My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family's Nazi Past (6 page)

On September 13, 1946, Amon Goeth was led to the gallows. His last words were “Heil Hitler.”

Amon Goeth (left) in Krakow on his way to court where he would be sentenced to death in September 1946

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THERE ARE MANY THINGS
I’d like to ask my grandmother. I think it would have been worthwhile to press her for answers—she had some dents in her armor and might have been willing to talk. As for my grandfather, I have few questions for him. Those images of his execution, of his arm raised defiantly in the air, the Hitler salute his parting gesture from life. If he had ever shown any signs of remorse, I would have liked to question him. Yet, as it was, I think it would have been pointless. He never admitted his guilt. At his trial he lied right up to the end.

I go to visit the former site of the Płaszów concentration camp.

Today the hilly ground where the camp used to be is turfed over. There is nothing here to recall the barbed-wire fences, the watchtowers, the quarry where the prisoners toiled, the barracks, the mass graves. Only green grass, in between a McDonald’s restaurant and a busy highway. In the distance, socialist prefab buildings loom against the sky.

High on a hill, visible from afar, stands the memorial: a larger-than-life sculpture of people with bowed heads, carved from light-colored stone. Where their hearts should be is a gaping hole.

I am surprised. I can still picture this setting from
Schindler’s List.
Everything seemed so real, so alive. Now there are no moving pictures, only stones.

The camp is history; my grandfather has long been dead.

I hold onto my flowers and climb the wide steps up to the plateau where the memorial stands. From up here I get a much better view of the area. The site looks abandoned and neglected. Without the informational displays, one would never guess at the atrocities that were committed here all those years ago.

People are jogging by in the drizzling rain; in the distance I can make out others walking their dogs. They probably come here every day, grateful for this park’s existence.

All alone I stand in front of the memorial. Few people come here at this time of year.

Reverently, I touch the cold stone with my hand, just like I did at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.

The memorial for the victims of the Płaszów camp

During the last few months I’ve been asking myself,
Who am I?
I’m not so sure anymore: Am I still Jennifer, or am I only Jennifer, the granddaughter of Amon Goeth, now? What counts in my life?

I can’t just shove my grandfather’s past into a box and put a lid on it. I can’t just say,
That’s the past, it’s over, it doesn’t affect me anymore.
That would be a betrayal of the victims.

I have come here as I would come to a grave. A grave is a place to care for and to return to in order to honor the dead.

When somebody dies it is not necessarily essential to go to their funeral. You can say good-bye privately. Yet the visit to the grave is a sign, an important ritual, which is why I have come here today. I want to pay my respects to the victims. To show that I will never forget them.

Slowly I lay down the flowers and sit on the grass. Only now do I realize that a group of people has gathered in front of the memorial. Children are running over the grass. A school class from Israel. I listen; it sounds dear and familiar.

The Commandant’s Mistress:
My Grandmother Ruth Irene Kalder

It was a wonderful time. My Amon was king, I was his queen. Who wouldn’t have relished that?

—Ruth Irene Goeth in 1975, about her time spent with concentration camp commandant Amon Goeth

HOW MUCH DID MY GRANDMOTHER KNOW?

Before my visit to the villa I had convinced myself that she probably wasn’t aware of everything that was going on.

Before going to Krakow I had imagined rambling grounds, a massive house. The shots fired in the camp would have been too far away, the screams of the maids being terrorized by my grandfather too quiet to hear.

Only it wasn’t like that. My grandmother was right in the thick of it. The house was small, the camp not far away.

Was my grandmother not just blinded by love but deafened by it, too?

Where was my grandmother’s compassion? People were dying a few hundred yards away, and there she was, reveling with Amon Goeth.

My grandfather has long been dead, but I knew my grandmother. When I was a small child, she was the person who mattered most to me. I had little, if anything, to hold on to. She liked me, and that meant a lot.

To me, she radiated kindness. Whenever I think of her, I feel safe and secure again.

And then I read the book about my mother, and now I am learning all these things about my grandmother that blatantly contradict the image I have of her.

If it hadn’t been for her, maybe discovering Amon Goeth in my family tree wouldn’t have been such a shock. I could have regarded him more as a historical figure; I might not have taken it quite so personally. Yes, he is my grandfather, but he never pushed my stroller or held my hand. But my grandmother did.

I feel so close to her, which is why I cannot simply shove the image of Amon Goeth to some distant place in history.

Literature written about the descendants of Nazi criminals sometimes differentiates between those who knew the relative in question and those who didn’t. Some authors conclude that those who never met their Nazi ancestor are generally less troubled by their past. What they ignore, however, is that those born after the event often still know relatives who loved their Nazi ancestor. The living are their connection to the dead.

My mother was ten months old, a baby, when Amon Goeth was executed. Yet the book about her clearly shows that she is very distressed by the past. She has the same connection to him as I do: Ruth Irene—her mother, my grandmother. The woman who had a picture of Amon Goeth hanging above her bed until her death. My grandmother later said that he was the most important man in her life. What drew her to him?

The large bus I am on is full of people, but nobody is talking much. We drive along roads lined with low houses; the route is dotted with little villages. The pavement is wet. It has been raining again. I wish the sun would break through the clouds—the place where I’m heading is gloomy enough as it is.

It is my second and last day in Poland, and I am on my way to Auschwitz. The former concentration camp is only an hour’s drive away from Krakow. I have never been there before, even though Auschwitz is both a powerful symbol and harrowing relic of the Holocaust. Visiting these places is an altogether different experience from just reading about them. Auschwitz is where Amon Goeth sent thousands of Płaszów prisoners—straight to the gas chambers. Did he talk to my grandmother about it? Maybe not, but she must have known it nonetheless.

The more I try to understand who she really was, the harder I find it to stay objective.

■ ■ ■

Jennifer Teege’s grandmother Ruth Irene Kalder, later Ruth Irene Goeth, was 25 years old when she met Amon Goeth. She came from Gleiwitz in Upper Silesia. Her father owned a driving school and was a member of the Nazi party. Ruth Irene Kalder had qualified as a beautician and had attended a drama school in Essen. During her time there, she allegedly had a relationship with an older man, got pregnant, and subsequently had an abortion.

In Krakow she was working as a secretary for the Wehrmacht. According to Goeth’s biographer Johannes Sachslehner, she “had a reputation for not being disinclined to little adventures with men in uniform.” She became friendly with the industrialist Oskar Schindler and carried out some secretarial jobs for him. One evening in the spring of 1943, Schindler took her along to a dinner with Amon Goeth.

Later, in interviews and when talking to her daughter Monika, Ruth Irene Kalder described meeting the concentration camp commandant as love at first sight. Amon Goeth was big and strong, she said, “a true dream for any secretary.” She had “eyes for nobody but this man,” adding that he was funny, intelligent, and well read, “the ideal man, like Clark Gable as Rhett Butler in
Gone with the Wind
.”

In an interview with the Israeli historian and journalist Tom Segev in 1975, Ruth Irene Kalder also claimed that she was supposed to flirt with Amon Goeth in order to cement his good relationship with Oskar Schindler, who relied on Jewish laborers sourced from Goeth’s camp. “My job as the pretty secretary was to win over his heart so that he would continue to provide us with these workers, since the Jews were now under the control of the camp commandant.”

The petite, dark-haired young woman instantly hit it off with Amon Goeth. Ruth Irene Kalder recalled that they were soon on first-name terms; as she was leaving, Goeth said to her, “I’ll call you.” When he hadn’t been in touch after a few days, she called him: “You said you’d call, I’m still waiting.” Goeth was surprised but also suspicious. He was under the impression that she was Oskar Schindler’s girlfriend and had called to spy on him. She reassured him that she was only friends with Schindler and arranged to meet him in Płaszów.

She soon became Goeth’s permanent girlfriend; he gave her the pet name
Majola
. Her love for Amon Goeth brought her to the grounds of a concentration camp, into the house of its commandant.

Goeth’s former Jewish maid Helen Rosenzweig has described Ruth Irene Kalder as a “beautiful young woman, with dark hair and wonderfully milky skin. She must have been very much in love with Goeth, for she was always gazing at him.”

Kalder ignored her beloved Amon’s less loveable side. According to Helen Rosenzweig, Ruth Irene Kalder did not want to know what was going on in the camp: “Most of the time she was busy mixing egg yolk with cucumber and yogurt, and then she would lie around with a cucumber mask on her face. She would turn the music way up so that she couldn’t hear the shots.”

Film director Steven Spielberg shows Ruth Irene Kalder burying her head in her pillow while Amon Goeth is shooting from his balcony.

Ruth Irene’s mother, Agnes Kalder, visited her daughter at Płaszów once. Agnes was horrified to see the environment where her daughter was living and returned home early.

Ruth Irene Kalder, however, enjoyed her life of luxury at the commandant’s side. She later told her daughter Monika that she and Goeth would often start the day with a horseback ride. Afterward, she would apply her extensive makeup. After breakfast she would give the orders for lunch: plenty of meat and alcohol for Amon Goeth, cake and fruit for dessert. In the afternoons, Ruth Irene Kalder would go for another ride, listen to music, or play tennis with the girlfriends and wives of the other SS men. In the evenings there would often be company. Amon Goeth and his girlfriend especially enjoyed having the Rosner brothers, Jewish musicians from the camp, perform for them. On those occasions, Hermann and Poldek Rosner would swap their prison clothes for elegant suits and play the violin and the accordion for Goeth and his guests. And Ruth Irene Kalder, dressed in fine clothes from Krakow shops, would play the lady of the house.

One photo from Płaszów shows Ruth Irene posing in an elegant riding dress in front of the somber barracks and barbed-wire fences as if she were modeling the latest fashion on the Champs-Élysées. In other photos she is sunbathing in a swimsuit on the patio of the commandant’s villa. Another picture shows her in a stylish hat and coat, standing with her little black lapdog on one side and Goeth’s favorite dog, his spotted Great Dane Rolf, on the other. Presumably, Amon Goeth took this picture of her.

Ruth Irene Kalder, photographed by Amon Goeth, with Rolf, the Great Dane that Goeth trained to tear humans apart, and her own lapdog

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FOR ALL THESE YEARS,
I’ve had only one photograph of my grandmother. It shows her wearing a long, flowery dress, her hair combed into a beehive, the golden bangle on her arm twinkling in the sun. She is standing on the grass in the English Garden in Munich. A dachshund is playing behind her, a red ball lying in the grass. She is smiling at the camera and looks young, happy, and relaxed. It is a lovely, natural photo, which I have always treasured.

Now I am finding very different pictures of her, in the book about my mother and on the Internet. Looking at these pictures of her, posing with a dog that would attack people on Goeth’s command—it is unbearable; it is too upsetting. I am exposing myself to a lot, but I can’t and won’t look at these pictures. How could she touch this dog, how could she bear having it near her? After all, it wasn’t a pet, but an animal trained to kill.

I cannot reconcile these pictures with my image of her.

I do not grieve for my grandfather, but I do for my grandmother. I grieve for the person she never really was.

She was always good to me, which is why I always thought of her as a good person. As a child, you cannot imagine that the person you love could have another side, a darker one.

I really wish that my memories of her had not been tarnished. Why couldn’t she have been just an ordinary grandmother—a nice lady who died one day?

I had always thought of Irene as one of my three grandmothers, the other two being my adoptive grandmothers, whom I called
Oma Vienna
and
Oma Bochum
.

Oma Bochum was my adoptive father’s mother. She was very short, had gray curly hair—a typical grandmother’s perm—and an energetic, scurrying walk. She would always wear skirts, covered with an apron to keep them clean. Whenever she left the house she would change into her orthopedic pumps with flat heels—the ones I called “click-clack shoes” as a child. When I went to visit her in Bochum with my adoptive family, we would accompany her to the market or to the butcher’s, or help with her gardening. I was never too enthusiastic about planting vegetables or picking fruit, but I loved the results: The shelves in her basement were loaded with jars of stewed fruit. At dinnertime, a gong would summon us to the table.

She was very disciplined and also a little strict, not a cuddly grandmother. Yet she had a big heart. Even though my Oma Bochum had two children of her own—my adoptive father and his sister—she regarded it her Christian duty to include other children in her family. Helping orphaned or neglected children was a living family tradition. Growing up with a number of foster siblings was a matter of course for my adoptive father, which is why it later seemed natural to him to take in a foster child—me.

My Oma Bochum was an active member of the Protestant Church and very popular in the community. She would regularly visit the grave of her late husband, who had died young. She normally went to church on Sundays, and eventually she died there, too: She had a heart attack one Sunday in the middle of a service.

My Oma Vienna, my adoptive mother’s mother, was also short, but very plump. She exuded something motherly, calming. She was always impeccably dressed and enjoyed wearing silk dresses and fur-trimmed coats. As a child, I often stayed with her; I preferred Vienna to Bochum—the city was more exciting. Oma Vienna would sometimes behave like a small child herself: Once we played a trick on Opa and pretended that we had all run away, Oma and the children. Opa played along, pretending to be really worried.

Only Christmastime was odd with Oma Vienna. We would all sing carols under the tree, but she wouldn’t join in for fear of striking the wrong notes.

We often went on vacation with our grandparents from Vienna, too: skiing in the winter, hiking in the Austrian Alps, or camping by the sea in Italy in the summer. Opa sometimes told us wartime stories about his time with Rommel in Africa. Oma never talked to us about the war. In 1945, she had fled the area that is now the Czech Republic for Vienna. The journey was a terrible experience for her, but she would never discuss it.

And then there is my fourth grandmother, in Nigeria—my other biological grandmother besides Irene. I don’t know much about her. I met my father once, when I was 28. He told me that, when my mother wanted to give me away to the orphanage, he had suggested that I might as well live with his mother in Nigeria. He would have preferred that to the orphanage, but my mother didn’t like the idea. I guess she wasn’t ready then to give me up entirely. While I was at the orphanage, my mother could still visit me, and she would still have had the option to take me back.

I imagine my African grandmother as a tall, proud woman, a strict matriarch. I find it remarkable that she would have been prepared to take me in. For that I am very grateful to her, and I sometimes wonder, what if . . . ?