When I moved to Paris after my high school graduation, I spent days wandering through the streets of Goutte d’Or, the African neighborhood in Paris’s 18th arrondissement. At the market, stallholders sold sweet potatoes and cassava roots next to smoked pikes that looked like shriveled rubber. Street vendors offered roasted peanuts and corn on the cob. The women, dressed in brightly patterned, tie-dyed wraps, carried their children on their backs and their shopping on their heads. At the hairdresser’s, women would have their long hair braided. One of the market stalls flew a Togolese flag.
Africa suddenly seemed very near.
It was a strange world to me, but at the same time I had a sense of homecoming. I liked the beat of the African music and the kaleidoscope of colors. Here, finally, people didn’t look back at me over their shoulders or stare at me from the corner of their eyes.
In Germany, black people are a minority. When we run into each other on the street, we nod and say “hello” even if we don’t know one another. Our skin color creates an affinity.
In the African quarter of Paris, the color of my skin was nothing out of the ordinary. For the first time in my life, I felt that I was among my own kind.
I inherited my dark skin from my father. Where was he now? I wondered. Who was he? And who was I?
I decided to find my father, and so I contacted CPS. He was living in a village in Germany.
I sent him a little note to find out if he wanted to see me. A few days later I received his reply, on lime-green stationery, in ornate handwriting and polished German. He thanked me for my letter and said that he had always hoped, and even expected, to hear from me one day. Now a huge weight had been lifted from his mind. He would be excited to meet me, he added, and was looking forward to getting to know me at last, to catching up on everything he had missed out on over all these years.
We arranged to meet in a restaurant. When he arrived, he presented me with a rose.
My father is Nigerian. He told me that he was from Umutu, a small town in the southeast of Nigeria, and that he belonged to the Igbo people, an ethnic group in Nigeria. Originally forest farmers, today they are predominantly traders, craftsmen, and civil servants. The majority of the Igbo belong to the Christian faith.
My father told me that, when he set off for Germany in the late sixties, he was one of the first people to leave his village. At the time, anyone in Nigeria who aspired to a career sought a Western education. Besides, the country was ravaged by civil war.
After he studied in Germany, my father returned to Nigeria, where he worked for the government. He explained how the corruption drove him to despair: Computers designated for schools ended up with employees of the ministry. Eventually he moved back to Germany. Today, he is married to a German woman and has five other children. My half-siblings.
When I was born, he wanted me to be brought up by my African grandmother in Umutu. I learn that my father gave me an African name, Isioma, a traditional Igbo name meaning “Lucky.”
My father gave me two books by the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, which I enjoyed very much. The books are about African traditions and about a kind of personal god that the Igbo people believe in: the chi that determines one’s life. When a person loses their way, their chi will try to lead him back to the right path, Achebe explains.
I, too, wonder if life is just a succession of coincidences, or if we are guided by some higher power like chi. For a long time I didn’t believe in fate, only in chance. But since I learned about my family history, I have thought differently. We are not free in our decisions—some things about our journey through life are predetermined.
After our meal at the restaurant, we went our separate ways: My father returned to his family, and I went back to Munich, to my old life.
As a child, I had known my mother, and so I missed her. My father, on the other hand, had always been a stranger to me. I had been curious about him and wanted to meet him in order to understand more about myself. But I had never felt a longing for him. Our meeting didn’t change my feelings for him, either. He remained a stranger to me.
I saw him once more, when he invited me to his home. I met his family, his wife and children. I could see that my father was making every effort, but I was overwhelmed by all these new people. We said a cordial good-bye. I didn’t see him again for a long time.
A few months later I moved to Hamburg. A friend had told me about a new media agency there. I wanted to get away from the heaviness of the political issues at the television network. I thought a job in advertising would be more lighthearted. By then, I felt emotionally strong enough to hold down a regular job.
■ ■ ■
The photo Jennifer Teege included with her application for the job in Hamburg shows her wearing a summer top and massive sunglasses. She also sent in a number of ideas for TV and magazine ads, as well as her report card from first grade: “Jennifer has integrated well into the class.”
Her application suited the agency, and it suited the times. In the late nineties, the new economy was still booming. The agency was hiring new people every month; there was plenty to do. Hairdressers and masseurs would come to the office; in the mornings there was breakfast for all. The workday started at 9 a.m., and if you went home at 6 p.m., your colleagues in the open-plan office would ask: “Just doing a half-day today?”
■ ■ ■
ON MY FIRST DAY AT THE NEW JOB, a tall man with a deep voice approached me in the corridor: “Are you new here?” He was the agency boss. Goetz. The man I would go on to share my life with.
Newly in love, I would sit in a top-floor office in the center of Hamburg, writing copy for online marketing campaigns for banks and tobacco, car and furniture brands.
I enjoyed my work. The atmosphere was good, everybody was in high spirits. The campaigns for such a diverse range of products gave me the perfect excuse to act out my curiosity at last. I have always quizzed the people around me; I’m interested in how other people live—from where they go on vacation to what sort of bed they sleep in, what kind of sofa they sit on.
But it didn’t take long for the same old problems to raise their heads again. It turned out that I still didn’t have a grip on my depression. It was no longer a constant issue, but it came in bouts. At some point, every new task would cause me to panic. I would spend days playing around with old texts in order to look busy. Once I pretended I had the flu to avoid having to go to work.
Telling the truth was not an option. The world of advertising is all about perfect façades. No one talks about mental health problems, since they are counterproductive to creativity. At the time, I felt under constant pressure. Once a week, I went to a psychological self-help group. On those evenings, I always skulked off early under some pretext.
■ ■ ■
Goetz Teege is a quiet, levelheaded man of few words. Regarding his wife, Jennifer, he says: “It was love at first sight. She inspires me.” Goetz Teege comes from a stable family and has four siblings. He tries to relate to the kind of upbringing Jennifer had: “Her fundamental problem is that she has learned not to rely on anyone.” Despite her difficult childhood, his wife has “enormous strength,” he says. “I was always fascinated by that side of her: Whenever she was feeling low, she fought hard to get over it. She sought to understand, to get to the bottom of it. She always felt that there was something that she didn’t know about. Something that she needed to find out in order to get a handle on her life.”
■ ■ ■
MY RELATIONSHIP WITH GOETZ BECAME STEADY. Soon, we were talking about children. He was seven years older than I and already had two children from a previous marriage; he wasn’t sure if he wanted to become a father again. If he had decided that he didn’t want any more children, I would have ended our relationship. I could not imagine a life without children. At age 32, I gave birth to my first son; two years later I had my second.
I endeavored to give my sons all those things that I went without for years: warmth, security. Normality.<
br />
Today, the most important thing I want them to come away with is a strong sense of self-worth. I don’t want them to have to work as hard for it as I did, in hundreds of hours of therapy.
At first, I found it incredibly hard to leave the children with anyone. I didn’t have the heart to say good-bye to them. Whenever the babysitter came, I would sneak out to spare them the pain of separation.
Today, I would do things differently. I have come to understand that children can tolerate a brief good-bye, a short separation. It is much worse to leave without saying good-bye at all: If children find their mother suddenly gone, it erodes their basic sense of trust.
■ ■ ■
Jennifer Teege’s brother, Matthias, notices that his sister is a very tense and anxious kind of mother to her sons: “She is very protective of her children, maybe too protective.”
Matthias believes that Jennifer demands too much of herself: “In Israel, she strove to be the perfect student. Now she aims to be the perfect mother.” Jennifer’s perception of the model mother is a mother who is there for her children 24/7, he explains. “She tries to offer them the kind of childhood she never had. She tries to be the mother she would have liked to have.”
After her marriage to Goetz and the birth of her sons, Jennifer Teege’s depression gave way to a more bearable sadness. Her life seemed secure—until the day, at age 38, she found the book about her mother.
Suddenly, Anat and Noa stopped hearing from their friend. Anat says: “We would normally be in regular contact, but then it just ended abruptly. For months, we didn’t hear a word from Jennifer. Noa and I were really worried; we kept sending her emails: ‘What’s up with you? Please write to us!’”
■ ■ ■
AFTER I FOUND THE BOOK about my mother, I couldn’t bring myself to write to Noa and Anat. I needed time to recover from the shock.
When I was ready to turn to my friends in Israel, I realized how hard it was. It felt as if I had led some kind of double life all these years. As if I had been lying to my friends and all the people around me.
Even though the family secret was not my fault, I had a guilty conscience. I was particularly scared of telling Noa; I didn’t know how she would cope. Some things affected her deeply.
Had Noa lost any relatives during the Holocaust? We had discussed the subject during my studies in Israel. I knew that none of her close family members had been murdered, but I knew nothing of her more distant relations. Had anyone been killed at Płaszów? If she had mentioned it at the time, I might not have taken note.
I would have felt more comfortable telling my story to Anat; she is not unsettled so easily. But I needed to talk to Noa first.
And so I didn’t confide in either of my friends, and I only answered their emails sporadically. We didn’t see each other for nearly three years.
Every year at Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, Noa sent me photos of her family. Sometimes she would write to me on the occasion of other Jewish festivals, too, or for family events. I usually replied with just a few short sentences.
Finally, Noa announced that she was coming to the next Berlinale, Berlin’s annual international film festival. Noa had become a screenwriter in Israel. Every time she came to the Berlinale, we would try to meet up; our reunions there had become a little ritual. I hadn’t been in touch for a long time—if I didn’t go to Berlin now, she would think that I was deliberately trying to avoid her.
But on the other hand, I couldn’t go to the festival and talk with Noa about trivial matters. I couldn’t and wouldn’t lie to her if she asked what was up with me. We had known each other for too long for that.
The Berlinale was going to show a film for which Noa had written the screenplay; it was about an autistic boy. My old roommate Tzahi played one of the main characters.
I knew how long Noa had been working on this screenplay—for years. She was always talking about it. Now, she had invited me to Berlin; she wanted me to sit next to her when it was shown at the cinema. It would be her big moment—one I wanted to share with her, not destroy with my story.
I had once made the mistake of telling a good friend my family’s story at a birthday party. My friend had become so upset that she couldn’t enjoy the rest of the party.
I wrote a long email to Noa’s husband Yoel and explained the difficult situation I found myself in: There was something on my mind that I needed to discuss with Noa, but I didn’t want to tell her at the film festival. I wrote down the whole story and asked him to share it with Noa. I also asked him how many relatives he and Noa had lost in the Holocaust, and if anyone they knew had died in Płaszów.
Yoel wrote back: “We have all lost someone. The Holocaust is in our DNA, it is why we are here. But how is that your fault? The Berlin film festival is a great moment for Noa, but you won’t spoil it for her. She is longing to see you again, she’s missing you. I am sure that she will listen to your story and help you however she can. You don’t need to spare her. You need us to support and look after you now, not the other way round. Noa will always be your friend, in good times and bad.”
■ ■ ■
Yoel and Noa are sitting in their apartment in the center of Tel Aviv as they tell their family stories.
Noa’s father’s family was living in the US when Hitler came to power; they were safe.
Noa’s mother’s family was from Poland and Russia. Her maternal grandmother was living in Stolin, Belarus, when the war broke out. She was deported to Siberia under Stalin. Her parents, her four siblings, and their children stayed behind and were killed by Germans in a massacre, along with hundreds of other Jews.
Relatives of Noa’s maternal grandfather were killed in the ghetto of Pinsk in what was then Poland. His brother died in the Majdanek concentration camp, near Lublin.
Noa’s husband, Yoel, also lost relatives in Poland. He recalls how in the seventies, when they were still children, he and his friends were surprised to learn that a neighbor owned a Volkswagen Beetle. This neighbor had been imprisoned in a concentration camp—and now he was driving a German car!
That was a long time ago, Yoel says. He laughs and points to his stove: Siemens!
In Yoel’s hometown, there were couples who adopted children because they could not have children themselves: They had become infertile due to the abuse and medical experiments they had suffered in concentration camps. They were severely traumatized people, living in constant fear that their adoptive children would one day disappear or be taken away from them.
Yoel very carefully told his wife what he had learned from Jennifer’s email. Noa says that she was shocked: “I had never been so intimate with a close relative of a Nazi criminal.” Noa had other German friends, too, and wondered what crimes their grandfathers might have committed during the war.
Why had she never asked? “At first I didn’t dare ask about their grandparents. And later the subject was so far removed. If you are friends with someone, you don’t discuss whether their grandparents may have killed or informed on your grandparents. It’s particularly striking in Jenny’s case: Her and Amon Goeth—I just can’t wrap my head around it!”
Noa is convinced: “It was fate that I met Jenny as a young woman. It would have been impossible to strike up a friendship if we had known that her grandfather was a concentration camp commandant. How could she have come up to me, with such a rucksack full of guilt? How could I have met her without any bias?”
It would have been so complicated, she adds—a tense, “reaching hands across the graves” sort of friendship.
Today, Noa explains, she can deal with Jennifer’s story. She has known Jennifer for twenty years and sees her only as a friend, not as the granddaughter of a Nazi: “I told her, forget Amon Goeth. You are Jenny! Please, come!”
■ ■ ■
I AM BACK IN ISRAEL NOW, at Noa’s. She has moved; I had to hunt for her new apartment. After we embrace and Noa shows me around, we sit in the sun on her patio, talking and watching the going
s-on in the street below. It is like always, only better, since now there is nothing between us.
A few weeks ago I was sitting next to Noa in the dark, watching clips of her film at the Berlin film festival. It was just as I had hoped—sharing that significant moment in her life.
Now, in Tel Aviv, Noa’s film is showing at the Dizengoff Center downtown. That evening, we go to see the full-length movie. It is called Mabul (The Flood). We see Tzahi on screen, playing the father. I like the story; it’s about a family with an autistic son. It shows how important it is to stick together and not give up, even in trying times.
After the movie, Noa and I go to a café. We talk about all the things we have done and been through together. We are closer than ever. There is nothing left to hide; everything feels good and right.
After a quick visit to Jerusalem, I travel to Eilat. To Anat. I had asked Noa to tell her everything.
Jennifer Teege and her friend Noa in a café in Tel Aviv
■ ■ ■
Anat cried when she heard Jennifer’s story.
This scene from Schindler’s List instantly came to her mind: a man on his balcony, shooting people as a pastime. Jennifer’s grandfather.
Anat switched the film off at the balcony scene. She couldn’t bear it.
When Anat shows old, faded family photographs, she often explains, “he was shot,” or “she was gassed.”
Anat’s mother’s family was originally from Poland. Anat’s great-grandparents and an uncle were probably killed in Sobibor—a death camp in the then-district of Lublin where Amon Goeth was posted temporarily before he came to Krakow.
Anat’s father was a German Jew from Hanover; he escaped to Israel in 1935. His relatives who stayed behind in Germany were all killed.
My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family's Nazi Past Page 17