Emilie Schindler recounted that around the middle of 1944, her husband Oskar reported that Goeth was getting tired of his girlfriend; the woman was “too peace-loving” and always trying “to dissuade him from his sadistic excesses.”
That said, the fact that Ruth Irene Kalder sometimes half-heartedly tried to help the victims goes to show that she knew how Amon Goeth was treating them and what crimes were being committed in the camp.
In his autobiography, Goeth’s secretary Mietek Pemper writes that Ruth Irene Kalder would sometimes type highly confidential documents for Goeth. Pemper believes that she also helped compile a list of prisoners to be executed.
Later, Ruth Irene Kalder would often stress two things, namely that Płaszów had only ever been a labor camp, not a death camp, and that there had been only adults in the camp, and no children.
Nonetheless, she told her daughter Monika that she had once observed children being transported from the camp by truck. Monika Goeth has said that her mother could not stop thinking about those children and that she believes her mother put her memories of the event to paper.
The trucks Ruth Irene Kalder remembered were probably those which took the children from Płaszów to Auschwitz on May 14, 1944. Goeth needed to create space in his camp for a number of Hungarian Jews who were due to arrive. Accordingly, he wrote in a letter to an SS leader, he had to “purge” the camp of its old, ill, and weak inmates, as well as its children, and thereby liquidate all the “unproductive elements.” In other words, he was going to deport the weak and the ill from Płaszów to the gas chambers at the nearby camp of Auschwitz, for “special treatment.”
Notices were put up at the parade ground proclaiming “Appropriate work for every prisoner.” Loudspeakers blared out cheery tunes as the prisoners were told to undress and parade past the camp doctors. According to an eyewitness, among them was Josef Mengele, the infamous camp doctor from Auschwitz, who had come specially and was noting down the names of the children. A week later, the result of this so-called “health action” was announced. Those who were to be removed to Auschwitz had to gather on one side of the square: around 1,200 people in total, including about 250 children.
Płaszów survivor Stella Mueller-Madej describes the scene as the children were being herded onto the truck: “The whole place is pandemonium. Fathers and mothers are sobbing. The children, who until then had been silent like dolls and frozen with horror, are now screaming and pleading . . . They are crying for help . . . A very young child tries to crawl away to safety on all fours. A female guard . . . grabs . . . her by her hands and throws her little body onto the truck bed like a sack of potatoes. It is unbearable. Everyone on the parade ground is crying, the whips are lashing down, the dogs are barking . . . At that moment the loudspeakers start to play waltz music . . . and the trucks head off to the camp gate.”
Shortly after their arrival at Auschwitz, the children were killed.
■ ■ ■
JUST AS MY GRANDMOTHER, HER WHOLE LIFE, made excuses for Amon Goeth and romanticized him, I tended to regard her too favorably in the beginning of my research. I told myself, “She didn’t do anyone any harm. She was not actively involved in his deeds.”
I knew so little about my grandmother. I saw my mother once again in my early twenties, but my grandmother had already passed away by then. When reading the book about my mother, I scrutinized the pictures of Irene closely—at first only the private ones from the years after the war, and then later the historic ones, too. Sometimes I can see myself in her.
I also love the good life. I drive a comfortable car, enjoy living in a big house, and appreciate modern conveniences. Like my grandmother, I like beautiful things, and I don’t mind if they cost a little extra. But surely the question is: How high is the price?
I don’t think it was just the status and the money that kept my grandmother in Płaszów—she undeniably enjoyed living in prosperity with Goeth, but I doubt that the luxury lifestyle alone would have been enough. After the war, she lived a much more modest life.
I think she was madly in love with Amon Goeth. Maybe she was also fascinated by his power, but there must have been more, some sort of inescapable pull or need, which blocked out everything else.
My grandmother never married or had a long-term relationship later in life. No matter who drifted in or out of her life after the war, Amon’s photograph always hung in the same spot—another reason I think her relationship with Amon Goeth was based on more than a mere cost-benefit calculation.
I know how this feels, this evidently boundless love, because I’m exactly the same way. When I love someone, I love unconditionally. In this I can understand my grandmother. When I’m in love with a man, I give him carte blanche: In theory, he can do as he likes; he will always have a special place in my heart. I won’t tell him so, of course, and it doesn’t mean that I will always tolerate or approve of his behavior, but the love will always be there.
That raises the question, what would I have done in my grandmother’s place? Could I have fallen for this sadist of a man? I can’t give a straight answer to that, but just the thought of someone beating his servants with a bull pizzle is enough to turn my stomach.
By way of apology for my grandmother, my mother has said that the camp was not visible from the bedroom at the villa. The Jews in the camp allegedly said of my grandmother: “She’s one of us.” Her name was Ruth, after all, a Jewish name.
Am I to believe that? Or am I just glad to have an excuse? I am of two minds: On the one hand, I want to sustain the lovely image of my grandmother. On the other hand, I want to know the truth. At college I used to gather reference material and compare the different sources. What mattered in the end were not my assumptions, but the hard facts. It is the same with my grandmother: I have gathered a lot of material about her in order to gain a better understanding of her.
I am no judge; it is not my place to pass judgment on her. I just want to see her as who she really was.
My first reaction when I read about her trying to help the victims was one of relief. I thought, “She wasn’t like my grandfather, maybe she was on the side of good.” But now I am ashamed of this thought.
I try to picture the scene with the maids again: My grandmother standing in the kitchen and telling Helen, who had to fear for her life every moment of every day, that she would help her if only she could. There is a great coldness in that, too. She took a step toward Helen, but then abandoned her after all.
She had seen the maids’ suffering; she was aware that she was caught in a predicament. But that’s the fatal thing: She could tell right from wrong. She could have made a choice. But she was too selfish to let this inner conflict come to the surface.
She felt pity for others and even helped some of them. But is that enough? Absolutely not. I don’t care whether she intervened a hundred times or a thousand. The fact is, it didn’t change her priorities. In the end, she was just looking out for herself.
I believe that there is a difference between me and my grandmother, and a very fundamental one: I could never live with a murderer; I could never bear to be with a man who took pleasure in tormenting other people.
■ ■ ■
Whenever Jennifer Teege talks about her grandmother, her voice goes soft and her eyes beam.
Her feelings fluctuate between rejection and affection, attack and defense. She cannot get a handle on who her grandmother really was.
“I had no idea.” Ruth Irene Kalder would repeat this sentence often after the war. It is a sentence that many young Germans have grown up with: Parents and grandparents claim they had no knowledge of the murder of countless people—and their children and grandchildren don’t know whether or not to believe them, whether or not they should believe them.
But surely you must have known!
Is it possible that no knowledge of what was really going on filtered down to the ordinary Germans?
In 2011, Friedrich Kellner’s diaries from the years 1939 to 194
5 were published for the first time. During the war, Friedrich Kellner was a simple judicial officer. He came from a modest background and lived in the Hessian backcountry until his death in 1970. He had no access to secret files, but simply wrote down the bits of information he overheard, gleaned from conversation with other locals and, above all, read in newspapers available to the general public. His diaries are evidence of what those who “had no idea” could have known about the dictatorial regime, the war, and the Holocaust. For example, in 1941 Friedrich Kellner wrote: “The mental asylums have turned into centers for murder.” Reading the newspapers, he had noticed a suspiciously high number of death notices for people in mental hospitals. He had also been told about a case where a couple was able to bring their mentally ill son home from such a hospital just in time. Around the same time, immediately after the attack on the Soviet Union, Friedrich Kellner heard about the mass murder of the Jews: “A soldier who was home on leave described the awful atrocities he had witnessed in occupied Poland. He had seen how naked Jews, men and women, were made to stand in front of a long, deep trench. Upon SS command, a number of Ukrainian men shot them in the backs of their heads and they fell into the trench. The trenches were filled in even though screams could still be heard from within!” In September 1942, two Jewish families were deported from Kellner’s hometown, Laubach. In his diary he writes: “In the last few days, the Jews from our district have been deported. From Laubach they took the Strausses and the Heinemanns. A well-informed source tells me that all the Jews are being taken to Poland, where they will be murdered by SS troops.”
In 1996, the artist Gunter Demnig started laying stolpersteine, or “stumbling blocks”—cobblestone-sized, brass memorials—in front of houses where victims of the Nazis used to live. Now in over 800 German towns and villages, they make the number of victims palpable: In some streets there are stolpersteine in front of every other house, sometimes with a single name, sometimes with the names of an entire family. On these streets it would have been glaringly obvious that some neighbors were missing: the Jewish family, the girl with Down syndrome, the homosexual, the communist.
Yet in many German families, the parents and grandparents have never been asked any probing questions. “The Nazis” were others. It is inconceivable that the friendly grandfather might have committed any crimes on the frontline, or that the kindly grandmother might have cheered Hitler. Just as unimaginable as it was for Jennifer Teege to discover that her grandmother once enjoyed the good life on the edge of a concentration camp.
This self-delusion, this schizophrenic view of one’s own historical narrative, is rarely as apparent as it is with Ruth Irene Kalder. She was no perpetrator, but she was a bystander and a profiteer. Amon Goeth made his career, and she joined him in it. Amon Goeth remains a stranger we can distance ourselves from, but in Ruth Irene Kalder, the seduced opportunist, we can recognize some part of ourselves.
When she learned of Amon Goeth’s execution from the newsreel, Ruth Irene Kalder is said to have ranted and raved. Monika Goeth remembers her grandmother, Agnes Kalder, claiming that Ruth Irene’s hair went white and that she subsequently died it black.
Monika Goeth also recounts that her mother repeatedly watched the American film I Want to Live with Susan Hayward in the title role. The film makes a passionate plea against the death penalty; it shows an innocent woman being executed for a murder she didn’t commit.
The Third Man was also among her favorite films. Ruth Irene Kalder is said to have seen herself in the beautiful actress Alida Valli. In the famous post-war film, Alida Valli plays the girlfriend of murderer Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles. She stands by her lover with total devotion, loyal to the grave.
According to her daughter Monika, Ruth Irene Kalder did go on to have relationships with other men, but she didn’t love any of them as she had loved Amon. After the war, she dated a US army officer for a short while. He paid for her English lessons. Even after he returned home to his wife and child in Texas, he continued to send her regular love letters and monthly checks until her suicide in 1983.
In 1948, two years after Amon Goeth’s execution, Ruth Irene Kalder asked the American authorities in US-occupied Germany to allow her to take on Goeth’s name, claiming that it was only the confusion at the end of the war that had prevented them from getting married.
Goeth’s father, Amon Franz Goeth, with whom Kalder had been corresponding, supported her request. He confirmed that his son and Ruth Irene Kalder had gotten engaged before the end of the war. Since Goeth’s divorce from his second wife had already been finalized, Ruth Irene was allowed to drop her maiden name, Kalder. From then on she was known as Ruth Irene Goeth.
Amon Goeth lived on in her stories—as a charming, witty gentleman from Vienna who sadly died a hero’s death in the war. Ruth Irene Goeth never spoke of the crimes committed during the war; in this she was no different from most of her contemporaries. More than once, Ruth Irene struck her daughter Monika because she would not stop asking questions.
Monika Goeth describes her mother as self-absorbed and cold-hearted, a woman who was mainly concerned with her own beauty. When she had a facelift, she also had her nose, which she considered “Jewish-looking,” straightened. She was a woman who carried a lifelong unhappiness because the world had taken her great love away from her too soon.
It does not appear as if Ruth Irene secreted away any of the riches Amon Goeth had amassed in Płaszów. Ruth Irene Kalder worked as a secretary and sometimes posed as a fashion model for catalogues; in the evenings she often worked at the Gruene Gans—the Green Goose, a bar in the trendy quarter of Schwabing. Her daughter Monika has described how her mother loved strutting around Schwabing in a dress to match her lipstick, with her equally well-groomed poodle, Monsieur, by her side.
Ruth Irene was not interested in Monika or her problems, Monika Goeth has said of her mother: “Ruth wasn’t concerned with much. What feelings she had were reserved for her dead lover, for Amon.”
■ ■ ■
THE BOOK ABOUT MY MOTHER DELIVERS a double blow: It broke my enchantment with my grandmother twice. She is described as heartless and selfish: first at the side of the concentration camp commandant, and then as a terrible mother. Even worse than that—as a monstrous kind of mother who neglects and hits her daughter. In the book, my mother criticizes her severely; she hardly has anything kind to say about her at all.
I don’t think that is very fair to my grandmother. After all, she is dead and can’t defend herself.
At the same time, the book clearly illustrates the degree to which my mother’s life has been dominated by her struggle with my grandmother. But despite everything, they always kept in touch. When my mother was pregnant with me, she even lived with Irene for a while.
What is striking is the close relationship my mother had with her grandmother Agnes, Irene’s mother. My mother spent her entire childhood living with her mother and grandmother in the apartment in Schwabing. A household with three women, three generations beneath one roof. The men—my great-grandfather and Amon Goeth—were dead.
According to the book, my grandmother was jealous of Monika’s close relationship with Agnes; she felt like an outsider between two soulmates. During my mother’s childhood, Agnes was her calm anchor and her pillar of support.
Sometimes I feel like history is repeating itself: Just as my mother had a close relationship with her grandmother and a difficult one with her mother, I used to feel at home with my grandmother and uncomfortable with my own mother. It appears that love tends to skip a generation in my family.
Again and again my mother stresses how obsessed my grandmother was with her looks, and how beautiful she was—like a young Elizabeth Taylor. While Irene was always dressed smartly, Monika allegedly ran around in rags.
Irene is reduced to her failures as a mother, and to her vanity—as if she had spent half her life in front of the mirror perfecting her makeup.
I don’t believe that Irene was only selfish
and vain. She was an attractive and unusual woman. She didn’t look for a provider, which was the norm in postwar Germany, but stood on her own two feet: She worked as a secretary at the Goethe Institute for many years. This is something else we have in common: I also worked at the Goethe Institute, while studying in Israel.
What was unusual for somebody of her generation was that she spoke very good English and often read the British Times. Her apartment was full of books, among them Tucholsky, Boell, and Brecht. She was interested in drama and literature. She voted for the socialist SPD party and was a fan of the politician Willy Brandt.
My grandmother was very liberal for her time: For a while she shared her flat with a transvestite called Lulu and went out on the town with him and his gay friends. My parents met when one of my father’s friends, also African, was living as a lodger in my grandmother’s house. Having an African man living in your house was far from normal in Munich in the 1960s and ’70s. She was no racist.
I would have loved to ask my grandmother’s friends some questions about her, but all I have is what journalists have reported about her—and my mother’s opinions. Neither source is exactly full of praise. Usually I can trust my gut; I have a keen sense of character. Can I really have been so wrong about my grandmother?
When I was about seventeen years old, my adoptive parents gave me a postcard from my grandmother. They had kept it from me until then because they were worried that I would be torn between my old family and my new one. My grandmother had sent me the card for my seventh birthday, together with a picture book she had picked out for me. I would have preferred to have received these things much earlier. It would have been helpful and important to me—after all, they were tangible possessions, memories of the natural family who had suddenly disappeared from my life when I was adopted.
My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family's Nazi Past Page 7