My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family's Nazi Past (15 page)

We have arranged to meet in the restaurant of the small hotel where my husband and I are staying. I take a seat and wait. At the agreed time, there is no sign of her. At first I don’t worry too much and use the extra time to gather my thoughts. But after a while I do begin to feel restless. I go outside to see if she is coming. A little later she arrives at last; she had been stuck in traffic. I am glad that she has made it at all.

This time she seems less like a stranger than when last we met, in the café in Munich when I was 20. I’ve seen her in the film, so I knew what to expect.

We talk about the little town where she lives, an easy, innocuous subject. Then she looks at me and declares that I remind her of my grandmother Irene—it’s the way I dress, my handbag matching my shoes. It sounds like a reproach.

She mentions my grandmother, and, again and again, Amon Goeth—as if it were only recently that he was the commandant of Płaszów, only yesterday that my grandmother committed suicide. My mother says that she is living with the dead.

In an interview, she once admitted that having bad thoughts about Amon Goeth feels like she is betraying her mother, Irene, since he was the love of her mother’s life. She believes that she has to be loyal to her mother, and that includes being loyal to Amon Goeth. That leaves her with a terrible dilemma.

Maybe that’s the difference between the second and third generations, between my mother and me. My mind is freer than hers. I can have fond memories of my grandmother while also condemning Amon Goeth and my grandmother’s life by his side.

I want to shake my mother and shout: “You are living now! Talk to me! Stop talking about your parents. Think about you and me! Don’t look back, look ahead!”

I have read many books written by the descendants of Nazis. I understand that my mother’s fate is not hers alone, but one that she shares with a whole generation of Nazi children. She is representative of this second generation. Many children of perpetrators have spent their whole lives suffering under their family history. Many have broken homes.

Seeing it like this makes it easier for me: My mother didn’t give me away because there was something wrong with me, but because she had her hands full simply dealing with her own life.

■ ■ ■

The process of coming to terms with the Nazi era has always been a family affair.

The feelings the children of many infamous Nazis have toward their fathers range from glorification on one end of the scale to unbridled hatred on the other, and everything in between. Often, loathing for their fathers turns into self-loathing. The one thing they all have in common: They cannot escape the past.

Gudrun Burwitz, Heinrich Himmler’s daughter, was an active neo-Nazi and collected donations for former Nazi criminals. Wolf-Ruediger Hess, son of Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess, spent his whole life trying to clear his father’s name. He proudly announced to his father in jail that his second grandchild had been born on “the Führer’s birthday.”

Bettina Goering, however, great-niece of Hermann Goering, Hitler’s chief of the Luftwaffe, chose to be sterilized so that she would not “create another monster, not produce any more Goerings.” Historian Tanja Hetzer says that, in interviews with Nazi descendants, she has learned of other men and women who chose sterilization or childlessness. “In this way, the Nazi ideology of ‘worthy and worthless’ life is propagated in the second and third generation and is, in an auto-aggressive way, directed toward their own offspring: They don’t feel worthy to pass on their genes,” Hetzer observes.

Niklas Frank, son of Hans Frank, Hitler’s deputy in occupied Poland, carries a picture of a corpse in his wallet: It’s a picture of his father with a broken neck, taken after he was hanged for his crimes. Frank says that, every night, he executes his parents afresh in his head, that they deserve it. In his book about his father,
In the Shadow of the Reich
, he writes: “I still feel like my father’s puppet, he is still holding the strings in his hands.”

Frank claims that his sister Brigitte “died from her father,” as if he was an affliction. She committed suicide when she was 46 years old—the same age her father was when he was executed.

Many descendants of Nazi criminals are haunted their whole lives by images of their fathers.

There are many ways to distance oneself from such a father. Karl-Otto Saur Jr., for example, son of Albert Speer’s confidant in the Reich’s Ministry for Armaments and War Production, used to wear his hair long in defiance of his father’s sharp, clean haircut. Monika Goeth studied ancient Hebrew.

■ ■ ■

TODAY, BETTINA GOERING LIVES IN NEW
MEXICO.
She speaks only in English and has kept her ex-husband’s surname. I can understand not wanting to be called Goering, but her decision to be sterilized sends the wrong message. There is no Nazi gene.

I could not finish Niklas Frank’s books about his parents,
In the Shadow of the Reich
and
My German Mother.
They may be important documents, but I didn’t like them. They are not really about his parents; they are about his suffering from having those parents. Every line in the books is an infuriated cry, full of loathing and self-hatred. Yet all this hatred leads to nothing.

Holding on to the past does nothing to help the victims, nor does it aid in our analysis of—or coming to terms with—our Nazi past.

Ultimately, some children of perpetrators lose themselves behind their overpowering father figures. They define themselves by their past. But who are they when they step out of their fathers’ and mothers’ shadows? What is left of them? What do they stand for?

Malgorzata, the interpreter who accompanied me to my grandfather’s villa in Krakow, had also shown Niklas Frank and my mother around the house.

Niklas Frank resembles my mother, insofar as his parents became the central theme in his life. My mother is not as outspoken as he is, but I sense that she, too, believes that she has no right to her own life, no right to be happy. My mother believes that she has to atone for my grandfather’s deeds, for my grandmother’s looking the other way.

Constant self-flagellation and self-damnation will eventually make a person ill—and this kind of suffering, over one’s identity and family history, gets passed on to one’s children.

I have seen this firsthand in Israel, with Holocaust victims: They buried themselves in their pain and transferred their fears to the next generation. The trauma experienced by the child of a Holocaust survivor is totally different from that experienced by a child of a perpetrator, but the transfer process is similar.

I know that I don’t want to live like my mother: arrested in the past, always in the shadow of Amon Goeth.

I think it’s a good thing that people like Niklas Frank and my mother go into schools and give lectures about their parents, but that’s not the path for me. One day I will tell my Israeli friends and their children my family history. I hope that I will be able to confide in them soon. I want to share my story with them.

I want to walk upright, to live a normal life. There is no such thing as inherited guilt. Everybody has the right to their own life story.

■ ■ ■

The third generation of Nazi descendants usually looks back upon their family with more detachment and fewer false justifications.

The children are still struggling to grasp their fathers’ crimes—the grandchildren are trying to come to terms with their family’s involvement. They analyze the oft-repeated family legends, investigate what is true and what was contorted or concealed.

The grandfathers’ deeds—and especially the silence surrounding those deeds—impacts families to this day. According to the historian Wolfgang Benz, a report on “the history of the mentality of National Socialism and its enduring consequences” is yet to be written.

Historians talk of a “family conspiracy of silence.” Katrin Himmler, great-niece of SS chief Heinrich Himmler, refers to the half-truths handed down in her family as “thought prisons.” She was able to use her own research to show that Himmler’s family directly profited from his position and that some members actively supported his genocidal policies, including her own grandfather, Heinrich Himmler’s brother.

Other grandchildren advocate the idea of treating the past as the past. Writer Ferdinand von Schirach, son of Reich Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach, drew a definite line under his grandfather’s history in his article for the German news magazine
Der Spiegel
:

“My grandfather’s guilt is my grandfather’s guilt. Our Federal Supreme Court defines guilt as the result of one person’s individual actions. . . . I am more interested in our world today. I write about postwar justice, about German courts who passed cruel judgments, about the judges who sentenced Nazi criminals to five minutes in jail for each murder they committed. . . . We think that we are safe, but the opposite is the case: We can lose our freedom, and then we’d lose everything. It is our life now, our responsibility. . . . ‘You are who you are,’ that’s the only answer I can give people who ask about my grandfather. It took me a long time to find it.”

■ ■ ■

I DON’T THINK WE DESCENDANTS CAN
disengage entirely from our past; it impacts us whether we like it or not.

I have studied the biographies of many Nazi descendants. The third generation no longer denies what happened under the Third Reich; they speak frankly about it. Nonetheless, some of those stories are lacking something: The people disappear behind the facts, they remain strangers. For me, they are too theoretical in examining their families’ past; I find it difficult to identify with them. Dealing with the sins of one’s parents and grandparents can destroy families; it is not an academic exercise.

And it doesn’t stop here: The past will have an impact on my children, too. My two sons are still young. In a few years, they may well watch
Schindler’s List
at school. I don’t want them to be ashamed; instead, I hope that they will talk openly about their family history.

I think that we can only get square with our past and truly leave it behind us if we deal with it openly. Feeling that you have to hide yourself and your identity will only make you ill.

That is why I was so shocked when I discovered what my mother had concealed from me: The secrecy that overshadowed her childhood, her youth, her entire life—she let me grow up with it, too. I found out about it much too late.

I’m desperate for her to appreciate my despair, to understand the sadness that I have lived with all these years—to see what a relief it would have been for me to know the history of my natural family.

My mother and I have been talking for over two hours now—and not a word about us. Cautiously, I try to steer her away from the subject of the Holocaust and ask about my childhood.

My mother tells me that she moved back in with my grandmother Irene when she became pregnant with me. The two women discussed the option of my staying with them in their apartment. The children’s home was only meant as a temporary measure, my mother explains.

After I was born, she adds, she struggled to bond with me. My grandmother, on the other hand, was immediately taken with me, and she often pointed out what an extremely good grandchild I was, that I never cried or whined. My grandmother loved taking me out on walks or grocery shopping, my mother recalls. Irene, a striking figure herself, enjoyed showing off her black grandchild, like a baby doll. She loved my exotic appearance. Even Lulu, my grandmother’s transvestite lodger, would proudly push me around the English Garden in my stroller.

For the first time, I learn the inspiration for my given names: My name is Jennifer Annette Susanne. My mother explains that “Jennifer” was a vestige from the American occupying forces after the war. She liked that it sounded foreign.

“Annette” was my grandmother’s suggestion; she just really liked the name.

“Susanne” was in honor of “Susanna” from Płaszów—since Amon Goeth had two maids named Helen, he called Helen Hirsch “Lena” and Helen Rosenzweig “Susanna.”

After the war, my grandmother would often talk about her maids in Płaszów. When she was a child, my mother believed that Lena and Susanna were relations of some sort. Only years later did she discover that the years they spent in my grandfather’s villa must have been the worst time of their lives.

So, I was named “Susanne” after a Jewish concentration camp survivor—after the woman who meets with my mother in Krakow in the documentary that I watched so avidly, after the woman whose story moved me so much.

I ask my mother about my adoption. She tells me that it first occurred to her to have the Siebers adopt me when I told her that I wanted to have the same surname as my brothers. She adds that she discussed the matter with my grandmother Irene and that she said, “Sure, why not? I’ve met the family and they seemed very nice.”

For my mother, the adoption was a mere formality. She thought that it would cut the red tape and make things easier for me and my adoptive parents. It was not until afterward that she realized it also meant she had relinquished her visiting rights. She tells me that she was angry and disappointed when she found out.

Once she was not allowed to see me anymore, she would sometimes drive past our house in Waldtrudering, and on occasion my grandmother would come with her.

My mother would look at the big, beautiful home where I now lived and tell herself that it was probably for the best, that she really couldn’t ask for more.

She came to terms with the adoption.

My mother only noticed the outward appearances: the house, the garden, the trappings of a middle-class lifestyle. She didn’t see how torn I was feeling inside.

She still doesn’t see it. She doesn’t ask me what life was like with my new family, if there was anything I missed, or if I missed her.

For her, it seems obvious: The adoption was in my best interest. I had a picture-perfect childhood.

She thinks that it was good for me to no longer bear the name “Goeth,” nor the burden of the family history that came with it. She still doesn’t see that not knowing was the greater burden.