My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family's Nazi Past (10 page)

On January 29, 1983, the day after her interview with Jon Blair, Ruth Irene Goeth took an overdose of sleeping pills.

Perhaps Ruth Irene Goeth was afraid of what was to come once Jon Blair’s documentary aired. Yet that certainly wasn’t her main reason to commit suicide: She had first spoken of taking her own life months before the recording session.

In her suicide note to her daughter, Ruth Irene Goeth wrote: “Dear Monika . . . Please forgive me for all the mistakes I’ve made . . . I am leaving. I am a wreck. A burden to myself and everybody else. It is so hard to be locked up with this illness all by myself. I want to go to sleep and never wake up again. Everywhere I look, fear is staring back at me. Believe me, it wasn’t an easy decision, but this life, being chained to the couch, is dreadful. Take care. Don’t be so hard all the time. I have been so desperate. My life would have been one long illness. . . . Remember me well . . . you didn’t make it easy for me either. But I have always loved you as you love your own child. Your mother.”

Not a single word about her time with Amon Goeth.

■ ■ ■

I CAN HARDLY WAIT TO SEE
my grandmother in the documentary about Oskar Schindler; I haven’t seen her for so long. Now I will be able to look at her on the screen. I borrow the film from the same library where I first found the book about my mother.

The film consists of a string of interviews that the director, Jon Blair, conducted with contemporary witnesses. I keep asking myself when my grandmother will make her appearance. I fast-forward and rewind but can’t seem to find the segment. At last, at 17 minutes, my grandmother appears.

She sits on a chair, bolt upright, looking straight into the camera. Her face is beautiful with fine features. She still has something youthful about her. She looks just as I remember her. As if time had stood still.

What she says is of no importance—I am not listening, I’m just staring at her.

I have missed her.

Now she is struggling to breathe. I can hardly bear to watch her gasping for air. She is terminally ill. I feel sorry for her.

I rewind the film over and over and watch the scenes with my grandmother a second, third, and fourth time. Only later do I take in what she is saying. She is still defending herself. She has had time to reflect, but she is immovable. She hasn’t changed.

I am sad and angry. Angry with her, but also with the people around her. They point the camera directly at my grandmother; she is obviously very ill, and yet they won’t leave her in peace. Irene gives evasive answers; her English is excellent. Her voice sounds familiar, lovely. Like it used to. If only she wasn’t saying these outrageous things. I hear her suppressed anger. She feels like she’s been cornered.

Tomorrow she will be dead. Is she already thinking of the pills she is going to take? When did she start saving them up? Has she already got the typewriter ready for her suicide note? Or is it during the interview that she realizes the time has come, that she cannot escape her illness, or her past?

They bombard her with more and more questions. I can tell by the look on her face that she would like to be left alone, that she doesn’t want to give any more answers. But the camera remains trained on her exhausted face. I watch her eyes; I like her eyes the best. They say that if you’re lying, your eyes become evasive, flutter, look upward, away. But she doesn’t look away. Her eyes look straight ahead. I don’t catch her lying. That makes it even more painful: She really believes what she is saying.

Her suicide note doesn’t mention the victims—it is all about her and her illness.

Also, her letter only mentions one child; she is referring to my mother’s second daughter, my younger half-sister. I was adopted and therefore gone. Nevertheless, I believe that my grandmother was thinking about me right until the end.

I would like to have had a different grandfather. But I would choose her as my grandmother again.

Perhaps it would have been different if I had met her again when I was older. If I could have talked to her, if she had repeated the same family lies that made my mother’s life so difficult. I’m sure my inner turmoil would be even worse. But I never discussed anything like that with her. I was just a child.

None of this means that I agree with what my grandmother did, or that I want to cover for her. I renounce what she did, and sadly didn’t do, in the camp. I renounce her explanations. I simply distinguish between the public figure, Ruth Irene Goeth, and my grandmother, Irene.

Many children and grandchildren of Nazi criminals feel the need to apologize on behalf of their relatives. The grandchildren do this less fervently than the “penitent generation” of Nazi children. At first, I noticed the same response in myself, a fear of how my environment might react if I admitted that I love my grandmother.

The book about my mother is entitled
I Have to Love My Father, Don’t I?
It implies that actually she mustn’t love her father. The author, Matthias Kessler, keeps confronting my mother with her father’s crimes. I can see him wagging his finger on the pages, can hear his judgmental undertone: You must not love this father, this monster!

But human psychology doesn’t work like that. If my children were ever to commit some horrendous crime, I would condemn their actions resolutely—but I would never stop loving them.

The descendants of perpetrators are often accused of deluding themselves by constructing a psychological framework to help them deal with their ancestors’ terrible crimes and to save the image of a good father or a good grandmother. Allegedly, they convince themselves that the offending relative was just acting on orders, that others committed atrocities of even greater magnitude. The descendants are said to cling to a fantasy that the culprit repented at the last minute.

I don’t think this is true. I did wonder whether Amon Goeth might have eventually regretted his actions, but not in order to exonerate him—and therefore myself. It was much more because I am interested from a psychological point of view, and because I see Amon Goeth as a human being after all. It is in our nature to have compassion.

My grandfather did not repent in the end; why else would he have raised his arm in a Hitler salute at the gallows? My grandmother never really repented either. She never really saw the victims; she walked through life with her eyes closed.

Nonetheless, I still feel close to my grandmother. I will not try to justify the fact; I won’t explain it either. That’s just the way it is.

When I was a little girl, she made me feel that I wasn’t alone. I will always remember her for that.

Ruth Irene Goeth in 1983, shortly before her suicide

Living with the Dead:
My Mother Monika Goeth

This man, he dominated our entire lives. Even though Amon Goeth was dead, he was still there.

—Monika Goeth in 2002

I WANT TO SEE MY MOTHER AGAIN,
not for a reckoning, but for answers to all the questions I have going around in my head.

Almost twenty years have passed since we last met. Will she be surprised to hear from me now? Will she be shocked? Curious? Pleased?

Will she like me, or reject me?

I set myself a deadline; I wanted to contact my mother before the end of the year. It was October when I went to Krakow. November came and went. Now we’re in December, and the weeks are quickly passing by.

By mid-December I can’t run from it any longer. A week before Christmas, I write a letter to my mother. I have found her address in the phone book.

I stumble at the first hurdle. How should I address her? Mother? Monika? Dear Monika?

As a child I called her
Mama
, but that was a long time ago.

I start my letter with “Dear Monika” and wish her a merry Christmas. I tell her that I would love to see her in the new year. I give her my address and include a small photo of my husband and my two sons. I am sharing a small part of my life with her so she’ll know a few things about me now: that I live in Hamburg and am married with two children.

I know so little about her, and yet so much—from the book about her, the documentary, and the Internet.

That was one of the reasons I went to Krakow—to be closer to my mother. She had gone there herself, tracing the steps of her own parents. It was there that she met with Helen Rosenzweig, Amon Goeth’s former maid. In the documentary about that meeting my mother looks lost and lonely.

The journey to Poland was an important step for me; I felt much better afterward. The moment I laid flowers at the Płaszów memorial, I felt as if a huge weight was lifted from my shoulders. Since then, I have stopped busying myself with historical facts. When I close my eyes I no longer see my murdering grandfather before me, nor my grandmother gasping for air. I am able to devote myself back to my own life and my children.

By being able to take a step back, I may have achieved what my mother never managed to do.

I study my mother’s photographs again. She looks so sad in some of them, her expression veiled, that it frightens me. I’m afraid these photos could pull me back into the depths of depression.

But without talking to my mother, I will never truly understand my family and my past. There are details only she can tell me.

At first, I wasn’t sure I really wanted to see her again. After I found the book, all I wanted to do was shout at her and tell her how disappointed I was. How could she leave me, and then pretend that I didn’t exist? How could she think it wasn’t necessary to tell me the shocking details of our family history?

But I knew it would have been futile to contact her feeling like that. I would have confronted her in the role of a small, hurt child, unable to have a proper conversation.

I needed time to understand her better.

So I kept quiet. Only during my therapy sessions did I really allow my anger to boil up. My husband suggested I confront my mother sooner rather than later. He was angry with her, too, I could tell—maybe even more so than I.

Yet I considered it best to wait. I thought about my mother a lot. What kind of person is she? Difficult, an enigma. I pored over the photos I have of her, and I watched the documentary about her and Helen Rosenzweig with new eyes. She has a peculiar gait; her shoulders are hunched as if under a heavy burden. Now, I feel sorry for her. My anger has abated a little.

Looking at her life now, I can see why she didn’t feel capable of bringing me up. I can even understand why she wouldn’t talk about the past for so long.

Still I would like to hear it from her: Why did she give me away? And I want to know how she has been all these years.

I no longer see her simply as a mother who abandoned her child; now I see her as the daughter of Amon Goeth—the father who became the story of her life, the story that shaped her identity. That occupied her to such an extent that it left no room for other people, for her role as a mother, or for me.

■ ■ ■

Monika Goeth was born in Bad Toelz in Bavaria. Amon Goeth had arrived there in the confusion of the last days of the war, but he was soon arrested by the recently arrived American forces in May 1945. Ruth Irene Kalder followed him to Bavaria and gave birth to their daughter in November 1945.

While in prison, Amon Goeth wrote to Ruth Irene Kalder: “Dearest Ruth, at last we are allowed to write home. I have been thinking of you, especially in early November. Was it difficult, you poor thing? What is it—a boy or a girl? Hoping to see you . . .”

After the birth, Ruth Irene Kalder came down with scarlet fever, and Ruth’s mother Agnes looked after her newborn granddaughter. For the first few weeks, due to the risk of infection, Ruth was only allowed to see her daughter behind glass. The distance between mother and daughter would always remain: Agnes became the person Monika would most closely relate to, she was the girl’s “Oma.” Her mother would always be simply “Ruth” or “Irene.”

Much later, Monika Goeth talked about her childhood at length in an interview with Matthias Kessler, the author and documentary filmmaker.

When Monika was six months old, her mother was walking her in her baby carriage when a man suddenly attacked the carriage and stabbed the baby with a knife. Monika needed an operation; she was left with a scar on her neck. Ruth Irene Kalder assumed that it must have been a former inmate of Płaszów who tried to kill her daughter.

When Monika was ten months old, her father was hanged in Krakow.

That didn’t stop Ruth Irene Kalder, who changed her name to Goeth in 1948, from romanticizing about her Amon, or “Mony” as he was called. Monika, also called “Moni,” was in Frankfurt with her mother when she met with an old friend, Oskar Schindler. He took one look at the girl and exclaimed: “Just like her father!” Monika was pleased to hear it.

She wasn’t suspicious until the day her mother shouted at her, during an argument, “You are just like your father, and one day you will end up like your father!” That was when Monika, now twelve years old, began asking questions. Her father had died in the war, hadn’t he?

Her mother wouldn’t explain anything. Eventually Monika managed to press her grandmother Agnes for the truth: “Well, they hanged him, you know. In Poland, where they had killed the Jews. Your father was one of them.”

Jews? Monika didn’t know any Jews. By then, the family had moved to Schwabing—the bohemian quarter of Munich—but even there in the big city Monika had heard nothing about the Holocaust. She would later describe the postwar atmosphere in the 1950s and ’60s as a time when “people wouldn’t talk about the Jews. They were extinct like the dinosaurs.”

Monika pressed her grandmother for more information: “And where was Irene?” She replied: “Also in Poland.”

The following day, Monika approached her schoolteacher and asked what had really happened with the Jews. The teacher told her to concentrate on her math homework instead of worrying about things that didn’t concern her.

So Monika went back to her mother and probed for answers: How many Jews did her father kill, and why? Had he killed children, too?

When Monika wouldn’t stop asking questions, her mother struck her.

Ruth Irene Goeth would downplay Goeth’s actions and repeat the same story over and over: The camp Mony led was only a labor camp, not an extermination camp. Another commandant, Rudolf Hoess, had been in charge of a much bigger and much worse camp in Auschwitz. Ruth Irene Goeth assured her: There had been no children in Płaszów; she never saw a single child.

Ruth Irene also claimed that Amon Goeth had shot only a few Jews, and then only for “hygienic reasons.” Monika Goeth quotes her mother as saying, “The Jews never went to the toilet, which caused diseases to spread. And when Amon once spotted a few men not using the toilet, he shot them.”

Monika Goeth grew up surrounded by lies. She was a child, so she believed her mother. The words we hear as children take hold, and they keep flashing through our minds whether we want them to or not.

It would take Monika Goeth almost half a lifetime to find out the whole truth about her father and her family. She went on to read all the material she could find to help uncover the lies and half-truths in her head, a process that nearly drove her insane.

It took a lot of energy to tear down the web of lies her mother had created. It would have been easier not to, especially since the stories her mother had told her were feel-good stories—stories about a charming, loving, and witty father who ultimately hadn’t done anything wrong. Looking back, Monika Goeth said, “I used to view my father as a victim—a victim of the Nazis, of Hitler, of Himmler.”

Psychologist Peter Bruendl in Munich explains that, to ensure normal development, children need to grow up thinking,
My parents are good people:
“It is awful to have murderers for parents, to have to think,
me, a child of killers
. That’s why many people accept their parents’ silence on the subject, and they too keep quiet about it. They don’t ask questions about what their parents actually did during the war.”

The generation born in the years just before and after the end of the Third Reich came to realize that their parents would refuse to engage in any discussion of the Nazi years. Regardless of whether they had been SS men or common Wehrmacht soldiers, most fathers (and their wives or widows) would say little to nothing about the years before 1945. They left it to their children and grandchildren to eventually rediscover their family history. With the truth cloaked in silence, legends and prejudices flourished.

Agnes Kalder asked her granddaughter to let it rest, but Monika kept needling her mother. If Ruth Irene asked her daughter to clean the bathroom, Monika would reply, “I’m not your maid from Płaszów!” If her mother hit her, she would yell, “Don’t stop! Come on, hit me again, you’re just like the old man! It’s not me who’s like him, it’s you!”

When Monika Goeth was in her twenties, she became friendly with a bartender at the Bungalow, her local bar. One day, when he rolled up his sleeves before doing the washing-up, he revealed a number tattooed on his forearm. Monika was aghast. “Manfred,” she asked, “Are you Jewish? Were you sent to a concentration camp?” “Yes,” he replied tersely. Monika wanted to know where he had been sent. Her questions made him uneasy, but he eventually admitted that he had been in Płaszów most of the time. Monika Goeth was relieved: “Goodness Manfred, am I glad that you were only in a labor camp and not in a proper concentration camp. You will know my father then; he was Amon Goeth.”

When the bartender grasped what Monika had said, he turned pale. Much later, Monika Goeth would say that she could still hear his screams: “That murderer, that bastard!” Monika didn’t understand: “But Manfred, you weren’t in a concentration camp, it was only a labor camp, remember?” He didn’t reply; he just stood there quivering. He wouldn’t talk to her for days.

Monika Goeth urged her mother to meet her traumatized friend. Ruth Irene Goeth eventually agreed, but she wouldn’t tell Monika much about their meeting. She only reported that Manfred had asked her again and again: “Why did you all do it?”

When she was barely 24 years old, Monika Goeth fell in love with a black student from Nigeria, a friend of one her mother’s lodgers. Monika has described him as good looking, kind of a Harry Belafonte type. She moved in with him for a while, but the relationship was not to last. On June 29, 1970, Monika Goeth gave birth to a daughter; she called her Jennifer. Jennifer was given her mother’s surname: Goeth.

At the time, Monika Goeth was working as a secretary, six days a week. She was also suffering from repeated episodes of mental illness.

When her daughter was four weeks old, Monika Goeth took Jennifer to Salberg House, a Catholic home for infants run by nuns just outside of Munich.

■ ■ ■

IT HAS BEEN THREE WEEKS
since I sent the letter to my mother, and I still haven’t heard back from her. I am worried that she might not get back to me at all. Maybe she doesn’t want to get in touch.

In fact, that was another reason why I waited so long to contact her. I wanted to be strong enough to endure her silence.

The silence feels familiar. After my adoption she was suddenly out of the picture; I heard nothing from her, and I couldn’t ask her anything anymore. Now, I try to stay calm. It took me so long to write my letter; maybe she needs time for hers.

Then, one Thursday, there is a call at my office. I am not there, so the caller leaves a message: Herr Such-and-Such would like to be called back. It was Dieter, my mother’s second husband; he is about the same age as her. The last time I saw my mother, in my early twenties, she had him in tow. She had brought him along without asking me first. I would much rather have met with my mother alone.

And now it’s Dieter who has gotten in touch, not my mother. I wonder why she didn’t call herself. Is she sending him ahead?

The next day I call Dieter back. He tells me that he tried calling me at home but that I hadn’t been in. We talk for a while until he asks me bluntly, “Why don’t you simply pick up the phone and call your mother?”

Simply pick up the phone? For me, nothing is simple when it comes to my mother.

Still, my mind is already made up: I am going to call her. I need clarity at last, and I don’t want to wait any longer. On Saturday my husband and the boys are out, so the house is quiet. I dial the area code, then her number. It’s only a few digits, since she lives in a village.

I am nervous. It rings, once, twice, three times before she picks up. She says hello and tells me that she was very happy to receive my letter. It sounds as if she has been expecting my call.

Her voice is instantly familiar; it takes me right back to the days and weekends of my childhood when I visited her.