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

by Jennifer Teege

  As Jennifer Teege, her husband, and her sons set off, Jennifer’s adoptive parents wave good-bye.

  ■ ■ ■

  I AM LOOKING FORWARD TO SEEING my mother again. This time, Charlotte will be coming, too, and my husband and our children. A Good Friday out with my family. My family: It sounds authentic when I say it like that.

  I wish there was more lightness in these relationships. I hope that we can get beyond the point where all we talk about is our family legacy. It would be nice to just go out together and have fun.

  I once said half-jokingly to Charlotte: “Maybe one day we’ll spend Christmas together!” I don’t think that that will ever happen. I have my adoptive family; they will always be there. But it would be lovely if my mother and Charlotte could become part of my life, too.

  My mother has a great opportunity now: After all these years, she can have her daughter back.

  It was interesting to talk with my mother on her own; I learned so much about her and my grandmother. I could even fit some of the long-missing pieces into the jigsaw puzzle of my life.

  I already knew some of the things she told me from the book about her, but now there is a new character in her story: me. It had hurt me deeply that there was no mention of me in the book. She says that was to protect me, to enable me to have a new life.

  She is not the type to question her own actions; she lives too much in her own world for that. She often comes across as aloof and says things that sound harsh and absolute. But I believe that, behind the façade, there lies a woman in need of love, and worthy of love.

  I can see the path she has taken: Emotionally, she hit rock bottom over and over again. She had a terrible first marriage—and now she is leading a nearly normal life. I think she keeps many things at a distance deliberately, to protect herself.

  My husband parks the car in front of the restaurant where we have arranged to meet. We get out of the car. Charlotte arrives; she looks exhausted. She notices the golden bangle on my arm, and I tell her that our mother gave it to me, that it is from Irene. Charlotte stares at the bangle but says nothing.

  My mother and Dieter arrive, and we have lunch together. Afterward, we go for a walk in the English Garden. We hire rowing boats on the lake in the park and later take the children to the playground.

  Outwardly it looks like an ordinary get-together, but the atmosphere is quite strained. I would have liked it to be more lighthearted, more personal. I had hoped to get to know Monika as my mother, not just as an older woman. After our first meeting, I still thought that might be possible. Now I am being more realistic; I sense that my mother does not crave a close relationship as much as I do. It’s partly due to her personality—she doesn’t have a strong maternal side.

  I am 40 years old now, she is 64. I am too old for mother-daughter bonding. She cannot give me my bottle or hold my hand while I take my first steps. All those things that she’s missed—that we’ve both missed—we can’t make up for them now.

  I see my mother one more time, four days after our day out on Good Friday. We meet at my grandmother’s grave.

  I had asked her to take me to Irene’s burial place; I felt a real need to go there with her. We agree to meet at the Viktualienmarkt, a popular market for flowers and delicacies in the center of Munich. I buy some flowers and we head to the Nordfriedhof, Schwabing’s cemetery. My mother visits the grave regularly; it seems that she has made peace with her mother now.

  We walk through the entrance gate. The cemetery is vast. There are tall, ancient trees, and narrow paths winding their way between the graves. Irene is buried in the same plot as her mother, Agnes Kalder. It is a beautiful grave, very simple. My mother and I plant a few pansies together. This visit means so much to me. In front of Irene’s grave, I appeal to my mother: “If you should decide one day that you don’t want to see me anymore, I will respect your decision. But please say good-bye and don’t just disappear like you did when I was little.”

  We talk on the phone a few more times after that, and then I don’t hear from her anymore. I send her a little package, but it comes back three times with a note: “Refused delivery.” When I call her number, no one answers. I let it ring and ring—in vain.

  ■ ■ ■

  The sign on Monika Goeth’s front door says SHALOM. It means “peace,” but there is no peace here.

  Months after her visit to the Nordfriedhof with Jennifer, Monika Goeth is sitting on her patio, under a roof of wild vines. Her husband has baked a cake and made coffee. It is a warm, late summer’s day; even the flies have come out again. Monika Goeth is talking nonstop, and every now and then she swats one of the little bugs. Digressing wildly, she tells her story, which revolves around one thing only: her parents, “Amon and Ruth.” Sometimes she is calm and smiling, and other times she furiously rants and raves about her screwed-up family.

  Monika Goeth says that she has always tried to protect her daughter Jennifer, to keep her out of that whole “Goeth rubbish.”

  Monika sees Jennifer, first and foremost, as the daughter of her adoptive parents. Jennifer already has a brilliant mother, she asserts—what does she want from me all of a sudden?

  Monika Goeth says that, in her eyes, the people who bring a child up are the parents.

  She doesn’t understand what this strange daughter wants from her, why she clings to the notion that even a terrible truth is better than silence, that a broken family is better than no roots at all.

  Monika Goeth says that she was very pleased to hear from Jennifer initially, but adds that her daughter moves at a different pace. She explains how she felt downright harassed by Jennifer’s eager desire to fix everything, to reunite the family. She felt as if Jennifer had written a script for a reconciliation scene that they were supposed to act out with all speed. But it takes time to develop a relationship after so many years, and in the end, she adds, she felt that it was too late.

  Jennifer Teege will only ever see her mother again on TV. Monika Goeth has been giving fresh interviews; an Israeli documentary-maker has persuaded her to talk about her role as Amon Goeth’s daughter. Time and again, Monika Goeth finds herself in the public eye, even though all she wants, she says, is to be left in peace.

  Monika Goeth is now raising her grandchild, her daughter Charlotte’s son, who is living with her. Monika says: “He is my life. I do the things for him that I would have loved to do for my father when he was a little boy.”

  Charlotte chose a traditional Jewish name for her son and combined it with her grandfather’s, “Amon”—that is the middle name Jennifer Teege’s half-sister gave her son.

  ■ ■ ■

  I HAVE ALWAYS FELT that I am part of a mobile: everyone connected to everyone else by many invisible strings. If one moves, the others move as well. I am right at the bottom; the main characters are moving around above me.

  The central figure is Amon Goeth; he is the source of this evil. Despite being long dead, he makes his presence felt, pulling the strings in the background. My adoption allowed me to escape the family system for a while. I had some peaceful years, but nevertheless I am, and always will be, a part of the whole, an important figure at the end of one string.

  I wanted to disentangle the old ties and free our movements today, so we’ll be able to adjust to whatever crisis comes next—and all pull through it together.

  Maybe I was being too ambitious.

  My grandmother’s portrait, in its silver frame, takes pride of place on a windowsill in our house, next to photographs of my children and my friends.

  Sometimes I visit Irene’s grave. I take fresh flowers and light a memorial candle. I don’t want to change much here: What would my mother say? After all, she has been caring for the grave for years.

  The last time I went, the headstone was overgrown with brambles, but I didn’t dare cut them back.

  Chapter 5

  Grandchildren of the Victims:

  My Friends in Israel

  Where are you from—Obama famil
y, eh?

  —A Jerusalem spice trader talking to Jennifer Teege in 2011

  I AM BACK IN ISRAEL. AT LAST.

  Tel Aviv has grown: The highways seem twice as wide; new high-rise buildings loom against the sky. Many buildings in the city center remain dilapidated, their façades dirty, corroded from pollution and the salty air. Next to them, the recently renovated buildings gleam all the more brightly.

  On Rehov Engel, a small, quiet side street, the house where I shared an apartment in my early twenties lies nestled between palm trees and flowering shrubs. This is where I sat in front of the TV all those years ago and watched Schindler’s List.

  The sun, the salty air, the throaty Hebrew sounds—it’s all very familiar. But I am a different person now.

  When I arrived here over twenty years ago to visit my friend Noa, I was young, curious, and unburdened. Now I am returning as the granddaughter of Amon Goeth.

  Noa was the reason I came to Israel in the first place. She is also the reason I haven’t dared to come back here in the three years since I discovered my family’s past.

  I first met Noa in Paris. After my graduation from high school in 1990, I moved to the French capital for a year. I minded the children of a French family, and I attended classes at the Sorbonne and at an art college, where I was developing a portfolio. I planned to study graphic or communication design on my return from Paris.

  I met Noa in a life drawing class. We were both trying very hard to get the model’s proportions right. After class ended, we stood in the corridor and talked for a long time.

  I liked her quick wit and her sense of humor. She had long, curly blonde hair and light green eyes. She talked openly about herself and her feelings. Noa told me she sometimes had days that were somehow different—she called them her “camera days.” I knew what she meant; I also have days where I feel like I am walking through life as a silent observer, zooming in and out on the world. Noa was able to give a name to the feeling that I had always found so hard to put into words. I liked her precise language and her unique view of the world.

  Noa was in her early twenties, like me, and she was in Paris to accompany her father, an artist who had been granted a scholarship there. Noa’s father always wore black clothes in winter and white only in the summer.

  Noa’s mother was a lawyer. She had worked in Germany, even in Munich. As a teenager, Noa had tagged along with her mother a number of times. Now she was trying to remember the few German words she had picked up at the time: “Bitte. Danke. Guten Tag.”

  She wrote down the Hebrew alphabet on a paper napkin for me. I was surprised to learn that words were written from right to left. Noa talked about Israel as if it were a perfectly normal country.

  After my year in Paris, I returned home. I hadn’t been accepted at any of the various colleges where I had applied to study design. I decided to visit Noa in Tel Aviv. When we had said our good-byes in Paris, she had asked me: “When are you coming to Israel?”

  It was a four-hour flight from Munich to Tel Aviv. Noa was waiting for me in her apartment. She beamed at me when she opened the door and briefly showed me her room, which I was going to share with her. Her roommate, Anat, was sitting on the balcony. She was a little older than Noa, with strawberry blonde hair. “Anat, this is Jenny,” said Noa by way of introduction. Anat and I shook hands. Soon Noa was eager to go out: She wanted to celebrate our reunion somewhere special.

  Noa hailed a taxicab, and we drove along the promenade toward the south of Tel Aviv. After half an hour, the cab stopped along a gravel path. I got out and looked around: We were standing on a cliff top, the sea below us. In front of us was an open-air bar, full to bursting.

  The bar, Turquoise, had deck chairs and swing seats on the lawn. More and more people were streaming inside. I thought the women were stunningly beautiful; almost all of them had long, dark, curly hair.

  In hindsight, it is difficult to say what I had been expecting, but it certainly wasn’t this: carefree people enjoying themselves, sitting in swing seats surrounded by palm trees and brightly colored beach umbrellas, listening to chill-out music, and looking out to sea.

  Primed by my history lessons and news reporting about Israel, I had been prepared for a permanent state of emergency. I was thinking Holocaust and intifada (the Palestinian rebellion against the Israeli occupation). I had expected a traumatized people—in a country where bombs could explode anywhere and anytime.

  I found a city built on sand, its bright apartment blocks on stilts in order to allow the fresh sea breeze to fan the city streets.

  I had expected heaviness and found lightness instead.

  That afternoon I knew: I want to stay here, in this country.

  Noa and I sat down on the warm grass. We watched the sun as it set slowly over the sea.

  ■ ■ ■

  Tel Aviv means “Hill of Spring.” It got its name in 1909, when Jewish immigrants founded a small settlement in the sand dunes by the Mediterranean Sea.

  In the years following 1933, many European Jews sought refuge in Palestine. They wanted a country of their own, because in so many other countries they feared for their lives.

  The first wave was of refugees who were able to flee Germany and the territories occupied by German troops in time.

  Others did not escape from the Nazis. They came to Palestine after the war, mentally and physically broken by their experiences in camps like Płaszów.

  The exhibition rooms at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem’s Holocaust memorial, are deliberately kept in semidarkness. Visitors are presented with evidence and testimonials of Nazi crimes, among them a photograph of concentration camp commandant Amon Goeth, sitting astride his white horse in his SS uniform. There are more pictures of other commandants and other concentration camps—at last, visitors grasp the extent of the killings. And then the corridor leads them slightly uphill to the exit, where they emerge into a sun-drenched Israel. This is Yad Vashem’s message: Israel and the Holocaust are like day and night. The new country is the emergence into light.

  On May 14, 1948, Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the establishment of the state of Israel in Tel Aviv. That day, the Jews danced with joy on Dizengoff Street, Tel Aviv’s main boulevard.

  While the establishment of the state of Israel meant that the Zionists’ dream of a Jewish state had come true, the Zionist myth of “a land without a people for a people without a land” was at odds with reality: The Jews’ holy land was already inhabited by Palestinian Arabs. Two peoples tied their national identity to the same piece of land. What for the Israelis is the founding of their country—Yom Ha’atzmaut, “Independence Day”—is, for the Palestinians, Nakba—“The Catastrophe.”

  That same night, troops from five Arab countries—Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan, Lebanon, and Syria—marched into Israel with the proclaimed aim of destroying the newly declared state. Israel emerged as the winner of this first Arab-Israeli war, and with a considerably enlarged territory. The new borders included a much greater area than Israel had originally been granted by the United Nations. Around 700,000 Palestinians fled or were driven away; many Palestinian villages were destroyed.

  This first war immediately following the founding of the state would be but one of many military disputes between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

  Israel’s history is inextricably tied to the history of the Palestinians; it is a succession of wars and terrorist attacks, of violence and counter-violence. It is impossible to recount it objectively, let alone in a few lines.

  One reason why the Middle East conflict seems so intractable is that it is an entanglement of many different conflicts. It isn’t just about the land. The Israeli historian Tom Segev writes: “The conflict is fueled not only by political, strategic, and economic interests, but also by fear and jealousy, faith and prejudice, myths and illusions.”

  Religious fanaticism, stoked by Muslim fundamentalists and ultra-Orthodox Jews, has long pervaded any dialogue on both sides.

  Israel,
the small country on the edge of the Mediterranean Sea with a current population of eight million people, cannot find peace: Externally, Israel is struggling with its Arab neighbors; internally, with itself. There is no peace between Israelis and Palestinians—but there is no peace between the deeply religious and the secular Jews either.

  The deeply religious Orthodox Jews and modern, liberal Israelis are engaged in a bitter struggle for the prerogative of interpreting many political issues: What role should religion play in politics? How to deal with the Palestinians? Should the ultra-Orthodox settlers withdraw from the occupied territories, or should they remain and continue expanding their settlements under the constant guard of young Israeli snipers?

  When Jennifer Teege arrived in Tel Aviv in late 1991, the city was already regarded as a haven for modern, democratic Israelis.

  Tel Aviv has always been the center of the country’s creative scene: Artists and writers come to live here; record labels, advertising agencies, and computer firms are headquartered here. Lefties and liberals, gays and lesbians love the city for its unorthodox way of life.

  In the years after the creation of the state, so many Jews came to Tel Aviv that most of its dwellings were raised with lightning speed. Previously, young European architects had designed and constructed around 4,000 Bauhaus-style buildings here and thus created the “White City.” Today, Tel Aviv is home to around 400,000 people, originating from over 100 different countries.

  Tel Aviv is a place for new beginnings, a city without memories. It is a counter-world to the capital, Jerusalem, where every stone tells a story and religious fanaticism is rife.

  Tel Aviv is young and modern, noisy and hectic, open-minded and tolerant. But it is not beautiful and picturesque like Jerusalem. In the summer, the stench of exhaust fumes and trash hangs over the city, and scrawny cats forage for food on the beach.