My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family's Nazi Past (7 page)

I have never compared my grandmothers to each other, during my childhood or later. They were far too dissimilar for that. I had separate relationships with each of them, and each was important in her own way.

Nonetheless, Irene occupied a special place in my heart. She was one of the first people I was attached to as a child.

When I was seven and my adoption became official, my adoptive parents broke off all contact with my mother; they thought that it would be best for me. With that, my grandmother also disappeared from my life. She left behind a gap, I missed her.

I was 13 when last I heard about her: My adoptive parents told me that my grandmother had died. They had seen the obituary notice in the newspaper. It didn’t mention that she had killed herself.

I didn’t ask any questions. My biological family was not a subject we talked about in my new family. There was a deep and stony silence—a tacit agreement between my adoptive parents and me not to mention my mother or grandmother. Not that my adoptive parents could have told me much about them anyway; they didn’t know anything.

I remember feeling sad when I heard about my grandmother’s death. I had always hoped to see her again one day, but now she was gone for good.

Before I came across the book in the library, all I had were my memories: My grandmother enjoyed my company. With my mother I often felt that I wasn’t welcome—my mother would pull me along by the arm when she was impatient, but Irene never did.

I remember only one exchange with my grandmother that confused me: For some reason I was feeling sad, but she was very unsympathetic and told me not to cry. I didn’t understand what my grandmother had against tears.

She was not your classic grandmother; I wasn’t even allowed to call her
Oma
, just Irene. Maybe she didn’t want to be considered old. It’s been said that she paid a lot of attention to her looks—her appearance was very important to her. Even my mother called her only by her first name; that’s what it says in the book.

I remember her apartment in Schwind Strasse, in Schwabing. We would usually sit in her open-plan kitchen with the American radio station AFN turned on. I still enjoy listening to English-language radio stations; in Hamburg I often tuned into a British military station, and in Israel I’d listen to the Voice of Peace.

She didn’t have a living room, as such. At home with my adoptive family in the Waldtrudering suburb of Munich, we would hang out on the sofa in the living room, and we would wear comfortable “house clothes” indoors. This would have been unthinkable at Irene’s. It is true that I always felt at ease with my grandmother, but never quite at home: I was still a visitor. She was always elegantly dressed and nicely made up—everything was a little formal. The kitchen was always clean and tidy; I never saw her cooking or baking.

Unfortunately I have far too few concrete memories of her; I think of her as a child would: someone who cares, someone who protects.

Whenever my mother picked me up from the orphanage—or later, from my foster family—and dropped me off at my grandmother’s, it meant that I didn’t have to go my mother’s place in Hasenbergl.

It wasn’t like my mother had a happy family at home: Her then-husband was a drunkard and a wife-beater, and I felt constantly threatened by him. I never knew whether he was going to be there or not. If he was out, I’d hope that he wouldn’t come back. I was always listening for the sound of his key in the lock or his footsteps in the corridor.

At my grandmother’s, I felt safe. When I entered her kitchen, everything was all right.

■ ■ ■

Helen Rosenzweig, Goeth’s former Jewish maid, tells this story about Ruth Irene Kalder: “Once she came down to see us in the kitchen. She reached out her hands to us and said: ‘If I could send you home I would, but it’s not in my power.’”

In Amon Goeth’s villa, the maids, Helen Hirsch and Helen Rosenzweig, were subjected to constant abuse: He summoned them by shouting or by ringing a bell that could be heard all over the house. Often he would beat them if they didn’t come running fast enough. One of those beatings left Helen Hirsch with a burst left eardrum; she remained deaf in that ear. Helen Rosenzweig has described how Goeth pushed her down the stairs countless times. “In his house, at his mercy, I lost all fear of death. It was like living under the gallows, twenty-four hours a day.”

Ruth Irene Kalder later told her daughter Monika that she once intervened when Goeth was threatening to beat one of the maids with a bull pizzle—a dried bull’s penis that was used as a flogging tool in the concentration camps. In the ensuing struggle, Amon ended up hitting Ruth, which he felt awful about. He came close to tears, she said, and apologized over and over, and after that he never again used a bull pizzle in the house. Ruth Irene also told her daughter another grotesque anecdote: She once threatened not to sleep with Goeth anymore “if he didn’t stop shooting at the Jews.” Apparently it worked.

Helen Rosenzweig felt she had spotted a “shred of humanity” in Ruth Irene Kalder. She remembers, for example, that Ruth would make it a point to praise the maids in front of Amon Goeth and that she always treated them with respect.

When Helen Rosenzweig’s sisters were to be transported from Płaszów—presumably to Auschwitz—Helen Hirsch ran to Ruth Irene Kalder and begged her to prevent their deportation. At first, she refused: “Please don’t ask me to do this!” Eventually, however, she caved in and called the camp police to stop the deportation of the Rosenzweig sisters. When Ruth Irene confessed her unauthorized rescue mission to Goeth, he was furious. According to Helen Hirsch, he came running to the kitchen with his rifle to find the maids, but eventually he calmed down.

Helen Hirsch also reported that the inebriated Goeth once tried to sexually assault her. Ruth Irene Kalder heard her cries and came running to her rescue. Goeth then let her go.

There are a number of eyewitnesses who remember that Ruth Irene Kalder tried to exert a moderating influence on Amon Goeth’s behavior. She is said to have taken a stand for individual prisoners and to have prevented the torture and shooting of a number of inmates. In her presence, Amon Goeth is said to have been more restrained and mild-mannered. In another example, according to contemporary witnesses, she once called Goeth away from the parade ground while he was having prisoners whipped. Ruth Irene Kalder, however, would later claim that she never set foot in the camp.

Emilie Schindler recounted that around the middle of 1944, her husband Oskar reported that Goeth was getting tired of his girlfriend; the woman was “too peace-loving” and always trying “to dissuade him from his sadistic excesses.”

That said, the fact that Ruth Irene Kalder sometimes half-heartedly tried to help the victims goes to show that she knew how Amon Goeth was treating them and what crimes were being committed in the camp.

In his autobiography, Goeth’s secretary Mietek Pemper writes that Ruth Irene Kalder would sometimes type highly confidential documents for Goeth. Pemper believes that she also helped compile a list of prisoners to be executed.

Later, Ruth Irene Kalder would often stress two things, namely that Płaszów had only ever been a labor camp, not a death camp, and that there had been only adults in the camp, and no children.

Nonetheless, she told her daughter Monika that she had once observed children being transported from the camp by truck. Monika Goeth has said that her mother could not stop thinking about those children and that she believes her mother put her memories of the event to paper.

The trucks Ruth Irene Kalder remembered were probably those which took the children from Płaszów to Auschwitz on May 14, 1944. Goeth needed to create space in his camp for a number of Hungarian Jews who were due to arrive. Accordingly, he wrote in a letter to an SS leader, he had to “purge” the camp of its old, ill, and weak inmates, as well as its children, and thereby liquidate all the “unproductive elements.” In other words, he was going to deport the weak and the ill from Płaszów to the gas chambers at the nearby camp of Auschwitz, for “special treatment.”

Notices were put up at the parade ground proclaiming “Appropriate work for every prisoner.” Loudspeakers blared out cheery tunes as the prisoners were told to undress and parade past the camp doctors. According to an eyewitness, among them was Josef Mengele, the infamous camp doctor from Auschwitz, who had come specially and was noting down the names of the children. A week later, the result of this so-called “health action” was announced. Those who were to be removed to Auschwitz had to gather on one side of the square: around 1,200 people in total, including about 250 children.

Płaszów survivor Stella Mueller-Madej describes the scene as the children were being herded onto the truck: “The whole place is pandemonium. Fathers and mothers are sobbing. The children, who until then had been silent like dolls and frozen with horror, are now screaming and pleading . . . They are crying for help . . . A very young child tries to crawl away to safety on all fours. A female guard . . . grabs . . . her by her hands and throws her little body onto the truck bed like a sack of potatoes. It is unbearable. Everyone on the parade ground is crying, the whips are lashing down, the dogs are barking . . . At that moment the loudspeakers start to play waltz music . . . and the trucks head off to the camp gate.”

Shortly after their arrival at Auschwitz, the children were killed.

■ ■ ■

JUST AS MY GRANDMOTHER, HER WHOLE
LIFE,
made excuses for Amon Goeth and romanticized him, I tended to regard her too favorably in the beginning of my research. I told myself, “She didn’t do anyone any harm. She was not actively involved in his deeds.”

I knew so little about my grandmother. I saw my mother once again in my early twenties, but my grandmother had already passed away by then. When reading the book about my mother, I scrutinized the pictures of Irene closely—at first only the private ones from the years after the war, and then later the historic ones, too. Sometimes I can see myself in her.

I also love the good life. I drive a comfortable car, enjoy living in a big house, and appreciate modern conveniences. Like my grandmother, I like beautiful things, and I don’t mind if they cost a little extra. But surely the question is: How high is the price?

I don’t think it was just the status and the money that kept my grandmother in Płaszów—she undeniably enjoyed living in prosperity with Goeth, but I doubt that the luxury lifestyle alone would have been enough. After the war, she lived a much more modest life.

I think she was madly in love with Amon Goeth. Maybe she was also fascinated by his power, but there must have been more, some sort of inescapable pull or need, which blocked out everything else.

My grandmother never married or had a long-term relationship later in life. No matter who drifted in or out of her life after the war, Amon’s photograph always hung in the same spot—another reason I think her relationship with Amon Goeth was based on more than a mere cost-benefit calculation.

I know how this feels, this evidently boundless love, because I’m exactly the same way. When I love someone, I love unconditionally. In this I can understand my grandmother. When I’m in love with a man, I give him carte blanche: In theory, he can do as he likes; he will always have a special place in my heart. I won’t tell him so, of course, and it doesn’t mean that I will always tolerate or approve of his behavior, but the love will always be there.

That raises the question, what would I have done in my grandmother’s place? Could I have fallen for this sadist of a man? I can’t give a straight answer to that, but just the thought of someone beating his servants with a bull pizzle is enough to turn my stomach.

By way of apology for my grandmother, my mother has said that the camp was not visible from the bedroom at the villa. The Jews in the camp allegedly said of my grandmother: “She’s one of us.” Her name was Ruth, after all, a Jewish name.

Am I to believe that? Or am I just glad to have an excuse? I am of two minds: On the one hand, I want to sustain the lovely image of my grandmother. On the other hand, I want to know the truth. At college I used to gather reference material and compare the different sources. What mattered in the end were not my assumptions, but the hard facts. It is the same with my grandmother: I have gathered a lot of material about her in order to gain a better understanding of her.

I am no judge; it is not my place to pass judgment on her. I just want to see her as who she really was.

My first reaction when I read about her trying to help the victims was one of relief. I thought, “She wasn’t like my grandfather, maybe she was on the side of good.” But now I am ashamed of this thought.

I try to picture the scene with the maids again: My grandmother standing in the kitchen and telling Helen, who had to fear for her life every moment of every day, that she would help her if only she could. There is a great coldness in that, too. She took a step toward Helen, but then abandoned her after all.

She had seen the maids’ suffering; she was aware that she was caught in a predicament. But that’s the fatal thing: She could tell right from wrong. She could have made a choice. But she was too selfish to let this inner conflict come to the surface.

She felt pity for others and even helped some of them. But is that enough? Absolutely not. I don’t care whether she intervened a hundred times or a thousand. The fact is, it didn’t change her priorities. In the end, she was just looking out for herself.

I believe that there is a difference between me and my grandmother, and a very fundamental one: I could never live with a murderer; I could never bear to be with a man who took pleasure in tormenting other people.

■ ■ ■

Whenever Jennifer Teege talks about her grandmother, her voice goes soft and her eyes beam.

Her feelings fluctuate between rejection and affection, attack and defense. She cannot get a handle on who her grandmother really was.

“I had no idea.” Ruth Irene Kalder would repeat this sentence often after the war. It is a sentence that many young Germans have grown up with: Parents and grandparents claim they had no knowledge of the murder of countless people—and their children and grandchildren don’t know whether or not to believe them, whether or not they
should
believe them.