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

by Jennifer Teege

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  Noa remembers how Jennifer arrived crying, with her bags at her feet, at her door in Tel Aviv: “She was so in love with Shimon, and so desperate.”

  When Jennifer’s alarm went off on the day of her planned departure, Noa tried to get her out of bed, “but Jenny just mumbled that she was tired and rolled over.”

  It still makes Noa laugh to think about that morning: “She overslept once—and stayed for four years!” Jennifer was vivacious and spontaneous, Noa says about her friend. “Jenny used to make up her own Hebrew words—we laughed so much.”

  Jennifer was a great friend, both for having fun with and for meaningful conversations: “When I first met her in Paris, we felt very close very quickly. Our friendship is one of the most extraordinary friendships I’ve ever had, full of wonderful times and crazy coincidences. I always tell her it was a godsend that she missed that flight.”

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  HEBREW IS A SEMITIC LANGUAGE. Unlike with English or French, it was impossible for me to deduce the meanings of new words by myself. My teacher at the Ulpan, the language school for newly arrived immigrants, made every effort. She was able to explain new words using gestures and facial expressions. If someone didn’t understand the expression for “to lie down,” she lay down on the desk. It didn’t take long for me to be able to follow simple conversations. But it was a long time before I had the courage to speak in Hebrew. Time and again I became exasperated by this new language and its complicated grammar.

  I found my own place to live. I met Tzahi, an actor, and we rented a three-bedroom apartment on Engel Street together. At the time, Tzahi was not yet the successful actor he was to become, but he was very popular with women. He was in his mid-thirties, blond, bright, and handsome. Many people thought that we were together, but Tzahi was like a brother to me. We often cooked together or played “guess the capital” while we were doing the dishes. Our roommates changed often, but he and I remained the solid core.

  Once I had finished my language course, I applied to study at Tel Aviv University for a degree in Middle Eastern studies and African studies. When the acceptance letter landed in my mailbox, it took a huge weight off my mind. Up to that point, my future had been uncertain. Now I knew—I was going to college in Israel!

  In the lectures I sat among Israelis. The lecturers spoke Hebrew, so at first I hardly understood anything at all and spent a lot of time reading up on the topics. I was allowed to take the exams in English. For my Middle Eastern classes I learned Arabic and translated parts of the Koran. Often I would stay up until midnight, my head bent over a book at my poorly lit desk.

  I had a new boyfriend, Elias. He had been sitting behind me in one of my Arabic classes and kept staring at me. When we talked during the break, we hit it off straight away. I soon gave him the key to my apartment. I tried to forget about Shimon, but I couldn’t.

  In the little spare time I had outside my studies, I often met with Noa and Anat. I had become close friends with Anat, too. She was just there, in her quiet, caring way. I once went on a trip to the Sinai Peninsula where I drank tea with the Bedouins in the desert and contracted a bad infection. Back in Israel, I was hospitalized for several days. When I was discharged, I was still weak and feverish. Anat would come and sit by my bedside—and she spent hours in the kitchen making me chicken soup.

  I admire Anat for her modest, unpretentious way of living. She eventually moved in with her boyfriend Alon on the kibbutz near Eilat, where I had only stuck it out for a couple of days. Today, Anat works as a nurse; I can’t imagine a better profession for her.

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  Anat describes how she spent many hours with Jennifer, walking through Tel Aviv: “We would talk—about Israeli politics or Israeli men. I usually put on my platform shoes because I’m so short and Jennifer is so tall. We stood out when we went out together.” Anat also recalls that Jennifer would often be approached by strangers when they walked on the beach: “Some people wanted to know whether Jennifer was a professional basketball player. Or model scouts would come up to her and want to book her for some photo shoot or other. But she always replied, ‘No, I am studying.’ She was never one of those naïve, clueless girls. She was very independent and seemed to know what she wanted. Friends would often come to her with their problems and ask her for advice.”

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  I SPENT A LOT OF MY TIME at the Goethe Institute in Tel Aviv. It was before the days when German newspapers were available on the Internet. I borrowed piles of books, and read literature about the Holocaust, Zionism, and the Middle East conflict. Soon I was known by everyone at the institute, and ultimately I was offered a part-time job in the library. From then on I would go to work there in the mornings and to college in the afternoons.

  The Goethe Institute mostly attracted young Israelis who came there to learn German. But older Israelis came, too: Holocaust survivors who wanted to read and hear the German language again. They didn’t talk about what they had gone through, but I saw the tattooed numbers on their arms. Initially, I was quite self-conscious and felt that I had to apologize for being German.

  The color of my skin was good camouflage: Most visitors to the institute assumed that I was American or maybe one of the many Ethiopian Jews who were arriving in Israel at the time. But once I opened my mouth and started speaking in fluent German, they knew. When I mentioned that I was German to my fellow students at college, they looked at me in amazement: How could I be from Germany? they wanted to know. How did I end up there?

  Some of the Holocaust survivors who came to the Goethe Institute had failing eyesight. If I had the time, I would sit down with them and read German newspapers and novels aloud.

  Much later, when I discovered my family history, I was glad that I had read to the old people then. I hadn’t done it because I felt guilty, but just because I wanted to. At the time, I had no idea that my grandfather had murdered people just like them.

  Two elderly ladies came regularly. They asked about my studies, and we talked about everyday issues. I didn’t dare ask them about their history. I just spoke with them in German and told them about today’s Germany—so different from the one that they had known.

  Once, at an event held at the Goethe Institute, I was talking with a sixteen-year-old Israeli boy who told me that he had been learning German at school for the past three years. I praised his pronunciation. And then, out of the blue, he said that almost his entire family had died in concentration camps. I was ashamed and didn’t know what to say, but eventually I blurted out: “Well, what really counts is that you and I can be here together now and talk.”

  I think he noticed my embarrassment. In any case, he smiled at me and asked if I had ever been to Berlin, or if I had heard of the German punk rock band Die Toten Hosen.

  The abrupt change of topic seemed bizarre, but at the same time it was characteristic of that generation of young Israelis. To them, Germany was both the Nazis and the present. They asked me about Boris Becker, Helmut Kohl, and reunification. It hadn’t been long since the Berlin Wall came down.

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  Nathan Durst is a psychologist and deputy chairman of AMCHA, the Israeli center providing assistance and counseling to Holocaust survivors and their families. He sees differences between second- and third-generation descendants of victims of the Holocaust.

  Most of the children would have grown up with their parents’ silence on the subject, he says: “Some of them would have been named after a murdered relative; yet many parents would not talk to their children about their experiences—because they didn’t want to relive the horrors, but also because they were ashamed of the humiliation that they had suffered.” But the children could still sense that their parents had gone through terrible ordeals, he adds, speculating that this may be why the second generation still struggles to entertain the idea of reconciliation. “The children of survivors often did not want to have anything to do with Germans. They felt hatred and wanted revenge.�
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  According to Durst, the third generation regards Germans in a different light, clearly differentiating between the past and the present. “Often it is their grandchildren that the victims open up to about their time in the concentration camps, about the experiences that they had locked up inside for so long. It has a healing effect on the whole family: Once things are out in the open and being talked about, they can usually be dealt with much more easily.”

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  EACH YEAR IN THE SPRING, Israel observes Holocaust Remembrance Day. Sirens wail all over the country; for two minutes everything stops, and people remember the victims of the Holocaust. I always found these two minutes very moving, the silent reflection very powerful. I would stand there, among the Israelis, and feel that I was part of the Jewish community of mourners.

  With my Israeli friends of my own age, my nationality and the past were irrelevant: Noa and I talked about everyday life, about college. Our friendship thrived on frivolity and the typical things twenty-year-olds care about, such as betting on which of his many female admirers my handsome roommate Tzahi would take to bed next.

  During the early days of my stay in Israel, I devoted myself to learning everything there was to know about the Holocaust. Later, the here and now came to the fore. While I was in Israel, apartheid was abolished in South Africa. Since I was also taking African studies at college, this was an important subject for me.

  In Middle Eastern studies, we looked into the different conflicts in the Middle East. Unlike my fellow students, I often traveled to the occupied territories, to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Hearing about the Palestinians’ lives from my Israeli lecturers wasn’t enough for me; I wanted to talk with the people living there in order to gauge their situation realistically.

  The first time I went to Gaza, I went with a friend who worked for a Palestinian aid organization. I remember how shocked I was when I saw the squalid and derelict homes and streets in Gaza. Posters with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat’s face where everywhere.

  The situation in the refugee camps was unbearable. People who had fled their homes decades ago were still living in temporary accommodations. Children were gamboling around the tents, but I didn’t see any playgrounds or parks, only dust and desperation. The Palestinians I spoke with kept saying, “Life and death are in Allah’s hands.” I didn’t ask who was to blame, but I couldn’t forget the suffering of the people there.

  During the four years that I lived in Israel, the political situation escalated. One morning I was waiting at my bus stop in Tel Aviv, part of my daily commute to the Goethe Institute. A line 5 bus arrived; the waiting passengers got on. Shortly afterward, I boarded a different bus. When I reached the Goethe Institute twenty minutes later, I knew straight away that something bad must have happened. The institute is right next to the Ichilov Hospital, and ambulances were speeding past me, sirens wailing and blue lights flashing. Inside the institute, my colleagues were already standing in front of the TV, watching the breaking news. A suicide bomber had blown up the line 5 bus in the center of Tel Aviv. The pictures showed pools of blood and the obliterated bus.

  I had taken that bus on numerous occasions. I suddenly realized that I could lose my life in this country that wasn’t my own.

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  The suicide attack on the line 5 bus on Dizengoff Street in October 1994 marked the arrival of political violence in Tel Aviv. The bombing shook the city that represented a modern Israel. Twenty-two people died; forty-eight were injured.

  It was the first major attack carried out by the radical Islamist group Hamas since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 and 1994, when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, chairman of the PLO, had agreed on the withdrawal of the Israeli Defense Forces from parts of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The agreements provided for the creation of Palestinian self-government and the renunciation of violence. However, particularly contentious issues, such as the question of the Jewish settlements in Israeli-occupied territories, the status of Jerusalem, and the return of Palestinian refugees, were deliberately kept out of the agreement to be decided at a later stage.

  In 1994, Rabin, Arafat, and Israel’s then-minister of defense, Shimon Peres, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In a later speech, Yitzhak Rabin promised to “end, once and for all, a hundred years of bloodshed.”

  Rabin was severely criticized for his policies by the radical Israeli right, while the Islamist organizations Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad attempted to disrupt the peace process with terrorist attacks.

  On November 4, 1995, Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated at a peace rally by Yigal Amir, an Israeli right-wing extremist.

  The bombing of that packed Israeli bus was not the last; many more were to follow. From then on, no one in Tel Aviv or anywhere in Israel could board a bus, or visit a café, bar, or shopping mall, without fearing an attack.

  When Yitzak Rabin died, hope for peace in the Middle East died with him.

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  I HADN’T ANTICIPATED THE ATTACK on Yitzhak Rabin. The country was in mourning. An Israeli had killed another Israeli. The danger hadn’t come from the outside—not from Gaza, the West Bank, or Lebanon—but from within Israel’s own ranks. Rabin’s assassination revealed how disjointed the country was.

  My view of Israel had been changing for some time: My initial euphoria had been replaced with a deep skepticism. I was living in a highly armed country, surrounded by hostile neighbors. I was aware now of the serious threat that the country was facing, the intractable conflict it was engaged in. And of how one’s view of the world became very one-sided for those that lived here.

  I can’t say exactly when the depressions began. All I know is that I found myself walking through Tel Aviv on my own. No longer happy and outgoing, but sad and introverted. I felt no joy and no curiosity. It was as if a wall had appeared between me and my surroundings.

  When I breathed in, I didn’t get enough air. I felt like I was being choked.

  I grew more and more withdrawn; I wanted to be on my own. I only left the house if I absolutely had to, to go to work or to the library for my studies. I didn’t discuss my worries with Noa or Anat; I would not have been able to explain the state I was in.

  What was wrong with me? I could find no obvious reason for my sadness. I wasn’t homesick; I received regular visits from my friends and my adoptive family. My degree program had been the right choice, too—at last I was doing something that I was really interested in.

  No matter how hard I thought about it, there was no explanation for my unhappy state of mind. I scolded myself for being ungrateful. I had seen how people lived in the Palestinian refugee camps. I, on the other hand, was living the good life; I had all I could possibly need. Why couldn’t I appreciate that? Why did I find everything so hard?

  Perhaps, I thought, the reasons for my sadness could not be found in the present. Perhaps they dated back to something in the past.

  I barely managed to concentrate on my final exams. The harder I crammed, the less I seemed to remember.

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  Jennifer’s adoptive family came to visit her during that time. Her brother Matthias was shocked when he saw her: “Jenny was completely exhausted. I was alarmed by her lifestyle: She had thrown herself fully into her studies, obsessing about details with an exaggerated intensity—as if she wanted to prove something to us.” Matthias had the impression that Jennifer wanted to demonstrate to her adoptive family what she was now capable of: “As if her worthiness depended on her being the best.”

  Noa and Anat also noticed that Jennifer wasn’t well, but she didn’t want any help. Noa says: “We were really close friends, but Jenny still liked to sort out her problems by herself.”

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  SOMEHOW I MANAGED TO PASS my final exams. Afterward, I invited Noa, Anat, and a couple of other friends over for dinner. The following morning, I left Israel.

  I went back to Munich and started therapy. I took
a part-time editorial job with Bayerische Fernsehen, the Bavarian television network. Shortly after my twenty-seventh birthday, I suffered a nervous breakdown—during a conversation with my boss, I started to cry and couldn’t stop.

  I spent the following days in bed, the duvet pulled over my head. When a friend of mine called, I picked up the receiver and told her to call me back in six months. I didn’t want to see anyone, only to stay in bed and sleep.

  People who have never suffered from depression cannot imagine what it’s like to be depressed. They may assume that depression is like an ordinary emotional low: For a while you “don’t feel so good,” but at some point you’ll start to feel better.

  I didn’t start to feel better. I fell into a deep hole. My breathlessness became more and more frightening; I was gasping for air and thought I was going to die. When I was at my worst, I would have preferred to die. I never seriously considered taking my own life, but I hoped that I might cross a road and get run over by a car, so that everything would be over.

  I had applied for a postgraduate course at the London School of Economics and been offered a place, but there was no way that I could accept it in my current condition. Instead of going to university in London, I went to therapy three times a week.

  The first kind of therapy I tried was classic psychoanalysis. I lay on the couch and talked about what was going on in my life or what was on my mind at the time. Often I would talk about things from my past or about my dreams.

  During the many hours I spent with my Munich therapist, the subject of my mother resurfaced. My underlying feelings of being given away and abandoned had not been resolved, but merely suppressed. I also suddenly discovered an interest in who my father was.

  At elementary school, the other children had always wanted to know where I was from and why my skin was so dark. I would tell them that my father was an African chief who rode through the jungle on elephant-back. Later, I would claim that my father was Idi Amin, the cruel dictator who controlled Uganda in the seventies. He was the only African ruler I knew of as a child. I thought it would make the other children understand that I didn’t want to talk about the subject and that they would leave me in peace.