My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family's Nazi Past by Jennifer Teege, Nikola Sellmair Read Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Jennifer Teege, Nikola Sellmair
door firmly shut behind me.
There’s another tour I’ve booked in Krakow: a Schindler’s List tour.
I take a taxi to the meeting place in Kazimierz, the former Jewish quarter of Krakow. In the summer, Kazimierz is meant to be picturesque and charming; but today it seems dark and gloomy. The cobblestones are wet with rain. Our group of tourists visits the old Jewish cemetery, a synagogue, and a few locations from Schindler’s List . We see idyllic courtyards and narrow alleys.
Many restaurants in Kazimierz serve gefilte fish and kosher meat. Pretty little cafés play traditional klezmer music—the rhythm of a long-lost time—around the clock. There is a morbid, museum-like feel to the whole district.
The narrow little alleys and the rough paving stones remind me of Mea Shearim, the Orthodox Jewish quarter of Jerusalem. The difference is, Jews actually live in Mea Shearim. Our tour guide tells us that before World War II there were 70,000 Jews in Krakow. Now there are only a few hundred. Most of the Jewish people walking through Kazimierz these days are visitors. There are six tourists in my group; I want to know where they are from. The response: Poland, USA, France. They want to know where I come from. “Germany,” I say. “Ah!” they reply. I am glad we are not wearing name badges.
I still haven’t really told anybody about my family history, apart from my husband, my adoptive family, and a close friend. Not because I think I need to be ashamed of it, but because I don’t know how to deal with it. I find it hard to share my discovery. How could I put it? “Oh, by the way, I’m the granddaughter of a mass murderer”? I can’t cope with my background myself, and I don’t want to burden anybody else with it either. Not yet anyway.
Our small group moves on; we go over a little bridge across the Vistula river to the neighboring district of Podgorze. This is where the entire Jewish population of Krakow was crammed into a ghetto. The trams still ran through the middle of it, taking the people of Krakow across their city. Inside the ghetto, nobody was allowed to get in or out of the tram; there were no stops, and the doors and windows were locked for the duration. I wonder how the people of Krakow felt when they traveled through here.
Today a large office building stands in the square that used to be the center of the ghetto, and there is a bus depot, too. On the edge, a few sections of the ghetto walls remain. To add insult to injury, these tall walls surrounding the people behind them had arches at the top—they were built in the shape of Jewish tombstones. The message to the Jews was clear: You won’t get out alive.
The victims are remembered at Ghetto Heroes Square. Empty, larger-than-life chairs dotted around the square are meant to convey a sense of the devastation in the ghetto after it had been liquidated: Everything laid to waste, no people in the streets, only furniture and other personal possessions that the Jews had been forced to leave behind. I find the installation too cold, too conceptual. Hundreds of people were killed during the clearing of the ghetto. Every chair represents 1,000 Jews who were murdered. The brutalities that were committed here remain abstract. But how can they be displayed? Schindler’s List is very graphic, but survivors say that even Spielberg’s film barely hints at the real horror that emanated from Amon Goeth.
■ ■ ■
Tadeusz Pankiewicz, a Polish druggist in the Krakow ghetto, described Goeth as a tall, handsome man with blue eyes, dressed in a black leather coat and carrying a riding crop. Survivors reported that during the liquidation of the ghetto Goeth tore little children from their mothers’ arms and flung them to the ground.
Before the liquidation, 20,000 people were living in the ghetto in cramped conditions and in constant fear of death.
When Amon Goeth had the ghetto cleared on March 13 and 14, 1943, it had already been divided into two separate
There’s another tour I’ve booked in Krakow: a Schindler’s List tour.
I take a taxi to the meeting place in Kazimierz, the former Jewish quarter of Krakow. In the summer, Kazimierz is meant to be picturesque and charming; but today it seems dark and gloomy. The cobblestones are wet with rain. Our group of tourists visits the old Jewish cemetery, a synagogue, and a few locations from Schindler’s List . We see idyllic courtyards and narrow alleys.
Many restaurants in Kazimierz serve gefilte fish and kosher meat. Pretty little cafés play traditional klezmer music—the rhythm of a long-lost time—around the clock. There is a morbid, museum-like feel to the whole district.
The narrow little alleys and the rough paving stones remind me of Mea Shearim, the Orthodox Jewish quarter of Jerusalem. The difference is, Jews actually live in Mea Shearim. Our tour guide tells us that before World War II there were 70,000 Jews in Krakow. Now there are only a few hundred. Most of the Jewish people walking through Kazimierz these days are visitors. There are six tourists in my group; I want to know where they are from. The response: Poland, USA, France. They want to know where I come from. “Germany,” I say. “Ah!” they reply. I am glad we are not wearing name badges.
I still haven’t really told anybody about my family history, apart from my husband, my adoptive family, and a close friend. Not because I think I need to be ashamed of it, but because I don’t know how to deal with it. I find it hard to share my discovery. How could I put it? “Oh, by the way, I’m the granddaughter of a mass murderer”? I can’t cope with my background myself, and I don’t want to burden anybody else with it either. Not yet anyway.
Our small group moves on; we go over a little bridge across the Vistula river to the neighboring district of Podgorze. This is where the entire Jewish population of Krakow was crammed into a ghetto. The trams still ran through the middle of it, taking the people of Krakow across their city. Inside the ghetto, nobody was allowed to get in or out of the tram; there were no stops, and the doors and windows were locked for the duration. I wonder how the people of Krakow felt when they traveled through here.
Today a large office building stands in the square that used to be the center of the ghetto, and there is a bus depot, too. On the edge, a few sections of the ghetto walls remain. To add insult to injury, these tall walls surrounding the people behind them had arches at the top—they were built in the shape of Jewish tombstones. The message to the Jews was clear: You won’t get out alive.
The victims are remembered at Ghetto Heroes Square. Empty, larger-than-life chairs dotted around the square are meant to convey a sense of the devastation in the ghetto after it had been liquidated: Everything laid to waste, no people in the streets, only furniture and other personal possessions that the Jews had been forced to leave behind. I find the installation too cold, too conceptual. Hundreds of people were killed during the clearing of the ghetto. Every chair represents 1,000 Jews who were murdered. The brutalities that were committed here remain abstract. But how can they be displayed? Schindler’s List is very graphic, but survivors say that even Spielberg’s film barely hints at the real horror that emanated from Amon Goeth.
■ ■ ■
Tadeusz Pankiewicz, a Polish druggist in the Krakow ghetto, described Goeth as a tall, handsome man with blue eyes, dressed in a black leather coat and carrying a riding crop. Survivors reported that during the liquidation of the ghetto Goeth tore little children from their mothers’ arms and flung them to the ground.
Before the liquidation, 20,000 people were living in the ghetto in cramped conditions and in constant fear of death.
When Amon Goeth had the ghetto cleared on March 13 and 14, 1943, it had already been divided into two separate
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