My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family's Nazi Past (8 page)

But surely you must have known!

Is it possible that no knowledge of what was really going on filtered down to the ordinary Germans?

In 2011, Friedrich Kellner’s diaries from the years 1939 to 1945 were published for the first time. During the war, Friedrich Kellner was a simple judicial officer. He came from a modest background and lived in the Hessian backcountry until his death in 1970. He had no access to secret files, but simply wrote down the bits of information he overheard, gleaned from conversation with other locals and, above all, read in newspapers available to the general public. His diaries are evidence of what those who “had no idea” could have known about the dictatorial regime, the war, and the Holocaust. For example, in 1941 Friedrich Kellner wrote: “The mental asylums have turned into centers for murder.” Reading the newspapers, he had noticed a suspiciously high number of death notices for people in mental hospitals. He had also been told about a case where a couple was able to bring their mentally ill son home from such a hospital just in time. Around the same time, immediately after the attack on the Soviet Union, Friedrich Kellner heard about the mass murder of the Jews: “A soldier who was home on leave described the awful atrocities he had witnessed in occupied Poland. He had seen how naked Jews, men and women, were made to stand in front of a long, deep trench. Upon SS command, a number of Ukrainian men shot them in the backs of their heads and they fell into the trench. The trenches were filled in even though screams could still be heard from within!” In September 1942, two Jewish families were deported from Kellner’s hometown, Laubach. In his diary he writes: “In the last few days, the Jews from our district have been deported. From Laubach they took the Strausses and the Heinemanns. A well-informed source tells me that all the Jews are being taken to Poland, where they will be murdered by SS troops.”

In 1996, the artist Gunter Demnig started laying
stolpersteine
, or “stumbling blocks”—cobblestone-sized, brass memorials—in front of houses where victims of the Nazis used to live. Now in over 800 German towns and villages, they make the number of victims palpable: In some streets there are
stolpersteine
in front of every other house, sometimes with a single name, sometimes with the names of an entire family. On these streets it would have been glaringly obvious that some neighbors were missing: the Jewish family, the girl with Down syndrome, the homosexual, the communist.

Yet in many German families, the parents and grandparents have never been asked any probing questions. “The Nazis” were others. It is inconceivable that the friendly grandfather might have committed any crimes on the frontline, or that the kindly grandmother might have cheered Hitler. Just as unimaginable as it was for Jennifer Teege to discover that her grandmother once enjoyed the good life on the edge of a concentration camp.

This self-delusion, this schizophrenic view of one’s own historical narrative, is rarely as apparent as it is with Ruth Irene Kalder. She was no perpetrator, but she was a bystander and a profiteer. Amon Goeth made his career, and she joined him in it. Amon Goeth remains a stranger we can distance ourselves from, but in Ruth Irene Kalder, the seduced opportunist, we can recognize some part of ourselves.

When she learned of Amon Goeth’s execution from the newsreel, Ruth Irene Kalder is said to have ranted and raved. Monika Goeth remembers her grandmother, Agnes Kalder, claiming that Ruth Irene’s hair went white and that she subsequently died it black.

Monika Goeth also recounts that her mother repeatedly watched the American film
I Want to Live
with Susan Hayward in the title role. The film makes a passionate plea against the death penalty; it shows an innocent woman being executed for a murder she didn’t commit.

The Third Man
was also among her favorite films. Ruth Irene Kalder is said to have seen herself in the beautiful actress Alida Valli. In the famous post-war film, Alida Valli plays the girlfriend of murderer Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles. She stands by her lover with total devotion, loyal to the grave.

According to her daughter Monika, Ruth Irene Kalder did go on to have relationships with other men, but she didn’t love any of them as she had loved Amon. After the war, she dated a US army officer for a short while. He paid for her English lessons. Even after he returned home to his wife and child in Texas, he continued to send her regular love letters and monthly checks until her suicide in 1983.

In 1948, two years after Amon Goeth’s execution, Ruth Irene Kalder asked the American authorities in US-occupied Germany to allow her to take on Goeth’s name, claiming that it was only the confusion at the end of the war that had prevented them from getting married.

Goeth’s father, Amon Franz Goeth, with whom Kalder had been corresponding, supported her request. He confirmed that his son and Ruth Irene Kalder had gotten engaged before the end of the war. Since Goeth’s divorce from his second wife had already been finalized, Ruth Irene was allowed to drop her maiden name, Kalder. From then on she was known as Ruth Irene Goeth.

Amon Goeth lived on in her stories—as a charming, witty gentleman from Vienna who sadly died a hero’s death in the war. Ruth Irene Goeth never spoke of the crimes committed during the war; in this she was no different from most of her contemporaries. More than once, Ruth Irene struck her daughter Monika because she would not stop asking questions.

Monika Goeth describes her mother as self-absorbed and cold-hearted, a woman who was mainly concerned with her own beauty. When she had a facelift, she also had her nose, which she considered “Jewish-looking,” straightened. She was a woman who carried a lifelong unhappiness because the world had taken her great love away from her too soon.

It does not appear as if Ruth Irene secreted away any of the riches Amon Goeth had amassed in Płaszów. Ruth Irene Kalder worked as a secretary and sometimes posed as a fashion model for catalogues; in the evenings she often worked at the
Gruene Gans
—the Green Goose, a bar in the trendy quarter of Schwabing. Her daughter Monika has described how her mother loved strutting around Schwabing in a dress to match her lipstick, with her equally well-groomed poodle, Monsieur, by her side.

Ruth Irene was not interested in Monika or her problems, Monika Goeth has said of her mother: “Ruth wasn’t concerned with much. What feelings she had were reserved for her dead lover, for Amon.”

■ ■ ■

THE BOOK ABOUT MY MOTHER DELIVERS
a double blow: It broke my enchantment with my grandmother twice. She is described as heartless and selfish: first at the side of the concentration camp commandant, and then as a terrible mother. Even worse than that—as a monstrous kind of mother who neglects and hits her daughter. In the book, my mother criticizes her severely; she hardly has anything kind to say about her at all.

I don’t think that is very fair to my grandmother. After all, she is dead and can’t defend herself.

At the same time, the book clearly illustrates the degree to which my mother’s life has been dominated by her struggle with my grandmother. But despite everything, they always kept in touch. When my mother was pregnant with me, she even lived with Irene for a while.

What is striking is the close relationship my mother had with her grandmother Agnes, Irene’s mother. My mother spent her entire childhood living with her mother and grandmother in the apartment in Schwabing. A household with three women, three generations beneath one roof. The men—my great-grandfather and Amon Goeth—were dead.

According to the book, my grandmother was jealous of Monika’s close relationship with Agnes; she felt like an outsider between two soulmates. During my mother’s childhood, Agnes was her calm anchor and her pillar of support.

Sometimes I feel like history is repeating itself: Just as my mother had a close relationship with her grandmother and a difficult one with her mother, I used to feel at home with my grandmother and uncomfortable with my own mother. It appears that love tends to skip a generation in my family.

Again and again my mother stresses how obsessed my grandmother was with her looks, and how beautiful she was—like a young Elizabeth Taylor. While Irene was always dressed smartly, Monika allegedly ran around in rags.

Irene is reduced to her failures as a mother, and to her vanity—as if she had spent half her life in front of the mirror perfecting her makeup.

I don’t believe that Irene was only selfish and vain. She was an attractive and unusual woman. She didn’t look for a provider, which was the norm in postwar Germany, but stood on her own two feet: She worked as a secretary at the Goethe Institute for many years. This is something else we have in common: I also worked at the Goethe Institute, while studying in Israel.

What was unusual for somebody of her generation was that she spoke very good English and often read the British
Times
. Her apartment was full of books, among them Tucholsky, Boell, and Brecht. She was interested in drama and literature. She voted for the socialist SPD party and was a fan of the politician Willy Brandt.

My grandmother was very liberal for her time: For a while she shared her flat with a transvestite called Lulu and went out on the town with him and his gay friends. My parents met when one of my father’s friends, also African, was living as a lodger in my grandmother’s house. Having an African man living in your house was far from normal in Munich in the 1960s and ’70s. She was no racist.

I would have loved to ask my grandmother’s friends some questions about her, but all I have is what journalists have reported about her—and my mother’s opinions. Neither source is exactly full of praise. Usually I can trust my gut; I have a keen sense of character. Can I really have been so wrong about my grandmother?

When I was about seventeen years old, my adoptive parents gave me a postcard from my grandmother. They had kept it from me until then because they were worried that I would be torn between my old family and my new one. My grandmother had sent me the card for my seventh birthday, together with a picture book she had picked out for me. I would have preferred to have received these things much earlier. It would have been helpful and important to me—after all, they were tangible possessions, memories of the natural family who had suddenly disappeared from my life when I was adopted.

My grandmother’s postcard is of a painting by Paula Modersohn-Becker,
Peasant Girl with Arms Folded
. It shows a serious and proud-looking young girl, her arms crossed in front of her body. She is about the same age I would have been when my grandmother wrote the card. Irene’s handwriting is itself a work of art. She took great care in writing the card, care that is typical of her generation. She wrote, “Dear Jennifer, wishing you a wonderful birthday and another 364 happy days in your new year. Do you like reading? I hope so, and if you do I am sure you will enjoy this book. I think of you often. Give my regards to your parents. Yours, Irene.” The message is lovely and heartfelt. It makes me happy to see the word “Yours” in front of her signature.

Paula Modersohn-Becker’s painting
Peasant Girl with Arms Folded.
Ruth Irene Goeth sent this card to her granddaughter for Jennifer’s seventh birthday

■ ■ ■

Inge Sieber, Jennifer Teege’s adoptive mother, remembers that for a while, when she was still small, Jennifer hoped that her grandmother would take her in.

Once, before the adoption, Ruth Irene Goeth visited Jennifer and her new family. She called beforehand and asked if she could come by, so Jennifer’s foster parents invited her for afternoon coffee. Inge Sieber found Ruth Irene to be friendly and thoughtful; she was wearing a long patchwork skirt and looked nothing like a grandma. “She was dressed in these shabby-chic clothes. Flashy, extravagant, but not false. I was 25 years younger, but next to her I felt like a little old housewife.” Jennifer’s grandmother stayed for a couple of hours, asked lots of questions, and was generally very interested in Jennifer’s new family.

At around the same time, in the mid-’70s, the Israeli historian Tom Segev visited Ruth Irene Goeth at her apartment in Schwabing.

Segev was not yet the scholar and journalist of international fame he would go on to become; he was just a young PhD student from Boston University. For his thesis on concentration camp commandants, he traveled all over Germany to interview the close relatives and friends of many Nazi perpetrators. He hoped that they would provide answers to his questions about the camp commandants’ frame of mind and the motives that drove them. His work was published under the title
Soldiers of Evil: The Commandants of the Nazi Concentration Camps
.

His study sheds light on not only the commandants’ psyche, but also that of their closest relatives, usually their widows. Segev writes: “They agree to be interviewed by me because they are haunted by a past that they cannot seem to escape. . . . Each of these people hoped that they could whitewash their past, if only a little bit.”

All of those questioned played down their time at the camps. For example, Fanny Fritzsch, widow of Auschwitz prison camp leader Karl Fritzsch, had “no difficulties to explain the atrocities her husband was accused of. She had simply decided that they had never happened,” Segev writes. According to Fanny Fritzsch, nobody died at Auschwitz. She told Segev that Fritzsch had been “the best husband on Earth,” and that she had raised their children based on his model.