My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family's Nazi Past (21 page)

I hug her as we say good-bye: “Anati, my dear friend.”

Flowers in Krakow

Everybody wants to know who they are.

—Jennifer Teege’s former therapist at the University Medical Center Hamburg–Eppendorf

WHAT IS FAMILY?
Is it something we inherit, or
something
we build?

It’s been exactly four years since I discovered the book about my mother, three years since I visited Krakow for the first time. When I first traveled to Poland, I had hit rock bottom. Reading the book about my mother had reopened old wounds: the hurt from my childhood, the feeling of not knowing who I am, and the sadness that had overshadowed my whole life.

Everybody wants to know where they come from, who their parents and grandparents are. Everybody wants to be able to tell their complete story, with a beginning and an end. Everybody asks:
What is unique about me?

The book was the key to everything, the key to my life. It revealed my family secret, but the truth that lay before me was terrifying.

I went to Krakow to get closer to the overwhelming figure of Amon Goeth, to understand why he destroyed my family.

During my last visit, three years ago, I didn’t have the courage to admit my identity to a Jewish tourist I happened to meet. I couldn’t even tell my friends in Israel who I really was.

Those days are behind me now. I have returned to Krakow to meet my friend Anat and her son Kai. Anat has come with the class to Poland, along with a few other parents and the children’s teachers.

Tomorrow, I will stand in front of Kai’s class and tell them my story. How will the children react?

At first, I wasn’t at all sure whether I really wanted to join them. I didn’t speak to Anat about my concerns; my doubts had nothing to do with her. It was just that I had resolved not to talk about the Nazi era all the time. Not because I think it’s the wrong thing to do—I think it’s good that the descendants of Nazi criminals urge people to question how they are dealing with the past. But I don’t want my life to revolve around just the subject of Nazism. There is an unending number of issues that are worthy of support, and I am not an expert on the Holocaust.

I decided to fulfill Anat’s request anyway. After all, I wouldn’t be addressing any class; it is her son Kai’s class, and I’ll have Anat by my side.

And I thought that it might be interesting for them to meet me. I didn’t consider the impact the meeting might have on me. I had no expectations whatsoever and just wanted to take things as they came.

When I arrive at Krakow airport, I am exhausted. I haven’t had time to properly prepare for my meeting with the Israeli students. I had planned on reviewing some vocab so that I could give my introduction tomorrow in Hebrew. That is out of the question now.

I have just come from the deathbed of my adoptive father. He died a few hours ago in the St. John of God Hospital in Munich. The cancer started in his prostate, but by the end it had spread all over his body.

I hail a taxicab and head toward the city. It is getting dark. In my head, I am still going over the last few days at the hospital, still sitting by Gerhard’s bedside. In the past two weeks I have come to realize what it means to die. Before then, death was only an abstract concept for me.

Never before had I been with someone during the last days and weeks of their life.

It only takes a few days for a person to take their leave of this world. The body deteriorates gradually, step by step. There are so many little markers on the way to death. It is a process, and by the end every last thing has been taken from us.

When a close relative dies, we think about our own lives, too. Our own mortality, which we prefer to ignore, is suddenly very real.

When Gerhard was admitted to the hospital, he was still able to feed himself and to briefly lift himself up from the wheelchair. At first he could still drink independently, then only using a straw, and in the end not even that. He was put on a drip and a ventilator. He didn’t want any life-extending procedures.

In the beginning, I would get ice cream for him; asking him which flavor he would like. “Strawberry,” he would reply, or “mango” or “lemon.” He could hardly eat, but the ice cream was his little pleasure.

On the day before he died, he could hardly talk anymore. When I asked him what flavor ice cream he wanted, he couldn’t decide. I got some lemon ice cream for him and carefully fed him small spoonfuls. His mouth was so dry, his face so gaunt—he looked like death itself.

Gerhard kept wanting to sit up in bed because it was easier to for him breathe in that position. But the doctors said that we were not allowed to sit him up: The risk of his suffering a collapse was too great. And so he would lie there, with his pleading eyes, begging us to sit him up. Seated opposite him, I felt so helpless. For him, sitting up would have meant that last bit of independence. I would have loved to do him that small favor, but even that was not allowed. At some point he gave up and lay still, with his eyes closed.

At the hospital, all the people who were close to Gerhard came together. Someone was always with him: Inge kept watch at night; during the day, my brothers, friends, and relatives would join her, as well as my husband, our sons, and I.

The only thing that was real was Gerhard’s dying; everything else seemed far away. Just like the terminally ill patient who was slipping into timelessness, into the twilight of the in-between world, we, his companions, also lost all sense of day and night.

Gerhard had enough time to say good-bye to his friends and family, properly, consciously. A blessing.

The big question was whether or not Gerhard would make it to his seventieth birthday. That had been his last wish—to celebrate his birthday surrounded by his family.

On the morning of his birthday, we all gathered around his hospital bed. My brother Manuel’s daughter had baked a cake.

Gerhard opened his eyes only briefly. He was barely conscious, but he sensed that we had all come. I think he still enjoyed his birthday; it was a nice way to say good-bye. We spent the whole day taking turns by his bedside. Quietly I was hoping that he would die soon. I knew that’s what he wanted, too.

Shortly after I left the hospital, Gerhard passed away.

I was onboard a plane three hours later.

Three years ago, I hadn’t let a recent miscarriage prevent me from traveling to Krakow. And now it hadn’t occurred to me to cancel on Anat.

My journey to Poland had been a long time in planning. I had booked my flight to Krakow weeks ago. It is part of my nature to honor my commitments.

The taxicab stops in front of a large hotel in the Podgorze area of Krakow, the former Jewish ghetto. Tomorrow, I will meet Anat and Kai, Kai’s class, and his teachers. It has been nearly a year since I last saw Anat and Kai in Israel. I am looking forward to seeing them again.

■ ■ ■

Płaszów is the penultimate stop for the Israeli students on their tour of Poland.

In the last few days, they have visited the former Warsaw ghetto and the former extermination camp Treblinka, northeast of Warsaw. They have cleared Jewish graves of dirt and leaves and have talked at length with Auschwitz survivor Zvi Moldovan, an old, friendly Israeli who has been accompanying students on school trips to Poland for years.

At the defunct train station in Lodz, the students boarded an old cattle car which was used to transport Jews and Romany from the Lodz ghetto to the concentration camps. Inside the cattle car, it was dark and crowded. The teens tried to relate to how the Jews locked in this car must have felt. One of the Israeli girls began to tremble violently.

The students visited the Chelmno concentration camp, and later Lublin and the Majdanek camp.

They visited the former Tarnow ghetto and the Belzec camp.

The class shared a joint diary, in which every student was invited to write. One student wrote: “Numerous members of my family were murdered there. When I looked at the gas chambers, the barracks, and the crematoria, it seemed as if they had only been built yesterday. But I went there in an air-conditioned bus; my grandfather in a hot and crowded cattle car without food or water. My journey took a couple of hours; Grandfather’s took three days and three nights. I was there with many of my friends; Grandfather was all alone. I left after a few hours; Grandfather left in the summer of 1944. In Poland, I saw my grandfather’s memories with my own eyes. He survived and told me all about his experiences. I will always remember him.”

Another student commented: “My grandmother never really escaped the camp. She was always restless and lived in constant fear of losing control over her life again. She planned and prepared things a long time in advance, forever filling her fridge and her larder. I never saw her sitting still.”

Halfway through the trip, the teachers gave the students letters that their parents had written in advance. The mothers and fathers had written comforting words, asking their children not to let the terrifying sights send them into despair. Many students started crying when they read their parents’ letters.

The last entry in the class diary reads: “Every day here feels like a week. I miss my parents and home so much.”

At Sobibor, the students walked through the woods where the escaped prisoners once went into hiding after the unsuccessful uprising in the camp.

They went to the village of Markova in southeastern Poland, where a Polish peasant and his family once hid two Jewish families on their farm. The Germans eventually discovered the Jews and shot them dead, along with their Polish hosts: the farmers and their six young children.

One student wrote in the diary: “I no longer want to join the army. Yes, I have to defend my country, but isn’t that what every soldier thinks? Isn’t that what the Germans thought, too?”

Another student wrote: “How can it be that the men got up in the morning, drank their coffee, kissed their wives and children good-bye, and then went to work—work that meant degrading and killing people?”

When the students arrive in Krakow, they are exhausted. They have seen little of the country itself. To them, Poland is first and foremost a collection of killing sites.

Remembrance is one of the key values in Judaism.
Zachor
—“Remember!”—it says in the Torah. How the Holocaust and its victims are remembered, however, has changed in the years since the state of Israel was founded in 1948.

By 1949, 350,000 Shoah survivors had come to Israel. They were received with reservation. In the words of Israeli historian Moshe Zimmermann, they were regarded as “lambs that had allowed themselves to be led to the slaughter.” The newly established state of Israel needed heroes and warriors, not victims.

The trauma experienced by the survivors became a taboo: In Israel, their suffering was barely mentioned in public.

The Israeli newspaper
Haaretz
once even declared: “Let’s face it: The few Jews we have left in Europe are not necessarily the crème de la crème of our people.” Historian Tom Segev discovered that “the Jews in Palestine were fixated on the idea that only the worst elements of society could have survived the camps, in other words, those who would steal the bread of their fellow inmates, etc. The good ones, they thought, had all been killed.”

The trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel in 1961 provided a turning point. Eichmann was responsible for the mass deportation of the European Jews to ghettos and concentration camps. The Israeli chief prosecutor not only put forward files and papers, but also, most notably, summoned many eyewitnesses who spoke openly of their pain and suffering for the first time. According to Tom Segev, the trial “released a whole generation of survivors” and served as “some kind of national group therapy.”

Remembering the Shoah became a national purpose, a central, identity-establishing element of the state of Israel, which has lost none of its importance today. Just like elementary and high school teachers, caregivers in Israeli preschools and kindergartens are encouraged to educate children age-appropriately on the Shoah.

The Israeli Ministry of Education also developed a program around school trips to Poland. Since 1988, tens of thousands of children have taken part.

Great care is taken to prepare the teenagers for these journeys, which are not compulsory. When Anat and the other parents discussed whether it is right to expose the children to these horrors, some decided against the trip.

Anat wasn’t worried that her son Kai would return from Poland frightened and disturbed. “My worry was rather that he would end up hating the Germans and seeing himself only as a victim of persecution.”

On their bus to Krakow, the students rewatched the film
Schindler’s List
. The image of Ralph Fiennes as the cruel killer Amon Goeth will still be fresh in their minds when they hear Jennifer Teege’s story in Płaszów.

That’s why it was so important to Anat that her friend come to Płaszów: “It’s too easy to hate Amon Goeth. If the Germans and their allies can turn into murderers, then we, too, can become murderers. If the Germans could turn a blind eye, it can happen to us. I hope that my sons will always remember that. I hope that they will always see the Palestinians as human beings, not as enemies.”

Upon their arrival in Krakow, the Israeli teenagers are escorted by three security guards: a bodyguard who has traveled with them from Israel, and two local policemen. They are even more watchful than usual: Four days ago, in Bulgaria, a suicide bomber attacked a passenger bus carrying Israeli tourists; six people died. The Lebanese Hezbollah militia is suspected to have been behind the attack.

The security guards check the bus every time before the children get on board; they inspect every accommodation in advance. The hotel meets all the security requirements: Each level can only be accessed through key-card-operated doors. The rooms for the Israelis are all on the same floor.

Once the teenagers have moved their bags into their rooms, they meet in the hotel lobby, where they rest for a while on modern, pastel sofas between artificial palm trees.

The boys and girls are whispering and giggling; they are planning secret meetings in their rooms. Just like on any ordinary school trip. The teenagers who live on kibbutzim are easily spotted: They walk around the stylish hotel lobby with its dark floor tiles in bare feet. A few men in suits look at them, irritated.