My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family's Nazi Past (3 page)

In 1943, Heinrich Himmler delivered his infamous speech in front of top SS officials where he propagandized an ideology of hatred and contempt: “Whether other nations are living in prosperity or are starving to death interests me only insofar as we need them as slaves for our culture. . . . Whether or not 10,000 Russian women die of exhaustion during the construction of an anti-tank ditch interests me only insofar as the ditch is being finished. I also want to mention . . . a very difficult subject here. . . . I am talking about the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. . . . Most of you will know what it is like when 100 bodies are piled up together, when there are 500 or when there are 1,000. To have seen this through and to have stayed decent—with the exception of human weaknesses—that is what has made us tough.”

Amon Goeth soon went on to prove his toughness. The SS taught him how to kill.

■ ■ ■

UPSTAIRS, THE OLD MAN UNLOCKS
the door to the former
bedroom
. There are hooks in the ceiling.
This is where Amon Goeth did his exercises,
the old man claims.
Or maybe,
he adds with a wink,
he had a love-swing hanging from there.

I step onto the balcony and look out over the hills covered in brushwood. A cold wind blows in my face. It is a rainy October day. The camp, surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by watchtowers, was located near the house. My grandfather could keep an eye on his prisoners; in the mornings it was only a short walk to work. That blurred photograph of Amon Goeth on the cover of the book about my mother—his open mouth, the bare chest, the rifle in his hand, wearing only shorts on his balcony—who took that photo? Was it my grandmother? Amon Goeth is said to have been proud of his firearms; he liked to carry them around with him. Did that impress my grandmother, or did it frighten her? What did she know? What did she suppress? I cannot imagine her living in this house, yet not being aware of what was happening in the camp. Amon Goeth is said to have beaten his maids. My grandmother must have seen or at least heard that, too. The house isn’t that big.

After my arrival in Krakow the previous night, on my way to the hotel, I drove past Wawel Castle, the former residence of the kings of Poland, high above the Vistula. The castle was brightly lit. After the German invasion, Hans Frank, Hitler’s governor of Poland, made himself at home there, living a life of luxury surrounded by servants, employing composers and chess players. I can imagine the life he had up there, how powerful he must have felt residing in that grand castle with its view over Krakow.

By comparison Amon Goeth’s house looks very normal, almost modest. I had imagined it to be bigger, more ostentatious. I find it difficult to imagine that glamorous receptions were held here and that its owner was a man who was master of life and death for thousands of people. A man who thrived on having absolute power, and who wielded and relished this power in the most cynical way.

■ ■ ■

Amon Goeth on the balcony of his villa

“I am your God,” said Amon Goeth to the prisoners in his inaugural address as commandant of the Płaszów camp. “I dispatched 60,000 Jews in the district of Lublin. Now it’s your turn.”

In the Polish city of Lublin, Amon Goeth had worked for Odilo Globocnik, an SS man known for his brutality, whom Heinrich Himmler had charged with killing the Jews in occupied Poland. In December 1940, Globocnik updated Hans Frank on the goal he had set out with these words: “In this one year, I have obviously not been able to eradicate all the lice and all the Jews. But I am convinced that in the course of time it can be achieved. . . .”

When the “Final Solution” was being strategically coordinated at the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, the deportation and mass murder of Polish Jews was already in full swing.

Goeth’s superior Odilo Globocnik was co-responsible for the construction of concentration camps and the installation of gas chambers. In consultation with Adolf Eichmann he planned the factory-style murder of millions of people. In Poland, extermination camps were being commissioned: Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka.

Soon Odilo Globocnik charged Amon Goeth with the liquidation of the ghettos. Liquidation meant rounding up the able ghetto population into forced labor; those too weak or too ill to work were shot, including children and the elderly. Historian Johannes Sachslehner describes the process as “blood-thirsty manhunts following a proven formula. . . . In the thick of it is Amon Goeth, who is soon entrusted with leading roles.”

If he hadn’t done so already, Goeth surely now discovered the lucrative side of genocide: Jews who offered him valuables such as furs, fine china, or jewelry were not killed immediately but were “allowed” to go to the labor camps.

Around this time Amon Goeth also started to drink more and more heavily.

Soon the ambitious Goeth was given more tasks: He was to lead the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto and establish a forced labor camp in Płaszów. In letters to his friends and to his father in Vienna he said, “Now I am the commandant at last.”

On March 13 and 14, 1943, he ordered the clearance of the Krakow ghetto. Around 2,000 people are killed during these two days; a further 4,000 are deported, many to Auschwitz.

The survivors were taken to Amon Goeth’s realm: Płaszów. Almost 200 acres in size, the camp was first a labor camp and later a concentration camp. The German occupiers had built it on Jewish cemeteries. They built barracks on top of the demolished graves and used the gravestones to pave the streets in the camp.

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THE OLD MAN LEADS ME
into the basement. “This is where the commandant stored his wine,” he says. And then he points proudly to a rusty tub: “Amon Goeth’s authentic bathtub.”

Opposite the wine cellar and next to the kitchen was the maids’ room. So this was Helen’s place, here in the basement—Helen Rosenzweig, Amon Goeth’s former Jewish maid from the American documentary I watched on TV the day after I discovered the book.

My mother met Helen here in this house. Ultimately it was a very sad encounter: Helen was shocked because my mother had such a striking resemblance to Amon Goeth. And even though Helen and my mother both try very hard, they cannot form a relationship with each other; history stands between them. Helen sees Amon Goeth in my mother.

In the film, when my mother tries to find an explanation for Amon Goeth’s actions, Helen snaps angrily: “He was a monster. He was smiling and whistling when he came back from killing. He had the urge to kill, like an animal. It was obvious.”

My brother Matthias has given me the documentary on DVD so that I can watch it again and again. At first I focused only on my mother and didn’t pay much attention to Helen. The film begins with my mother writing a letter to Helen asking her for a meeting. In the letter she says that she imagines Helen might be afraid of meeting her—she herself is scared to meet Helen.

At the start, I wasn’t so concerned about the actual contents of the letter. All I could think was, why does my mother spend so much time writing a letter to Helen? Why doesn’t she write to me? Why does she share Helen’s pain but not that of her own child?

Then gradually my feelings faded into the background and suddenly I saw Helen. I saw her, after all those years, returning anxiously to this house that used to be her dreadful prison. I saw how she is still plagued by her memories. She recounts how Amon Goeth used to beat the maids, how he pushed them down these very stairs, how he screamed at them and called them
slut, bitch, dirty Jewess.

Helen’s boyfriend was a member of the Jewish Resistance in the camp and was shot by Goeth. Helen also talks about the man she loved after the war, a camp survivor like herself. They were married for 35 years, moved to Florida and had children. Yet her husband could not get over the experience of the camp, and one day he took his own life. In his suicide note he wrote, “The memories haunt me every day. I just can’t go on.”

I am standing in the basement of my grandfather’s house, in the darkness of Helen’s room, where the only light comes from a small window. You can see a small patch of the garden. It was warm here; she didn’t have to sleep on straw in the drafty barracks and was certain to have had more to eat than the other detainees. She didn’t have to perform hard labor in the quarries like most of the other women in the camp; she wore a black dress with a white apron and served roast meat and wine. Yet she was living beneath the same roof as the man who could kill her at any time. She expected to die in this house.

■ ■ ■

When you saw Goeth, you saw death, one survivor said. The Płaszów camp became the stage for Amon Goeth’s cruelty.

There are many eyewitness reports relating to this. Goeth’s Jewish assistant, Mietek Pemper, described how once, in the middle of a dictation, the commandant suddenly grabbed his rifle, opened a window, and started shooting at prisoners. Pemper heard screams; Goeth then returned to his desk and asked calmly, as if nothing had happened,
Where were we?

When Amon Goeth killed somebody, he would have their relatives killed, too, because he didn’t want to see any “unhappy” faces in his camp.

In her memoirs, Płaszów survivor Stella Müller-Madej writes about Goeth, “If there was somebody he didn’t like the look of, he’d grab him by the hair and shoot him on the spot. He was a giant of a man, a powerful, imposing figure with beautiful, gentle features and an even gentler expression on his face. So this is what a cruel, murdering monster looks like! How can that be?”

Goeth used publicly celebrated executions to crush any thought of escape or resistance the detainees might have had. Public hangings and shootings on the parade ground were accompanied by popular music. Larger groups of people were usually shot on a hill a little further away; the pit for the bodies was just below.

The Płaszów camp was growing, and the prisoners were now coming from further afield. Survivors from other ghettos, Polish prisoners, Romany from other camps, as well as Hungarian Jews all joined the Jews from the Krakow ghetto. Sometimes the Płaszów concentration camp held more than 20,000 detainees in its 180 barracks surrounded by two and half miles of barbed wire.

Within the SS, Amon Goeth was promoted to the rank of
Hauptsturmführer
, captain, which was an extraordinarily fast rise. He got rich on the prisoners’ possessions and lived a life of luxury. He had a Jewish cobbler make new shoes for him every week and a pastry chef bake fancy cakes for him until he was piling on the pounds. In his villa, he held parties; alcohol, music, and women were offered in abundance to humor the SS men. Goeth owned riding horses and a number of cars; he enjoyed riding through the camp on his white horse or racing around the lanes in his BMW.

Goeth would often ride around the camp on his white horse

Mietek Pemper, the commandant’s assistant, also took dictation of Goeth’s personal letters to his family in Vienna. Omitting the details of everyday life in the camp, he would ask his father about the progress of the business and his wife about the children: Anna Goeth had given birth to two more children, Ingeborg and Werner. When Amon Goeth learned that Werner was hitting his sister Ingeborg, he told Pemper to write in his letter to his wife Anna: “He must have got the hitting from me.”

Eyewitnesses reported that Goeth would wear different accessories depending on his mood on a given day. If he put on white gloves or a white scarf, combined with a peaked cap or a Tyrolean hat, the detainees had to expect the worst. His two dogs, a Great Dane and an Alsatian mix, were called Rolf and Ralf, and he trained them to attack people on his command.

In 1944, Amon Goeth had children from the Płaszów camp herded onto trucks—to be transported to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. He ordered waltz music to be played over the loudspeakers in order to drown out the desperate cries of their parents.

In other words: Amon Goeth was perfect Hollywood material. Just as Adolf Eichmann was for many years the epitome of the callous, bureaucratic mastermind behind the scenes, denying any responsibility, Amon Goeth serves as the grotesquely excessive personification of the sadistic murderer. The image of the trigger-happy concentration camp commandant, accompanied by his two dogs trained to tear humans apart—it seems like a grim archetype, like a template for Paul Celan’s poem
Death Fugue
. Steven Spielberg portrays Amon Goeth as a twisted psychopath, cruel, and at the same time almost laughable.