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 B
Authors: Jennifer Teege, Nikola Sellmair
areas: Ghetto A was for those who had been declared fit for work and who were to be transported to the Płaszów camp; they were allowed to live for now. Ghetto B, separated from Ghetto A by barbed wire, was for the old, the young, and the ill; they were going to be killed.
Nobody was to get away. Goeth’s people combed through all the alleys, looked in every apartment and under every bed. In the hospitals, the patients were shot in their beds. Tadeusz Pankiewicz described the scene of the aftermath like this: “It looks like a battlefield—thousands of abandoned bundles and suitcases . . . on pavements drenched in blood.”
In front of the walls of the former Jewish ghetto in Krakow
■ ■ ■
WE MOVE ON. IT IS RAINING, and we have to keep looking for shelter. A nice, elderly lady lets me share her umbrella. We walk beneath a drafty underpass and enter an industrial park. We stop in front of a gray, three-story office block dating from the 1930s: Oskar Schindler’s former enamelware factory on Lipowa Street.
Today it has been turned into a museum dedicated to his memory. We visit the exhibition. It starts with photographs of Krakow in the early 1930s. There are women going for their daily walk and men on their way to synagogue. Then follows a portrayal of the German blitzkrieg against Poland and the immediate ostracism of the Jews. One picture shows German soldiers cutting off the sidelocks of an Orthodox Jew with a knife.
I am tired and worn out. I’ve been on my feet since the early morning. I would love to just sit down somewhere and get some rest, but the tour guide keeps on talking. I am losing my concentration and can no longer remember any of the details.
In the last room of the museum there is a recreation of the Płaszów camp. Little model barracks, even my grandfather’s villa. I take a close look: Again it is obvious how close Goeth’s villa was to the camp and the prisoners’ barracks. I find my grandmother’s justifications less and less credible.
The exhibition covers Oskar Schindler, the man, only marginally. His story is told by means of photographs, documents, and his original furniture. In one room there is a large transparent cube filled with tin pots, bowls, and plates that were produced in his factory during the war. The installation is meant to symbolize the history of Schindler and his workers. Inside the cube are the names of the 1,200 Jewish slave laborers whose lives Oskar Schindler saved.
At the end of the exhibition there are two books, a black one and a white one. The white one is for the names of the people who helped save the Jews, the black one for the names of those who denounced and persecuted them. Two books representing two options: to save or to kill. Oskar Schindler or Amon Goeth. I don’t like this simple division between good and evil.
Many Jews survived by going underground, thanks to help from relatives, friends, or work colleagues. These “quiet heroes” are not remembered often enough. Oskar Schindler was certainly not holier-than-thou but a rather ambiguous character. I find it hard to picture what he was really like.
■ ■ ■
Oskar Schindler and Amon Goeth: The two men were the same age and shared the same weakness for drink, parties, and women.
Both got rich on the back of the pogroms: Goeth by stealing from Jews and by killing them, by taking everything they had. Schindler by acquiring a factory in Krakow whose Jewish owners had been dispossessed and employing Jews from Goeth’s camp as cheap labor.
Oskar Schindler, who had worked as an agent for the German counterintelligence in Poland, was a wartime profiteer at first; he came to Krakow to make a fortune. Later on he would spend most of the profits he had made on saving Jews.
The commandant Amon Goeth and the industrialist Oskar Schindler got on well together. Oskar Schindler needed cheap Jewish laborers and was therefore dependent on Amon Goeth’s goodwill. Oskar Schindler called Goeth
Nobody was to get away. Goeth’s people combed through all the alleys, looked in every apartment and under every bed. In the hospitals, the patients were shot in their beds. Tadeusz Pankiewicz described the scene of the aftermath like this: “It looks like a battlefield—thousands of abandoned bundles and suitcases . . . on pavements drenched in blood.”
In front of the walls of the former Jewish ghetto in Krakow
■ ■ ■
WE MOVE ON. IT IS RAINING, and we have to keep looking for shelter. A nice, elderly lady lets me share her umbrella. We walk beneath a drafty underpass and enter an industrial park. We stop in front of a gray, three-story office block dating from the 1930s: Oskar Schindler’s former enamelware factory on Lipowa Street.
Today it has been turned into a museum dedicated to his memory. We visit the exhibition. It starts with photographs of Krakow in the early 1930s. There are women going for their daily walk and men on their way to synagogue. Then follows a portrayal of the German blitzkrieg against Poland and the immediate ostracism of the Jews. One picture shows German soldiers cutting off the sidelocks of an Orthodox Jew with a knife.
I am tired and worn out. I’ve been on my feet since the early morning. I would love to just sit down somewhere and get some rest, but the tour guide keeps on talking. I am losing my concentration and can no longer remember any of the details.
In the last room of the museum there is a recreation of the Płaszów camp. Little model barracks, even my grandfather’s villa. I take a close look: Again it is obvious how close Goeth’s villa was to the camp and the prisoners’ barracks. I find my grandmother’s justifications less and less credible.
The exhibition covers Oskar Schindler, the man, only marginally. His story is told by means of photographs, documents, and his original furniture. In one room there is a large transparent cube filled with tin pots, bowls, and plates that were produced in his factory during the war. The installation is meant to symbolize the history of Schindler and his workers. Inside the cube are the names of the 1,200 Jewish slave laborers whose lives Oskar Schindler saved.
At the end of the exhibition there are two books, a black one and a white one. The white one is for the names of the people who helped save the Jews, the black one for the names of those who denounced and persecuted them. Two books representing two options: to save or to kill. Oskar Schindler or Amon Goeth. I don’t like this simple division between good and evil.
Many Jews survived by going underground, thanks to help from relatives, friends, or work colleagues. These “quiet heroes” are not remembered often enough. Oskar Schindler was certainly not holier-than-thou but a rather ambiguous character. I find it hard to picture what he was really like.
■ ■ ■
Oskar Schindler and Amon Goeth: The two men were the same age and shared the same weakness for drink, parties, and women.
Both got rich on the back of the pogroms: Goeth by stealing from Jews and by killing them, by taking everything they had. Schindler by acquiring a factory in Krakow whose Jewish owners had been dispossessed and employing Jews from Goeth’s camp as cheap labor.
Oskar Schindler, who had worked as an agent for the German counterintelligence in Poland, was a wartime profiteer at first; he came to Krakow to make a fortune. Later on he would spend most of the profits he had made on saving Jews.
The commandant Amon Goeth and the industrialist Oskar Schindler got on well together. Oskar Schindler needed cheap Jewish laborers and was therefore dependent on Amon Goeth’s goodwill. Oskar Schindler called Goeth
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