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

by Jennifer Teege

  At the end of the exhibition there are two books, a black one and a white one. The white one is for the names of the people who helped save the Jews, the black one for the names of those who denounced and persecuted them. Two books representing two options: to save or to kill. Oskar Schindler or Amon Goeth. I don’t like this simple division between good and evil.

  Many Jews survived by going underground, thanks to help from relatives, friends, or work colleagues. These “quiet heroes” are not remembered often enough. Oskar Schindler was certainly not holier-than-thou but a rather ambiguous character. I find it hard to picture what he was really like.

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  Oskar Schindler and Amon Goeth: The two men were the same age and shared the same weakness for drink, parties, and women.

  Both got rich on the back of the pogroms: Goeth by stealing from Jews and by killing them, by taking everything they had. Schindler by acquiring a factory in Krakow whose Jewish owners had been dispossessed and employing Jews from Goeth’s camp as cheap labor.

  Oskar Schindler, who had worked as an agent for the German counterintelligence in Poland, was a wartime profiteer at first; he came to Krakow to make a fortune. Later on he would spend most of the profits he had made on saving Jews.

  The commandant Amon Goeth and the industrialist Oskar Schindler got on well together. Oskar Schindler needed cheap Jewish laborers and was therefore dependent on Amon Goeth’s goodwill. Oskar Schindler called Goeth “Mony,” brought him gifts, and introduced him to pretty women—among them Ruth Irene Kalder, who would eventually become Goeth’s live-in lover.

  Helen Rosenzweig, the Jewish maid in the Płaszów villa, reportedly said that Goeth believed that Schindler was his best friend. She, too, had been under that impression. True, Schindler had promised again and again to save her, “but then there he was again in his brown Nazi uniform taking part in Goeth’s wild parties.” There had been other factory owners who were helping Jewish workers and who depended on Goeth’s goodwill. Yet they had not joined him in his revelries. “Schindler crossed limits that he didn’t need to cross.” Still, in the end she finds for Schindler: “Amon Goeth and Oskar Schindler, they both had power. One used it to kill, the other to save lives. Their example shows that everyone has a choice.”

  Steven Spielberg also plays with this motif in Schindler’s List. He shows Amon Goeth as Schindler’s evil twin. Both men appear to have been cut from the same wood, but their actions could not have been more different.

  Goeth allowed Schindler to employ prisoners from the camp in his factory; he even allowed him to build an external camp for the workers at his factory where living conditions were much better than at Płaszów.

  Amon Goeth’s Jewish secretary Mietek Pemper and Oskar Schindler would sometimes hold secret meetings. Pemper said later that he had regarded Oskar Schindler as a savior from very early on. “No one other than Schindler was interested in our fate.”

  The Płaszów camp was run as a labor camp until the fall of 1943 when the SS administration decided to turn the last remaining labor camps into concentration camps. At the same time, more and more Polish camps which were not producing “strategic or pivotal” goods were being disbanded and the prisoners killed.

  Consequently, Mietek Pemper conceived a plan: He wanted the Płaszów camp to be given the formal status of concentration camp because he was convinced that “the concentration camps will stay until the end of the war.” Oskar Schindler claimed that apart from pots and pans his factory was also capable of making shell parts. Amon Goeth was just as keen on keeping “his” camp and presented his superiors with lists, manipulated by Mietek Pemper, of strategic goods produced at Płaszów. In fact, Płaszów officially operated as a concentration camp starting in January 1944. The prisoners were re-registered and were issued different clothes. New SS wardens arrived, and Amon Goeth was kept under tighter control. In his memoirs, Mietek Pemper explains that Goeth now needed written authorization from Berlin in order to torment his prisoners. He gives an example that highlights the bureaucracy of torture at the time: “A form had to be filled in with the requested number of lashes to the exposed buttocks.” The camp’s finances were also audited on a more regular basis now.

  Amon Goeth had a look around other concentration camps and returned with new ideas, such as the tattooing of prisoners or the creation of a brothel for use by especially productive inmates. However, he never got a chance to implement these ideas.

  By mid-1944 Płaszów was about to be disbanded. The Wehrmacht, the German army, was on the retreat, and the Red Army had entered Poland. In the summer of 1944, special SS task forces carried out a so-called “exhumation action” in Płaszów: All evidence of the exterminations was to be erased: The mass graves of the victims of the ghetto liquidation and other killings were dug up and the bodies burned. A putrid stench hung over the camp for weeks; the ashes were carried away by the truckload.

  Emilie Schindler reported that in August 1944, her husband Oskar was worried about his laborers because Amon Goeth had decided to close Płaszów and send all the inmates to Auschwitz.

  At the time, Oskar Schindler had his eye on an arms factory in Bruennlitz, near his hometown of Zwittau. His aim was to bring his workers there, to safety. Emilie Schindler described how her husband would bring Amon Goeth more and more expensive gifts. In the end, according to a number of different sources, the two men agreed upon a “deal”: Amon Goeth would help Oskar Schindler smuggle “his” Jews to Bruennlitz, and Oskar Schindler would help Amon Goeth smuggle some of his valuable possessions to safety. Ultimately, however, Goeth’s superiors in the SS also agreed to the transport of the “Schindler Jews” to Bruennlitz.

  The list of people who were allowed to survive includes the names of around 800 men and 300 women. The circumstances behind each name’s addition to the life-saving list are still unclear today. What is certain is that Marcel Goldberg, a Jewish camp inmate, took bribes and would swap names on the list for valuables.

  After the war, Oskar Schindler did not meet with much success. Some of the Jews whose lives he had saved supported him financially. For his rescue of over 1,000 Jews, Schindler was named Righteous Among the Nations at a ceremony at the Israeli Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. He died in 1974 and was buried in Jerusalem.

  There are many speculations as to what drove Schindler, what motives he had to save the Jews. Mietek Pemper sums Oskar Schindler up in these words: “This man, who had no special achievements to boast of, neither before the war nor after it, carried out a rescue operation, together with his wife, to which today, directly or indirectly, more than six thousand people, including children and grandchildren, owe their lives. That is what’s important. Nothing else matters.”

  Oskar Schindler (2nd on the left) with some of his colleagues in Krakow, 1942

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  OUR GUIDED TOUR OF THE MUSEUM has come to an end. I hang back to talk with the nice elderly lady from my group, the one who had offered me her umbrella. She is Jewish, from America, in her early seventies. She looks sporty, has short gray hair and bright eyes. I ask her if she has come to Krakow by herself. No, she replies, actually she’s here with her husband. They are both Ausch-witz survivors. Since they arrived in Poland, her husband has been gripped by a sudden fear, and he can’t bring himself to revisit the scenes of his ordeal. He is distraught and stays in the hotel because he doesn’t dare to go outdoors. That’s why she went on her own—they had booked the tours before they came: Auschwitz yesterday, old Jewish Krakow today. She says it upsets her very much that her husband is suffering so much.

  The story of the traumatized man who is too afraid to leave his hotel room moves me. I would like to cheer his wife up a little. I tell her that I have lived in Israel. She seems pleased and asks me what it was like for me there. We keep talking for a little while. She wants to know what I’m doing here, why I have come to Poland. Again I pretend that I am just a tourist with an interest in history. I offer her a lift in my t
axi back toward Kazimierz, but she would rather walk a bit more.

  For the second time today I have hidden my true identity. In the end I told Malgorzata, my tour guide, the whole story, but I couldn’t tell it to this woman. I didn’t want to tell her why I am here. There wouldn’t have been enough time to explain everything. The knowledge would only have left her upset. She would have gone back to her husband in the hotel confused and maybe even troubled. But I am not comfortable with this secrecy either.

  I will probably never see this friendly Jewish lady again, but sooner or later I will have to confide in my friends in Israel.

  I head toward the Rynek, the magnificent medieval market square in the center of Krakow’s Old Town. There is nothing gloomy about this place, there are no winding little alleys like in Kazimierz; here, everything is majestic and open. I browse the market stalls, looking for a bunch of flowers. I want something bright, but nothing gaudy. Mainly whites, with a mix of small and large flowers. I end up arranging my own.

  ■ ■ ■

  During the German occupation, the Rynek in the center of Krakow was renamed Adolf Hitler Square. The Germans were already on the retreat in Poland when the Płaszów commandant was arrested: The SS had discovered that Amon Goeth was secreting valuable assets away from Płaszów, so they initiated proceedings against their own man.

  Goeth was accused of corruption and abuse of his position. He spent some time in Munich’s Stadelheim prison but was soon released.

  After a short stint at the front, Goeth was admitted to a hospital in the Bavarian town of Bad Toelz. His health had weakened; he was suffering from diabetes and had liver and kidney problems.

  On April 30, 1945, the American army marched into Munich. On May 4, Amon Goeth—wearing only a Wehrmacht uniform and therefore not immediately identifiable as a member of the SS—was arrested in Bad Toelz. He gave a false name and claimed that he was a common soldier returning from the front. Meanwhile, his wife was filing for divorce in Vienna; she had heard of his affair with Ruth Irene Kalder.

  The pregnant Kalder and her mother Agnes fled first to Vienna and then to Bad Toelz. On November 7, 1945, Goeth and Kalder’s daughter, Monika, was born in Bad Toelz.

  By then, Goeth had been taken to a detention camp on the grounds of the former Dachau concentration camp near Munich. From there, in January 1946, he wrote his last letter to Ruth Irene Kalder: “Dearest Ruth, Thank you for your letter and parcel. You poor thing, you have been through so much. . . . The food here is such that I only weigh 70kg now. It’s enough. . . . Everything will be all right. Don’t worry. . . . Lots of kisses for you and Monika and give my love to Omi. Love, Mony.”

  It wasn’t long until the American investigators discovered who Goeth really was. Four former Płaszów prisoners identified him as the commandant of the camp. When they saw Amon Goeth in the company of American soldiers, one of the four witnesses greeted him with the words, “Herr Commandant, four Jewish pigs reporting for duty!”

  Amon Goeth was extradited to Poland, together with the former commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, Rudolf Hoess. Goeth and Hoess arrived at Krakow’s main station on July 30, 1946. An angry mob awaited them, but it wasn’t Rudolf Hoess they were after, the man who had sent hundreds of thousands to their deaths in the gas chambers. It was Amon Goeth whom they wanted to lynch, the “Butcher of Płaszów.”

  Goeth was put on trial in Krakow in late August 1946. It was the first big trial of its kind in Poland, and it was going to last just a few days. The many spectators did not all fit into the courtroom, so the proceedings were broadcast to the outside via loudspeakers. Hundreds of listeners gathered on the lawns opposite the courthouse.

  Goeth was charged with genocide. Among other crimes, he was accused of being responsible for the deaths of around 8,000 people at the Płaszów camp as well as the killings of 2,000 more during the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto. This was in addition to the murder of hundreds of people during the liquidation of the ghettos in Tarnow and Szebnie in the fall of 1943. Furthermore, he was charged with taking unlawful possession of the victims’ valuables. Confronted with the number of witnesses for the prosecution, Amon Goeth reportedly called out: “What? So many Jews? And we were always told there’d be none left.”

  When Goeth was asked if he pleaded guilty, he retorted with a loud “No.” At the trial he denied his crimes, giving the names of other SS men and saying that they had been responsible for the killings. He had only been following orders, he said, he had been a common soldier and had not given any orders himself. When witnesses described the murders in the camp, he looked away indifferently or tried to prove that they were making false claims. He called Oskar Schindler as a witness for the defense, but he did not turn up.

  Absurdly, he also called his former secretary Mietek Pemper as a witness, but Pemper, who had witnessed many of Goeth’s crimes, spoke against him rather than for him.

  The Polish prosecutor demanded the death penalty and said in his summation to the jury: “You are being asked to judge a man who has become a legend during his lifetime for being the modern incarnation of the biblical Satan.”

  Amon Goeth was indeed sentenced to death. He appealed for clemency and asked for the death penalty to be changed into a prison sentence. He wanted to prove that he could be a useful member of society. The appeal was denied.

  On September 13, 1946, Amon Goeth was led to the gallows. His last words were “Heil Hitler.”

  Amon Goeth (left) in Krakow on his way to court where he would be sentenced to death in September 1946

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  THERE ARE MANY THINGS I’d like to ask my grandmother. I think it would have been worthwhile to press her for answers—she had some dents in her armor and might have been willing to talk. As for my grandfather, I have few questions for him. Those images of his execution, of his arm raised defiantly in the air, the Hitler salute his parting gesture from life. If he had ever shown any signs of remorse, I would have liked to question him. Yet, as it was, I think it would have been pointless. He never admitted his guilt. At his trial he lied right up to the end.

  I go to visit the former site of the Płaszów concentration camp.

  Today the hilly ground where the camp used to be is turfed over. There is nothing here to recall the barbed-wire fences, the watchtowers, the quarry where the prisoners toiled, the barracks, the mass graves. Only green grass, in between a McDonald’s restaurant and a busy highway. In the distance, socialist prefab buildings loom against the sky.

  High on a hill, visible from afar, stands the memorial: a larger-than-life sculpture of people with bowed heads, carved from light-colored stone. Where their hearts should be is a gaping hole.

  I am surprised. I can still picture this setting from Schindler’s List. Everything seemed so real, so alive. Now there are no moving pictures, only stones.

  The camp is history; my grandfather has long been dead.

  I hold onto my flowers and climb the wide steps up to the plateau where the memorial stands. From up here I get a much better view of the area. The site looks abandoned and neglected. Without the informational displays, one would never guess at the atrocities that were committed here all those years ago.

  People are jogging by in the drizzling rain; in the distance I can make out others walking their dogs. They probably come here every day, grateful for this park’s existence.

  All alone I stand in front of the memorial. Few people come here at this time of year.

  Reverently, I touch the cold stone with my hand, just like I did at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.

  The memorial for the victims of the Płaszów camp

  During the last few months I’ve been asking myself, Who am I? I’m not so sure anymore: Am I still Jennifer, or am I only Jennifer, the granddaughter of Amon Goeth, now? What counts in my life?

  I can’t just shove my grandfather’s past into a box and put a lid on it. I can’t just say, That’s the past, it’s over, it doesn’t affect me anymo
re. That would be a betrayal of the victims.

  I have come here as I would come to a grave. A grave is a place to care for and to return to in order to honor the dead.

  When somebody dies it is not necessarily essential to go to their funeral. You can say good-bye privately. Yet the visit to the grave is a sign, an important ritual, which is why I have come here today. I want to pay my respects to the victims. To show that I will never forget them.

  Slowly I lay down the flowers and sit on the grass. Only now do I realize that a group of people has gathered in front of the memorial. Children are running over the grass. A school class from Israel. I listen; it sounds dear and familiar.

  Chapter 3

  The Commandant’s Mistress:

  My Grandmother Ruth Irene Kalder

  It was a wonderful time. My Amon was king, I was his queen. Who wouldn’t have relished that?

  —Ruth Irene Goeth in 1975, about her time spent with concentration camp commandant Amon Goeth

  HOW MUCH DID MY GRANDMOTHER KNOW?

  Before my visit to the villa I had convinced myself that she probably wasn’t aware of everything that was going on.

  Before going to Krakow I had imagined rambling grounds, a massive house. The shots fired in the camp would have been too far away, the screams of the maids being terrorized by my grandfather too quiet to hear.

  Only it wasn’t like that. My grandmother was right in the thick of it. The house was small, the camp not far away.

  Was my grandmother not just blinded by love but deafened by it, too?

  Where was my grandmother’s compassion? People were dying a few hundred yards away, and there she was, reveling with Amon Goeth.

  My grandfather has long been dead, but I knew my grandmother. When I was a small child, she was the person who mattered most to me. I had little, if anything, to hold on to. She liked me, and that meant a lot.