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Coming to terms with the shocking realization that a sadistic Nazi was your grandfather would be hard for anyone — but it’s even more so when you’re a black, Hebrew-speaking German.

That’s the reality captured in Jennifer Teege’s memoir, “My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family’s Nazi Past,” after learning that Plaszów concentration camp commander Amon Goeth was her blood.

In an interview with Haaretz, Teege, who was given up for adoption shortly after birth, said she spent her first 38 years blinded to her roots until a 2008 visit to a Hamburg library revealed her family’s dark history.

It was in the happenstance find of a book, featuring her biological mother’s face on its cover, which revealed her mother’s own struggle with their lineage. “I have to love my father, right?” its title read in German.

“I knew almost nothing about the life of my biological mother, nor did my adoptive family,” she told Haaretz of her mother, Monika Hertwig.

hen she flipped through the pages and realized that a crazed killer was her grandfather, it emotionally hit her hard.

As the now 44-year-old tells it, she hadn’t had much contact with her biological mother or grandmother, Ruth Irene Kalder, for years before the first time she watched Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” in a rented room in Tel Aviv after high school.

In the Oscar-winning film her grandfather, the so-called “Butcher Plaszów,” is seen as a face of evil for the Nazi party that uses the concentration camp as a free-range outlet for committing sickening murders and abuse.

Those acts included hunting humans, like sport, from a porch.

“I lapsed into silence, I slept a lot and I wasn’t really functioning,” Teege recalled upon discovering her bloodline.

 

Only after reading her mother’s book, she said, “did I begin to analyze the situation and try to understand the characters of my mother and my grandmother. I only started to learn more about my grandmother at the end.”

Teeth’s mother was conceived out of wedlock a year before Goeth’s execution. In 1970 she gave birth to her own daughter after a brief affair with a Nigerian man, she said.

Though she had minimal relations with her biological mother and grandmother, she recalled her grandmother showing her more warmth and love than her mother.

Kalder, who changed her surname to Goeth after the war, is said to have lived blindly to her late lover’s horrid crimes. Teege said they never spoke about it.

Teege’s discovery followed her studying abroad in Tel Aviv for nearly five years after becoming friends with an Israeli woman in Paris.

There she learned the language and even dated an Israeli man. Unbeknownst to her then, her emotional ties to its Jewish community were only just beginning.

Since discovering her past, Teege said she’s undergone psychotherapy to help her deal with a worsening depression — her first session left her doctor in tears, she said — and eventually visited Krakow where her grandfather nightmarishly killed so many men, women and children.

She then struggled revealing her family lineage to her Israeli girlfriends, some of which lost family in the Holocaust, she said.

One friend stopped responding to her emails, a mutual friend told Haaretz.

Teege’s book has since become an international bestseller with a U.S. release slated for mid-April. Copies will additionally be translated into Hebrew, she said.

“I very much wanted the book to be translated into Hebrew, and I am looking forward to seeing how it’s received,” she said.

She’s also looking forward to an upcoming trip back to Israel where she plans to meet with “Schindler’s List” survivor, 88-year-old Rena Birnhack.

Birnhack recalled to Haaretz the first time she saw Amon while residing in Krakow’s ghetto with her family as a child in 1943.

She described him as “a huge, frightening person” but one who spared her life when caught trying to smuggle two puppies under a coat.

“…when he saw the two puppies, a drop of humanity came into his eyes for a few seconds,” she recalled to Haaretz. “He asked me what I intended to do with them, and I offered them to him as a present. He ordered one of the soldiers to take the puppies, and sent me to the side with those who would remain alive.”

Those puppies were given to Teege’s grandmother; she said she learned this through reading Teege’s book.

She said she saw Goeth only a few times later — at camp roll calls and when he shot inmates from a porch.  She amazingly survived the atrocities with her sister and parents.

 

 

 

Source:  Nydailynews