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

by Jennifer Teege

  To me, she radiated kindness. Whenever I think of her, I feel safe and secure again.

  And then I read the book about my mother, and now I am learning all these things about my grandmother that blatantly contradict the image I have of her.

  If it hadn’t been for her, maybe discovering Amon Goeth in my family tree wouldn’t have been such a shock. I could have regarded him more as a historical figure; I might not have taken it quite so personally. Yes, he is my grandfather, but he never pushed my stroller or held my hand. But my grandmother did.

  I feel so close to her, which is why I cannot simply shove the image of Amon Goeth to some distant place in history.

  Literature written about the descendants of Nazi criminals sometimes differentiates between those who knew the relative in question and those who didn’t. Some authors conclude that those who never met their Nazi ancestor are generally less troubled by their past. What they ignore, however, is that those born after the event often still know relatives who loved their Nazi ancestor. The living are their connection to the dead.

  My mother was ten months old, a baby, when Amon Goeth was executed. Yet the book about her clearly shows that she is very distressed by the past. She has the same connection to him as I do: Ruth Irene—her mother, my grandmother. The woman who had a picture of Amon Goeth hanging above her bed until her death. My grandmother later said that he was the most important man in her life. What drew her to him?

  The large bus I am on is full of people, but nobody is talking much. We drive along roads lined with low houses; the route is dotted with little villages. The pavement is wet. It has been raining again. I wish the sun would break through the clouds—the place where I’m heading is gloomy enough as it is.

  It is my second and last day in Poland, and I am on my way to Auschwitz. The former concentration camp is only an hour’s drive away from Krakow. I have never been there before, even though Auschwitz is both a powerful symbol and harrowing relic of the Holocaust. Visiting these places is an altogether different experience from just reading about them. Auschwitz is where Amon Goeth sent thousands of Płaszów prisoners—straight to the gas chambers. Did he talk to my grandmother about it? Maybe not, but she must have known it nonetheless.

  The more I try to understand who she really was, the harder I find it to stay objective.

  ■ ■ ■

  Jennifer Teege’s grandmother Ruth Irene Kalder, later Ruth Irene Goeth, was 25 years old when she met Amon Goeth. She came from Gleiwitz in Upper Silesia. Her father owned a driving school and was a member of the Nazi party. Ruth Irene Kalder had qualified as a beautician and had attended a drama school in Essen. During her time there, she allegedly had a relationship with an older man, got pregnant, and subsequently had an abortion.

  In Krakow she was working as a secretary for the Wehrmacht. According to Goeth’s biographer Johannes Sachslehner, she “had a reputation for not being disinclined to little adventures with men in uniform.” She became friendly with the industrialist Oskar Schindler and carried out some secretarial jobs for him. One evening in the spring of 1943, Schindler took her along to a dinner with Amon Goeth.

  Later, in interviews and when talking to her daughter Monika, Ruth Irene Kalder described meeting the concentration camp commandant as love at first sight. Amon Goeth was big and strong, she said, “a true dream for any secretary.” She had “eyes for nobody but this man,” adding that he was funny, intelligent, and well read, “the ideal man, like Clark Gable as Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind.”

  In an interview with the Israeli historian and journalist Tom Segev in 1975, Ruth Irene Kalder also claimed that she was supposed to flirt with Amon Goeth in order to cement his good relationship with Oskar Schindler, who relied on Jewish laborers sourced from Goeth’s camp. “My job as the pretty secretary was to win over his heart so that he would continue to provide us with these workers, since the Jews were now under the control of the camp commandant.”

  The petite, dark-haired young woman instantly hit it off with Amon Goeth. Ruth Irene Kalder recalled that they were soon on first-name terms; as she was leaving, Goeth said to her, “I’ll call you.” When he hadn’t been in touch after a few days, she called him: “You said you’d call, I’m still waiting.” Goeth was surprised but also suspicious. He was under the impression that she was Oskar Schindler’s girlfriend and had called to spy on him. She reassured him that she was only friends with Schindler and arranged to meet him in Płaszów.

  She soon became Goeth’s permanent girlfriend; he gave her the pet name Majola. Her love for Amon Goeth brought her to the grounds of a concentration camp, into the house of its commandant.

  Goeth’s former Jewish maid Helen Rosenzweig has described Ruth Irene Kalder as a “beautiful young woman, with dark hair and wonderfully milky skin. She must have been very much in love with Goeth, for she was always gazing at him.”

  Kalder ignored her beloved Amon’s less loveable side. According to Helen Rosenzweig, Ruth Irene Kalder did not want to know what was going on in the camp: “Most of the time she was busy mixing egg yolk with cucumber and yogurt, and then she would lie around with a cucumber mask on her face. She would turn the music way up so that she couldn’t hear the shots.”

  Film director Steven Spielberg shows Ruth Irene Kalder burying her head in her pillow while Amon Goeth is shooting from his balcony.

  Ruth Irene’s mother, Agnes Kalder, visited her daughter at Płaszów once. Agnes was horrified to see the environment where her daughter was living and returned home early.

  Ruth Irene Kalder, however, enjoyed her life of luxury at the commandant’s side. She later told her daughter Monika that she and Goeth would often start the day with a horseback ride. Afterward, she would apply her extensive makeup. After breakfast she would give the orders for lunch: plenty of meat and alcohol for Amon Goeth, cake and fruit for dessert. In the afternoons, Ruth Irene Kalder would go for another ride, listen to music, or play tennis with the girlfriends and wives of the other SS men. In the evenings there would often be company. Amon Goeth and his girlfriend especially enjoyed having the Rosner brothers, Jewish musicians from the camp, perform for them. On those occasions, Hermann and Poldek Rosner would swap their prison clothes for elegant suits and play the violin and the accordion for Goeth and his guests. And Ruth Irene Kalder, dressed in fine clothes from Krakow shops, would play the lady of the house.

  One photo from Płaszów shows Ruth Irene posing in an elegant riding dress in front of the somber barracks and barbed-wire fences as if she were modeling the latest fashion on the Champs-Élysées. In other photos she is sunbathing in a swimsuit on the patio of the commandant’s villa. Another picture shows her in a stylish hat and coat, standing with her little black lapdog on one side and Goeth’s favorite dog, his spotted Great Dane Rolf, on the other. Presumably, Amon Goeth took this picture of her.

  Ruth Irene Kalder, photographed by Amon Goeth, with Rolf, the Great Dane that Goeth trained to tear humans apart, and her own lapdog

  ■ ■ ■

  FOR ALL THESE YEARS, I’ve had only one photograph of my grandmother. It shows her wearing a long, flowery dress, her hair combed into a beehive, the golden bangle on her arm twinkling in the sun. She is standing on the grass in the English Garden in Munich. A dachshund is playing behind her, a red ball lying in the grass. She is smiling at the camera and looks young, happy, and relaxed. It is a lovely, natural photo, which I have always treasured.

  Now I am finding very different pictures of her, in the book about my mother and on the Internet. Looking at these pictures of her, posing with a dog that would attack people on Goeth’s command—it is unbearable; it is too upsetting. I am exposing myself to a lot, but I can’t and won’t look at these pictures. How could she touch this dog, how could she bear having it near her? After all, it wasn’t a pet, but an animal trained to kill.

  I cannot reconcile these pictures with my image of her.

  I do not grieve for my grandfather, but I do for my grandmoth
er. I grieve for the person she never really was.

  She was always good to me, which is why I always thought of her as a good person. As a child, you cannot imagine that the person you love could have another side, a darker one.

  I really wish that my memories of her had not been tarnished. Why couldn’t she have been just an ordinary grandmother—a nice lady who died one day?

  I had always thought of Irene as one of my three grandmothers, the other two being my adoptive grandmothers, whom I called Oma Vienna and Oma Bochum.

  Oma Bochum was my adoptive father’s mother. She was very short, had gray curly hair—a typical grandmother’s perm—and an energetic, scurrying walk. She would always wear skirts, covered with an apron to keep them clean. Whenever she left the house she would change into her orthopedic pumps with flat heels—the ones I called “click-clack shoes” as a child. When I went to visit her in Bochum with my adoptive family, we would accompany her to the market or to the butcher’s, or help with her gardening. I was never too enthusiastic about planting vegetables or picking fruit, but I loved the results: The shelves in her basement were loaded with jars of stewed fruit. At dinnertime, a gong would summon us to the table.

  She was very disciplined and also a little strict, not a cuddly grandmother. Yet she had a big heart. Even though my Oma Bochum had two children of her own—my adoptive father and his sister—she regarded it her Christian duty to include other children in her family. Helping orphaned or neglected children was a living family tradition. Growing up with a number of foster siblings was a matter of course for my adoptive father, which is why it later seemed natural to him to take in a foster child—me.

  My Oma Bochum was an active member of the Protestant Church and very popular in the community. She would regularly visit the grave of her late husband, who had died young. She normally went to church on Sundays, and eventually she died there, too: She had a heart attack one Sunday in the middle of a service.

  My Oma Vienna, my adoptive mother’s mother, was also short, but very plump. She exuded something motherly, calming. She was always impeccably dressed and enjoyed wearing silk dresses and fur-trimmed coats. As a child, I often stayed with her; I preferred Vienna to Bochum—the city was more exciting. Oma Vienna would sometimes behave like a small child herself: Once we played a trick on Opa and pretended that we had all run away, Oma and the children. Opa played along, pretending to be really worried.

  Only Christmastime was odd with Oma Vienna. We would all sing carols under the tree, but she wouldn’t join in for fear of striking the wrong notes.

  We often went on vacation with our grandparents from Vienna, too: skiing in the winter, hiking in the Austrian Alps, or camping by the sea in Italy in the summer. Opa sometimes told us wartime stories about his time with Rommel in Africa. Oma never talked to us about the war. In 1945, she had fled the area that is now the Czech Republic for Vienna. The journey was a terrible experience for her, but she would never discuss it.

  And then there is my fourth grandmother, in Nigeria—my other biological grandmother besides Irene. I don’t know much about her. I met my father once, when I was 28. He told me that, when my mother wanted to give me away to the orphanage, he had suggested that I might as well live with his mother in Nigeria. He would have preferred that to the orphanage, but my mother didn’t like the idea. I guess she wasn’t ready then to give me up entirely. While I was at the orphanage, my mother could still visit me, and she would still have had the option to take me back.

  I imagine my African grandmother as a tall, proud woman, a strict matriarch. I find it remarkable that she would have been prepared to take me in. For that I am very grateful to her, and I sometimes wonder, what if . . . ?

  I have never compared my grandmothers to each other, during my childhood or later. They were far too dissimilar for that. I had separate relationships with each of them, and each was important in her own way.

  Nonetheless, Irene occupied a special place in my heart. She was one of the first people I was attached to as a child.

  When I was seven and my adoption became official, my adoptive parents broke off all contact with my mother; they thought that it would be best for me. With that, my grandmother also disappeared from my life. She left behind a gap, I missed her.

  I was 13 when last I heard about her: My adoptive parents told me that my grandmother had died. They had seen the obituary notice in the newspaper. It didn’t mention that she had killed herself.

  I didn’t ask any questions. My biological family was not a subject we talked about in my new family. There was a deep and stony silence—a tacit agreement between my adoptive parents and me not to mention my mother or grandmother. Not that my adoptive parents could have told me much about them anyway; they didn’t know anything.

  I remember feeling sad when I heard about my grandmother’s death. I had always hoped to see her again one day, but now she was gone for good.

  Before I came across the book in the library, all I had were my memories: My grandmother enjoyed my company. With my mother I often felt that I wasn’t welcome—my mother would pull me along by the arm when she was impatient, but Irene never did.

  I remember only one exchange with my grandmother that confused me: For some reason I was feeling sad, but she was very unsympathetic and told me not to cry. I didn’t understand what my grandmother had against tears.

  She was not your classic grandmother; I wasn’t even allowed to call her Oma, just Irene. Maybe she didn’t want to be considered old. It’s been said that she paid a lot of attention to her looks—her appearance was very important to her. Even my mother called her only by her first name; that’s what it says in the book.

  I remember her apartment in Schwind Strasse, in Schwabing. We would usually sit in her open-plan kitchen with the American radio station AFN turned on. I still enjoy listening to English-language radio stations; in Hamburg I often tuned into a British military station, and in Israel I’d listen to the Voice of Peace.

  She didn’t have a living room, as such. At home with my adoptive family in the Waldtrudering suburb of Munich, we would hang out on the sofa in the living room, and we would wear comfortable “house clothes” indoors. This would have been unthinkable at Irene’s. It is true that I always felt at ease with my grandmother, but never quite at home: I was still a visitor. She was always elegantly dressed and nicely made up—everything was a little formal. The kitchen was always clean and tidy; I never saw her cooking or baking.

  Unfortunately I have far too few concrete memories of her; I think of her as a child would: someone who cares, someone who protects.

  Whenever my mother picked me up from the orphanage—or later, from my foster family—and dropped me off at my grandmother’s, it meant that I didn’t have to go my mother’s place in Hasenbergl.

  It wasn’t like my mother had a happy family at home: Her then-husband was a drunkard and a wife-beater, and I felt constantly threatened by him. I never knew whether he was going to be there or not. If he was out, I’d hope that he wouldn’t come back. I was always listening for the sound of his key in the lock or his footsteps in the corridor.

  At my grandmother’s, I felt safe. When I entered her kitchen, everything was all right.

  ■ ■ ■

  Helen Rosenzweig, Goeth’s former Jewish maid, tells this story about Ruth Irene Kalder: “Once she came down to see us in the kitchen. She reached out her hands to us and said: ‘If I could send you home I would, but it’s not in my power.’”

  In Amon Goeth’s villa, the maids, Helen Hirsch and Helen Rosenzweig, were subjected to constant abuse: He summoned them by shouting or by ringing a bell that could be heard all over the house. Often he would beat them if they didn’t come running fast enough. One of those beatings left Helen Hirsch with a burst left eardrum; she remained deaf in that ear. Helen Rosenzweig has described how Goeth pushed her down the stairs countless times. “In his house, at his mercy, I lost all fear of death. It was like living under the gallows, twen
ty-four hours a day.”

  Ruth Irene Kalder later told her daughter Monika that she once intervened when Goeth was threatening to beat one of the maids with a bull pizzle—a dried bull’s penis that was used as a flogging tool in the concentration camps. In the ensuing struggle, Amon ended up hitting Ruth, which he felt awful about. He came close to tears, she said, and apologized over and over, and after that he never again used a bull pizzle in the house. Ruth Irene also told her daughter another grotesque anecdote: She once threatened not to sleep with Goeth anymore “if he didn’t stop shooting at the Jews.” Apparently it worked.

  Helen Rosenzweig felt she had spotted a “shred of humanity” in Ruth Irene Kalder. She remembers, for example, that Ruth would make it a point to praise the maids in front of Amon Goeth and that she always treated them with respect.

  When Helen Rosenzweig’s sisters were to be transported from Płaszów—presumably to Auschwitz—Helen Hirsch ran to Ruth Irene Kalder and begged her to prevent their deportation. At first, she refused: “Please don’t ask me to do this!” Eventually, however, she caved in and called the camp police to stop the deportation of the Rosenzweig sisters. When Ruth Irene confessed her unauthorized rescue mission to Goeth, he was furious. According to Helen Hirsch, he came running to the kitchen with his rifle to find the maids, but eventually he calmed down.

  Helen Hirsch also reported that the inebriated Goeth once tried to sexually assault her. Ruth Irene Kalder heard her cries and came running to her rescue. Goeth then let her go.

  There are a number of eyewitnesses who remember that Ruth Irene Kalder tried to exert a moderating influence on Amon Goeth’s behavior. She is said to have taken a stand for individual prisoners and to have prevented the torture and shooting of a number of inmates. In her presence, Amon Goeth is said to have been more restrained and mild-mannered. In another example, according to contemporary witnesses, she once called Goeth away from the parade ground while he was having prisoners whipped. Ruth Irene Kalder, however, would later claim that she never set foot in the camp.