My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family's Nazi Past by Jennifer Teege, Nikola Sellmair Read Free Book Online

sense that he was in love with himself. He was a narcissist who felt on top of the world when he humiliated and degraded others.
    I read that my grandmother used to idolize him: handsome Amon Goeth, the man of her dreams.
    This is juxtaposed to the image of him that contemporary witnesses have painted: quick-tempered, cruel, irascible. His dogs. His exaggerated masculinity: commanding, dominating. Uniform, discipline, Fatherland.
    My mother always saw the father in him, too, not just the concentration camp commandant. She is much closer to him than I am, even though she never met him. She was still a baby when he was hanged. Survivors of the camp have told her again and again how much she looks like him. How dreadful that must have been for her.
    Do I look like him? My skin color is like a barrier between us. I imagine myself standing next to him. We are both tall: I am six foot, he was six foot four—a giant in those days.
    He in his black uniform with its death-heads, me the black grandchild. What would he have said to a dark-skinned granddaughter, who speaks Hebrew on top of that? I would have been a disgrace, a bastard who brought dishonor to the family. I am sure my grandfather would have shot me.
    My grandmother was never bothered by my skin color. She always seemed delighted to see me when I came to visit. No matter how little I was at the time: Children can sense if someone likes them, and she liked me. I’ve always felt so close to her. Yet she also held Amon Goeth when he came back from his killings. How could she share her bed and her home with him? She said she loved him, but is that a good enough excuse? Is it good enough for me? Was there anything loveable about Amon Goeth—is that even a permissible question?
    When I look in the mirror I see two faces, mine and his. And a third, my mother’s.
    The three of us have the same determined chin, the same lines between the nose and the mouth.
    Height, lines—those things are only external. But what about on the inside? How much of Amon Goeth do I have in me? How much of Amon Goeth does each of us have in us?
    I think we all have a bit of him in us. To believe that I have more than others would be to think like a Nazi—to believe in the power of blood.
    The quiet in the villa is suddenly broken: Malgorzata, the Polish woman who interprets the old man’s Polish for me, reveals out of the blue that she once met Amon Goeth’s daughter Monika. I ask her to tell me more and she says that my mother once came to visit the villa with a group of Polish schoolchildren. They were accompanied by a descendant of another Nazi, Niklas Frank, son of Hans Frank, governor-general of Hitler’s occupied Poland.
    Since Malgorzata doesn’t know who I am I ask her what she thought of my mother. “I thought she was a bit strange, and sad,” she replies. “Niklas Frank and Monika Goeth, neither of them could laugh.” And then she tells us that here in this house Monika Goeth had touched a doorpost and said that she loved her father.
    My mother’s hand on the door. There are hundreds of German-speaking tour guides in Krakow, and I chose the one who has met my mother.
    I tell Malgorzata who I am. At first she doesn’t believe me, then she becomes bewildered and confused. I apologize to her. In order to find out more about my mother I had asked questions without revealing my identity. I say that I hope she understands my situation.
    I had been determined to contact my mother before the end of the year. Now the year is almost over—it is well into fall, but I don’t want to write to my mother until I feel better prepared for it.
    In the documentary about her meeting with Amon Goeth’s former maid Helen, my mother frequently cries. I can see the strain she’s under because of her father’s past. Krakow has a special meaning for her. I thought that I’d be able to understand my mother better if I, too, got to know this place.
    The old man shows Malgorzata and me out. I pull the