figure with beautiful, gentle features and an even gentler expression on his face. So this is what a cruel, murdering monster looks like! How can that be?”

  Goeth used publicly celebrated executions to crush any thought of escape or resistance the detainees might have had. Public hangings and shootings on the parade ground were accompanied by popular music. Larger groups of people were usually shot on a hill a little further away; the pit for the bodies was just below.

  The Płaszów camp was growing, and the prisoners were now coming from further afield. Survivors from other ghettos, Polish prisoners, Romany from other camps, as well as Hungarian Jews all joined the Jews from the Krakow ghetto. Sometimes the Płaszów concentration camp held more than 20,000 detainees in its 180 barracks surrounded by two and half miles of barbed wire.

  Within the SS, Amon Goeth was promoted to the rank of Hauptsturmführer, captain, which was an extraordinarily fast rise. He got rich on the prisoners’ possessions and lived a life of luxury. He had a Jewish cobbler make new shoes for him every week and a pastry chef bake fancy cakes for him until he was piling on the pounds. In his villa, he held parties; alcohol, music, and women were offered in abundance to humor the SS men. Goeth owned riding horses and a number of cars; he enjoyed riding through the camp on his white horse or racing around the lanes in his BMW.

  Goeth would often ride around the camp on his white horse

  Mietek Pemper, the commandant’s assistant, also took dictation of Goeth’s personal letters to his family in Vienna. Omitting the details of everyday life in the camp, he would ask his father about the progress of the business and his wife about the children: Anna Goeth had given birth to two more children, Ingeborg and Werner. When Amon Goeth learned that Werner was hitting his sister Ingeborg, he told Pemper to write in his letter to his wife Anna: “He must have got the hitting from me.”

  Eyewitnesses reported that Goeth would wear different accessories depending on his mood on a given day. If he put on white gloves or a white scarf, combined with a peaked cap or a Tyrolean hat, the detainees had to expect the worst. His two dogs, a Great Dane and an Alsatian mix, were called Rolf and Ralf, and he trained them to attack people on his command.

  In 1944, Amon Goeth had children from the Płaszów camp herded onto trucks—to be transported to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. He ordered waltz music to be played over the loudspeakers in order to drown out the desperate cries of their parents.

  In other words: Amon Goeth was perfect Hollywood material. Just as Adolf Eichmann was for many years the epitome of the callous, bureaucratic mastermind behind the scenes, denying any responsibility, Amon Goeth serves as the grotesquely excessive personification of the sadistic murderer. The image of the trigger-happy concentration camp commandant, accompanied by his two dogs trained to tear humans apart—it seems like a grim archetype, like a template for Paul Celan’s poem Death Fugue. Steven Spielberg portrays Amon Goeth as a twisted psychopath, cruel, and at the same time almost laughable.

  Other, big- and small-screen documentaries about Amon Goeth are often accompanied by ominous background music, but actually his crimes don’t call for any embellishment.

  Amon Goeth’s crimes were so reprehensible that it seems easy enough to distance oneself from them. In his dissertation about concentration camp commandants, the Israeli historian and journalist Tom Segev writes: “They were by no means Germans like all the other Germans, not even Nazis like all the other Nazis. They are not characterized by the banality of evil, but much more so by their inner identification with this evil. Most of the concentration camp commandants joined the Nazi movement in its early days . . . ; they had been vehement supporters of these radical rightwing politics right from its beginnings. The majority of Germans never even joined the Nazi party.”

  But Segev’s theory might be too simple after all: The late Marcel Reich-Ranicki, literary critic and Holocaust survivor, had good reason to oppose the fact that famous Nazis such as Adolf Hitler are usually portrayed purely as monsters. “Of course Hitler was a human being,” Reich-Ranicki said, adding, “What else would he have been? An elephant?”

  It is very easy to demonize the prominent Nazis, to treat them like animals in a zoo: Look, aren’t they cruel and perverted? It offers a way out of having to deal with one’s own actions, one’s family’s actions—or indeed those of the many people who joined in on a small scale, those who no longer greeted their Jewish neighbors, and those who looked away and walked past when Jews were being beaten up in the streets and their businesses were destroyed.

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  THEY CALLED GOETH THE “BUTCHER OF PŁASZÓW.” I keep on asking myself how it was that he became that way. I don’t think that it was his childhood or even his hatred of the Jews. I think it was much more banal than that: In this world of men, killing was a contest, a kind of sport. It reached the point where killing a human being meant nothing more than swatting a fly. In the end the mind goes completely numb; death has entertainment value.

  I have a terrible image in my head, which used to haunt me even in my sleep: It is said that Amon Goeth once caught a Jewish woman who was boiling potatoes in a large trough for the pigs—just as she, driven by hunger, ate one of the potatoes herself. He shot her in the head and ordered two men to throw the dying woman into the boiling water with the potatoes. One of them refused, so Goeth shot him, too. I don’t know if this story is true or not, but I cannot get the image of this half-dead woman thrashing around in the boiling water out of my head.

  These stories of how Amon Goeth considered himself superior, how he played music to accompany executions, used scarves and hats as props for his killings, how he played the master in his pathetic little villa—it would be comical if it wasn’t so sad. He was a narcissist—but not just in the sense that he was in love with himself. He was
a narcissist who felt on top of the world when he humiliated and degraded others.

  I read that my grandmother used to idolize him: handsome Amon Goeth, the man of her dreams.

  This is juxtaposed to the image of him that contemporary witnesses have painted: quick-tempered, cruel, irascible. His dogs. His exaggerated masculinity: commanding, dominating. Uniform, discipline, Fatherland.

  My mother always saw the father in him, too, not just the concentration camp commandant. She is much closer to him than I am, even though she never met him. She was still a baby when he was hanged. Survivors of the camp have told her again and again how much she looks like him. How dreadful that must have been for her.

  Do I look like him? My skin color is like a barrier between us. I imagine myself standing next to him. We are both tall: I am six foot, he was six foot four—a giant in those days.

  He in his black uniform with its death-heads, me the black grandchild. What would he have said to a dark-skinned granddaughter, who speaks Hebrew on top of that? I would have been a disgrace, a bastard who brought dishonor to the family. I am sure my grandfather would have shot me.

  My grandmother was never bothered by my skin color. She always seemed delighted to see me when I came to visit. No matter how little I was at the time: Children can sense if someone likes them, and she liked me. I’ve always felt so close to her. Yet she also held Amon Goeth when he came back from his killings. How could she share her bed and her home with him? She said she loved him, but is that a good enough excuse? Is it good enough for me? Was there anything loveable about Amon Goeth—is that even a permissible question?

  When I look in the mirror I see two faces, mine and his. And a third, my mother’s.

  The three of us have the same determined chin, the same lines between the nose and the mouth.

  Height, lines—those things are only external. But what about on the inside? How much of Amon Goeth do I have in me? How much of Amon Goeth does each of us have in us?

  I think we all have a bit of him in us. To believe that I have more than others would be to think like a Nazi—to believe in the power of blood.

  The quiet in the villa is suddenly broken: Malgorzata, the Polish woman who interprets the old man’s Polish for me, reveals out of the blue that she once met Amon Goeth’s daughter Monika. I ask her to tell me more and she says that my mother once came to visit the villa with a group of Polish schoolchildren. They were accompanied by a descendant of another Nazi, Niklas Frank, son of Hans Frank, governor-general of Hitler’s occupied Poland.

  Since Malgorzata doesn’t know who I am I ask her what she thought of my mother. “I thought she was a bit strange, and sad,” she replies. “Niklas Frank and Monika Goeth, neither of them could laugh.” And then she tells us that here in this house Monika Goeth had touched a doorpost and said that she loved her father.

  My mother’s hand on the door. There are hundreds of German-speaking tour guides in Krakow, and I chose the one who has met my mother.

  I tell Malgorzata who I am. At first she doesn’t believe me, then she becomes bewildered and confused. I apologize to her. In order to find out more about my mother I had asked questions without revealing my identity. I say that I hope she understands my situation.

  I had been determined to contact my mother before the end of the year. Now the year is almost over—it is well into fall, but I don’t want to write to my mother until I feel better prepared for it.

  In the documentary about her meeting with Amon Goeth’s former maid Helen, my mother frequently cries. I can see the strain she’s under because of her father’s past. Krakow has a special meaning for her. I thought that I’d be able to understand my mother better if I, too, got to know this place.

  The old man shows Malgorzata and me out. I pull the door firmly shut behind me.

  There’s another tour I’ve booked in Krakow: a Schindler’s List tour.

  I take a taxi to the meeting place in Kazimierz, the former Jewish quarter of Krakow. In the summer, Kazimierz is meant to be picturesque and charming; but today it seems dark and gloomy. The cobblestones are wet with rain. Our group of tourists visits the old Jewish cemetery, a synagogue, and a few locations from Schindler’s List. We see idyllic courtyards and narrow alleys.

  Many restaurants in Kazimierz serve gefilte fish and kosher meat. Pretty little cafés play traditional klezmer music—the rhythm of a long-lost time—around the clock. There is a morbid, museum-like feel to the whole district.

  The narrow little alleys and the rough paving stones remind me of Mea Shearim, the Orthodox Jewish quarter of Jerusalem. The difference is, Jews actually live in Mea Shearim. Our tour guide tells us that before World War II there were 70,000 Jews in Krakow. Now there are only a few hundred. Most of the Jewish people walking through Kazimierz these days are visitors. There are six tourists in my group; I want to know where they are from. The response: Poland, USA, France. They want to know where I come from. “Germany,” I say. “Ah!” they reply. I am glad we are not wearing name badges.

  I still haven’t really told anybody about my family history, apart from my husband, my adoptive family, and a close friend. Not because I think I need to be ashamed of it, but because I don’t know how to deal with it. I find it hard to share my discovery. How could I put it? “Oh, by the way, I’m the granddaughter of a mass murderer”? I can’t cope with my background myself, and I don’t want to burden anybody else with it either. Not yet anyway.

  Our small group moves on; we go over a little bridge across the Vistula river to the neighboring district of Podgorze. This is where the entire Jewish population of Krakow was crammed into a ghetto. The trams still ran through the middle of it, taking the people of Krakow across their city. Inside the ghetto, nobody was allowed to get in or out of the tram; there were no stops, and the doors and windows were locked for the duration. I wonder how the people of Krakow felt when they traveled through here.

  Today a large office building stands in the square that used to be the center of the ghetto, and there is a bus depot, too. On the edge, a few sections of the ghetto walls remain. To add insult to injury, these tall walls surrounding the people behind them had arches at the top—they were built in the shape of Jewish tombstones. The message to the Jews was clear: You won’t get out alive.

  The victims are remembered at Ghetto Heroes Square. Empty, larger-than-life chairs dotted around the square are meant to convey a sense of the devastation in the ghetto after it had been liquidated: Everything laid to waste, no people in the streets, only furniture and other personal possessions that the Jews had been forced to leave behind. I find the installation too cold, too conceptual. Hundreds of people were killed during the clearing of the ghetto. Every chair represents 1,000 Jews who were murdered. The brutalities that were committed here remain abstract. But how can they be displayed? Schindler’s List is very graphic, but survivors say that even Spielberg’s film barely hints at the real horror that emanated from Amon Goeth.

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  Tadeusz Pankiewicz, a Polish druggist in the Krakow ghetto, described Goeth as a tall, handsome man with blue eyes, dressed in a black leather coat and carrying a riding crop. Survivors reported that during the liquidation of the ghetto Goeth tore little children from their mothers’ arms and flung them to the ground.

  Before the liquidation, 20,000 people were living in the ghetto in cramped conditions and in constant fear of death.

  When Amon Goeth had the ghetto cleared on March 13 and 14, 1943, it had already been divided into two separate areas: Ghetto A was for those who had been declared fit for work and who were to be transported to the Płaszów camp; they were allowed to live for now. Ghetto B, separated from Ghetto A by barbed wire, was for the old, the young, and the ill; they were going to be killed.

  Nobody was to get away. Goeth’s people combed through all the alleys, looked in every apartment and under every bed. In the hospitals, the patients were shot in their beds. Tadeusz Pankiewicz described the scene of the aftermath l
ike this: “It looks like a battlefield—thousands of abandoned bundles and suitcases . . . on pavements drenched in blood.”

  In front of the walls of the former Jewish ghetto in Krakow

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  WE MOVE ON. IT IS RAINING, and we have to keep looking for shelter. A nice, elderly lady lets me share her umbrella. We walk beneath a drafty underpass and enter an industrial park. We stop in front of a gray, three-story office block dating from the 1930s: Oskar Schindler’s former enamelware factory on Lipowa Street.

  Today it has been turned into a museum dedicated to his memory. We visit the exhibition. It starts with photographs of Krakow in the early 1930s. There are women going for their daily walk and men on their way to synagogue. Then follows a portrayal of the German blitzkrieg against Poland and the immediate ostracism of the Jews. One picture shows German soldiers cutting off the sidelocks of an Orthodox Jew with a knife.

  I am tired and worn out. I’ve been on my feet since the early morning. I would love to just sit down somewhere and get some rest, but the tour guide keeps on talking. I am losing my concentration and can no longer remember any of the details.

  In the last room of the museum there is a recreation of the Płaszów camp. Little model barracks, even my grandfather’s villa. I take a close look: Again it is obvious how close Goeth’s villa was to the camp and the prisoners’ barracks. I find my grandmother’s justifications less and less credible.

  The exhibition covers Oskar Schindler, the man, only marginally. His story is told by means of photographs, documents, and his original furniture. In one room there is a large transparent cube filled with tin pots, bowls, and plates that were produced in his factory during the war. The installation is meant to symbolize the history of Schindler and his workers. Inside the cube are the names of the 1,200 Jewish slave laborers whose lives Oskar Schindler saved.