Jennifer Teege: My Grandfather would Have Shot Me

[bibliogramma]

In My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family’s Nazi Past, Jennifer Teege, a German woman of mixed race, recounts the moment when, browsing in a library, she discovers that her grandfather was a Nazi officer. The book she finds, I Have To Love My Father, Don’t I?, is by Monika Goerth, her biological mother, and the daughter of a concentration camp commandant.

Adopted children who search for their biological parents generally have little idea of what they will find, or how the knowledge they uncover will affect them, but under most circumstances, they at least have made some mental preparation for the process of discovery. In Teege’s case, though, she met her biological mother and grandmother sporadically during her childhood, did not drift out of touch completely with her mother until she was 21. She knew them as people. What she didn’t know was that there was more to learn, or the terrible facts of her mother’s story, or why no one in either her adoptive or biological family had told her about it.

Finding the book is a shock. Reading it and coming to terms with what it means, even more so.

“I collapse onto our bed and read and read, to the very last page. It is dark when I close the book. Then I sit down at my computer and spend the whole night online, reading everything I can find about Amon Goeth. I feel like I have entered a chamber of horrors. I read about his decimation of the Polish ghettoes, his sadistic murders, the dogs he trained to tear humans apart. It is only now that I realize the magnitude of the crimes Amon Goeth committed. Himmler, Goebbels, Goering—I know who they are. But what exactly Amon Goeth had done, I’d had no idea. Slowly I begin to grasp that the Amon Goeth in the film Schindler’s List is not a fictional character, but a person who actually existed in flesh and blood. A man who killed people by the dozens and, what is more, who enjoyed it. My grandfather. I am the granddaughter of a mass murderer.”

Jennifer Teege’s story is told in two voices. Her own, first person account, is about questions, emotions, reactions. How she entered into a depression, a crisis of identity. How she worried what hidden madness and brutality might lie within her, a legacy of a grandfather she sometimes sees as psychopathic. Her attempts to learn more about her family past, visits to the Polish ghettoes and the camp at Plaszow where her grandfather ordered the deaths of thousands. Her conflicted feelings about her grandmother, who was kind to her in childhood, who lived next to the grounds of the concentration camp with its commandant, who must have seen and heard and known what was happening there. Her questions for her mother, who grew up overshadowed by a father she had never known, by a mother who could not acknowledge her lover’s actions or her own complicity.

Interspersed with these are sections written in the third person, possibly by her co-author Nikola Sellmair. These are sections that talk about the lives of Amon Goeth, his career, his relationships with Oskar Schindler, his trial and execution, that of his lover, Ruth Irene Kalder, who is Teege’s grandmother, that of his daughter, Monika Goeth, Teege’s mother, and that of Teege herself.

It’s a fascinating exploration of how hidden trauma is passed through generations. Teege’s story ends with her revealing her family’s past to the friends she made during four years spent studying and working in Israel, years before she discovered her connection to a noted Nazi war criminal, and finding acceptance and healing there. The ways in which the descendants of the victims and the descendants of the perpetrators both carry wounds is dealt with compassionately, and with unflinching honesty. Her experience of difference as a black woman in a predominantly white society, as a member of a race that her grandfather would have held to be subhuman even as he viewed the primarily Jewish victims in his camp, is an ever-present but backgrounded parallel to the overwhelming awareness of the Holocaust that permeates her narrative.

This is a courageous personal narrative. Teege’s journey to self-acceptance, and to understanding of the ways that the horrors of her grandfather’s actions affected her grandmother, her mother and herself is a moving one, skillfully told in both her own voice and that of her co-author.