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

by Jennifer Teege

  I went to bed worried sick that they would send me back to Salberg House. Like all abandoned children, I was traumatized by feelings of worthlessness. After all, my original parents hadn’t found me loveable enough to keep.

  My adoptive parents tried their hardest to be perfect parents, but they could not dispel my fear of being abandoned again. I thought that I had to earn their love over and over. I was missing a basic sense of trust.

  One night, I dreamed that my brothers and I were sharing a peach: one half for each of them, which left me with just the stone.

  It highlighted my underlying feeling: Whatever my brothers had was beyond my reach.

  My adoptive parents set high store by performance and achievement. They taught us the importance of diligence and good grades from an early age. When Matthias was in fourth grade, he took an intelligence test. His results were outstanding; Inge and Gerhard were very proud.

  Manuel was in my class. He was also one of the best students and achieved top grades in every subject. My own grades were so-so, and for many years I doubted my intelligence.

  I must have been ten or eleven when one day I went hunting through the closets in my parents’ bedroom. They weren’t home, and I was hoping to discover some hidden Christmas presents.

  What I found was a card with a gold chain and pendant. The card was signed, “Lots of love from Monika and little Charlotte.” Little Charlotte—that must be my younger half-sister, I thought, the girl my mother was about to have when she gave me up for adoption.

  I did not confront my adoptive parents. I was too embarrassed for having rummaged through their closets.

  At least now I knew that my mother was still thinking of me.

  At age twelve or thirteen, during an argument with my parents, I demanded to be put in touch with my mother. Furiously, I declared that I wanted to see her again. My adoptive parents explained that I should wait until I was sixteen. Then I would be legally entitled to know my mother’s address and to contact her if I so wished.

  ■ ■ ■

  In the 1970s, it was common practice for adoptive parents to break all contact between their adopted child and the biological parents.

  The realization that it is in the best interest of the child’s development to deal openly with their past took hold only gradually. But every child has a right to know their origins; it even says so in the 1990 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

  Today, adoptive parents are advised to explain the reasons for the adoption to their child from an early age, and to keep an album with photos of the child’s natural parents, for example. It is also recommended that they find out as much as they can about the child’s history. They have to be proactive, since many children don’t dare to raise any questions themselves.

  Nowadays, adoption clinics are more likely to discuss potential problems a child may encounter as a consequence of adoption. Studies have shown that adopted children are more likely than birth children to feel unloved, have self-doubt, crave recognition, and fear abandonment. They are often afraid to commit and are more likely to suffer from severe depression and to seek psychiatric treatment.

  Often, they will test their adoptive parents sorely: Will they still love me even if I behave really badly? Puberty, in particular, is liable to turn into an endurance test for the adoptive child and parents.

  ■ ■ ■

  GERHARD AND INGE NEVER HEARD ME use the phrase that adopted children typically seem to shout at their parents: “You’re not my real parents anyway, you can’t tell me what to do!” It wouldn’t even have occurred to me, since I was grateful to them. They had taken me in, given me a new life and a future.

  But by the time I reached puberty, I was no longer content with just gratitude.

  My rebellion against Inge and Gerhard was always partly driven by the question about my mother, by the question of who I really was.

  At my adoptive family’s dinner table, everybody had their place. Mine was on the left, in front of the windowsill with the flowerpots. But it wasn’t only the seats that were set, our roles were as well: Manuel, blond and slim, was always best at everything, the highly intelligent one, while still being friendly and uncomplicated. He was closely followed by Matthias, equally strong at school, calm and bright, but less predictable than his ever-diplomatic brother.

  My role was that of the fun-loving goose. When the dinner table conversation revolved around politics or culture, I turned away or yawned pointedly.

  Chernobyl, the Cold War—those were the topics of the eighties. Inge and Gerhard were very interested in politics. Inge was a member of Women for Peace, and the whole family joined anti-rearmament demonstrations. Gerhard, who had always been a loyal follower of the Social Democrats, voted for the Green Party for the first time. They went about saving energy and separating their trash for recycling with ardent zeal (I was the only one who refused to rinse my yogurt cups).

  My brother Matthias was elected student body president at our high school. He was much more involved at school than I; he distributed flyers he’d printed himself and painted banners: a Pershing missile with an X through it.

  Manuel was very interested in protecting the environment, too; he went on to study geoecology at college. His stickers proclaiming “Nuclear power? No thanks!” graced our bedroom door.

  Eventually, we children each had our own bedroom. Mine had a pitched roof with a window opening onto the sky. I pushed my bed right under the window so that I could watch the clouds. I read a lot, spending hours up there with my books; I retreated into my own little world.

  My room also served as a kind of “coffee house” where I would meet with my brothers. We would hang a sign on the door reading POD—short for “problem-oriented discussions,” and talk about the things we weren’t comfortable discussing with Inge and Gerhard: our friendships, broken hearts, fears, and dreams.

  When I thought about my mother in those times, I would only recall her positive side; I’d suppress the bad. Lying in my bed at night, I would try to remember what she looked like and picture her long, dark hair. I envisioned her showing up at the door one day, taking me into her arms, stroking me. She would take me home, I fantasized, buy me expensive things, and allow me to do all the things my adoptive parents barred me from doing: wearing makeup or pantyhose, for example, or playing with Barbie dolls.

  I soon wanted to get away from my family, from Germany. We weren’t a normal family, yet no one seemed to notice but me. At 16 I went on my first vacation without my parents. On an InterRail pass, I crisscrossed Europe with a girlfriend, discovering Paris, Rome, and the Spanish island of Formentera by rail and by boat.

  My late teenage years were more carefree than my childhood. I spent less time thinking about my mother and stopped brooding so much. Matthias’ and my motto was carpe diem—seize the day. I had a large number of friends and went out most nights; I particularly enjoyed parties. On the weekends I worked at a club, the Skyscraper. A bouncer would check you out at the door; if you passed, you took an elevator to the top floor, which offered a sweeping view of Leopold Street, Schwabing’s famous boulevard, below. Above the dance floor was a sliding roof; in the summer, people would dance under the open sky. I was 18; I worked behind the bar and thought that everyone there was ultra-cool, me included. I was not allowed to drink while at work, but I could smoke. I smoked like a chimney.

  Then one day, when I was 20 and had recently graduated from high school, a girl named Charlotte called our home telephone. Matthias answered the call and took a message for me: “Some girl called Charlotte wants to talk to you.” I remembered the card I had found in my parents’ closet, and my mother’s words: “Lots of love from Monika and little Charlotte.”

  My half-sister. The girl who had essentially “replaced” me: When my mother became pregnant with Charlotte, she gave me up for adoption. Charlotte came, I went. I did the math in my head: She had to be fourteen now.

  I returned her call. A young, friendly voice. Charlotte expl
ained that she would be visiting Munich soon, to see her father. Hagen—the man who beat my mother. He still haunts me in my dreams. Charlotte explained that he and my mother were now divorced.

  Charlotte and I arranged to meet in a café the following evening. She had light brown, shoulder-length hair; she was wearing pants and a T-shirt. We talked for hours. She told me about her childhood and asked me, “Is your new family nice?”

  She also described how she found out about me. By chance, she had discovered her mother’s maternity log, with details of all her mother’s pregnancies. Under “Children,” she had spotted my name listed above hers. Charlotte ran to our mother and showed her the log. “Who is Jennifer?” she wanted to know. My mother claimed that I had died. Charlotte didn’t believe her and probed further. In the end, my mother admitted that I wasn’t dead. Only adopted.

  My mother told Charlotte my new surname, which is how she found me and my brothers in the phonebook. (We children had our own landline because we would spend so much time on the phone.)

  On impulse, Charlotte and I decided to meet again in two days’ time. We drove to Starnberg and walked along the lakeshore. The sun was shining, and we spent the whole afternoon together. It was strange having a sister all of a sudden, but somehow it was nice, too. At the same time, I sensed that something wasn’t quite right with her.

  A few days after my meeting with Charlotte, my mother contacted my adoptive parents. She wanted to meet with me, preferably at our house in Waldtrudering. I didn’t like that idea; it was too much—after all these years, I wanted to meet my mother on my own. I suggested that my mother could see just Inge and Gerhard first. I would wait to meet with her afterward, in a café downtown.

  ■ ■ ■

  By the time Monika Goeth saw her daughter Jennifer in 1991, she had been divorced from her husband Hagen for several years. In the end, he had threatened her with a gun, and she had called the police.

  She met her second husband, Dieter, at work: Monika worked as a secretary at one of Munich’s universities. Dieter was very different from her first husband; he was calm, kind, and friendly. “Like winning the lottery,” Monika said. After the wedding, Monika Goeth took on her husband’s surname, by which she was known in private and in public from then on.

  Dieter was soon offered a job in the country, and the family moved to a small village in Bavaria.

  Charlotte started doing drugs at a young age. By her teen years, she was abusing heroin. She spent many years battling her addiction.

  Monika Goeth brought Dieter along to the meeting with the Siebers. Inge and Gerhard had set up a table in their garden under the apple tree, and, together with Jennifer’s eldest brother Matthias, they welcomed Monika and her husband into their home.

  This time, Inge Sieber found Jennifer’s mother more approachable. “She was very nice and said that she wished I could have adopted her too, that she would have had a better life then. I was pleased and touched by her praise.” Matthias remembers the conversation as rather awkward and stilted. He recalls that Jennifer’s mother seemed very nervous.

  After a while, Inge Sieber told Monika Goeth: “You’d better go now, our daughter is waiting for you.”

  ■ ■ ■

  I HAD BEEN WAITING in the café on Wiener Platz in Munich for a while when a woman entered. A man was with her, and I nearly didn’t recognize her: She had shoulder-length hair, dyed dark blonde. The last time I had seen her, 15 years ago, she’d had long, dark hair, which I liked better.

  She was heading straight toward me. I got up. Uncertain of what to do, we shook hands. I was disappointed that she had brought her husband along. Why hadn’t she come on her own? I had hoped for a private conversation.

  Nevertheless, I was glad to see her again after all those years. I talked a lot, trying to make a good impression. I told her about my final exams, my recent trip to France, and my plans to visit a friend in Israel. She didn’t comment on anything.

  She remained guarded and hardly talked about herself. I didn’t dare ask her any of the questions that were burning inside me: Why did you give me away? Why did I never see you or my grandmother again? What did Irene die of?

  We had lost so much time, and now that we were sitting opposite each other, the distance seemed immense.

  We parted with another formal handshake.

  I hoped that we would see each other again soon, but my mother didn’t call. Not after a week, not after a month, not after a year.

  I didn’t call her either. It wasn’t a conscious decision; I just assumed that she would call me. After all, she was the mother. I didn’t call Charlotte, either, since she was living with my mother.

  Years after the meeting in the café, I was lying on the couch of the first therapist I saw for my depression. She asked about my mother, and suddenly my head started whirring. Like a film, my last meeting with my mother replayed before my eyes. And I got it at last: My mother didn’t want anything to do with me, and she would never get in touch with me again.

  Our “good-bye” in the café had not been open-ended. She hadn’t forgotten to call me; she just didn’t want to. Why not? Did I mean so little to her? For months, I went from grief to rage and back again, but worst of all was the sense of powerlessness.

  When I first began to suffer from depression, there were days when I would sit for hours, the photo album from my earliest childhood on my knees, trying to remember everything. I went to Inge and Gerhard’s and asked questions—questions I should have asked a long time ago. What was it like when my mother came to collect me? How did we greet each other? And when she dropped me off again, did I hug her before she left? Was there any affection at all? Did they know her violent husband? Inge and Gerhard seemed surprised that I would bring it up now, after all these years. They said that they could not recall any displays of affection between me and my mother, no hugging. They had never met her husband Hagen either.

  For many years, I had to deal with those questions on my own. Every now and then I thought about contacting my mother, but I never did.

  Now, I have finally written to her, we have spoken. On our phone call, I also asked her about my half-sister Charlotte. My mother gave me her phone number, so I called her and we arranged to meet. Again, I am going to see my sister before I meet with my mother.

  I am stunned by how pretty Charlotte is. She is wearing her long hair loose, and she has a beautifully curved mouth. Her appearance belies the difficult years she has behind her. Again we talk about our different childhoods, about our mother. I have the impression that our conversation stirs up memories for Charlotte that she would rather keep blocked out. I witnessed my mother and Hagen’s disastrous marriage on my childhood visits to Hasenbergl. Charlotte spent her entire childhood in that broken home; she experienced every row firsthand.

  I realize that our conversation is taking a toll on her, and I feel sorry for her. I am enjoying seeing her again, but I am not sure if she feels the same. Am I asking too many questions? Or am I talking too much about my life, about my studies abroad, my travels—all the opportunities she never had? I don’t want to hurt my sister.

  I am getting angry with my mother again: Why didn’t she protect Charlotte? But I have resolved not to be angry anymore. I want to meet my mother openly, without any reservations.

  I would love to have a relationship with her. True, we have lived separate lives, but in the end we are still connected. I, too, have carried the burden of our family secret.

  ■ ■ ■

  Jennifer Teege quickly understood that her grandfather was a criminal. It had taken her mother years to realize that.

  Ruth Irene’s suicide in 1983 changed Monika Goeth’s view of her father, Amon Goeth: “Until then I had always fought against my father. After Irene’s death I suddenly felt that I had to protect him—there was nobody else left who would have done that now. I wanted to accept Amon at last so that Irene could be at peace.”

  In 1994, Schindler’s List came to German cinemas. Mon
ika Goeth could not watch it to the end. Every time Amon Goeth—portrayed by the actor Ralph Fiennes—produced his pistol, Monika Goeth thought: “Stop it, just stop it!”

  After watching the film, she stayed in bed for three days. Her husband called a doctor, who diagnosed a nervous breakdown.

  Now Monika Goeth wanted to know all the details: She researched in archives, visited Krakow and Auschwitz again and again. She met with survivors from Płaszów. Monika did not walk to those meetings—she trudged there, burdened by guilt and shame and insecurity. Some survivors told her that they felt anxious near her, that they could not bear her presence since she looked so much like her father.

  Regarding her father’s deeds, Monika Goeth has said: “I believe all that, but I can’t live with it. They hanged my father three times; my mother took her own life. I think that, surely, one day, my life will also come to a violent end.”

  Monika Goeth underwent a kind of public therapy—but not guided by a psychologist: The documentary filmmaker Matthias Kessler submitted her to a long, torturous interview, confronting her with her father’s crimes. He would later turn it into a book with the title I Have to Love My Father, Don’t I? It was that book that Jennifer Teege discovered in a library in Hamburg in the summer of 2008.

  In 2006, filmmaker James Moll recorded the meeting between Monika Goeth and Płaszów survivor Helen Rosenzweig on film. Both women cried when they met in Płaszów. Their meeting is marked by misunderstandings, with Monika still repeating the phrases she grew up with: She explains to Helen Rosenzweig that Amon Goeth only shot Jews because they spread infectious diseases. Helen Rosenzweig is shocked. She interrupts Monika Goeth and asks: “Monika, please stop, stop right now.” The film, Inheritance, first aired on German television in 2008, the day after Jennifer Teege found the book about her mother.

  Monika Goeth later regretted her demeanor in James Moll’s film. “I would never try to defend Amon again. I would just be quiet and listen to Helen.”