Rowohlt Verlag

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DBE!@DF<-G(/!A* • AB!!-AABCDEF@$BFD FF"FA* • HEDEFEFB)EE* Jennifer Teege with Nikola Sellmair Amon My Grandfather Would Have Killed Me English sample translation by Jefferson Chase Prologue: My Discovery Chapter 1: Me, The Granddaughter of a Mass Murderer Chapter 2: The Butcher of Plaszów – My Grandfather Amon Göth Chapter 3: The Commandant’s Wife – My Grandmother Ruth Irene Kalder Chapter 4: A Life with the Dead – My Mother Monika Göth Chapter 5: The Grandchildren of the Victims – My Friends in Israel Chapter 6: The Final Journey – Flowers in Kraków 2 Prologue: My Discovery It’s the woman’s gaze that seems familiar. I’m standing in the Hamburg’s Public Library with a book in my hand. I’ve just taken it from the shelf. It’s got a red cover with a black-and-white portrait of a middle-aged woman. Her gaze is pensive. Pained and joyless. She’s frowning. She looks unhappy. I read the book’s subtitle: “The Life of Monika Göth, the Daughter of the Commandant from Schindler’s List.” I know the name Monika Göth! It’s my mother’s. The mother who gave me up for adoption and whom I haven’t seen in many years. I used to be called Göth as well. I was born as Jennifer Göth. It’s the name I wrote on my first school notebooks, before I was officially adopted and assumed the name of my new parents. I was seven years old at the time. What is my mother’s name doing on this book? My heart is pounding. I stare at the cover. In the background, behind the black-and-white photo of the woman, there is a shadow of a man with his mouth open and a gun in his hand. That must be the concentration-camp commandant. I open the book and begin thumbing through the pages faster and faster. There are a lot of photos. Have I seen these people before? There’s one of a tall young woman with dark hair. She reminds me of my mother. Another one shows an older woman sitting in the English Garden in Munich. She’s wearing a floral-pattern dress. I only have a few photos of my grandmother, and I’ve committed all of them to memory. In one of them, she’s wearing exactly this floral dress. The caption reads: “Ruth Irene Göth.” That was my grandmother’s name. Is this my family? Are these photos of my mother and grandmother? The very idea is absurd. How can there be a book about my family that I know nothing about? I keep thumbing through the pages. On the very last one, there’s a biographical note. It begins: “Monika Göth was born in 1945 in Bad Tölz.” This information is familiar to me from the paperwork surrounding my adoption. And there it is again in black and white. This really is my mother. This book is about my family. I close the cover. The library is silent except for someone coughing in the reading room. I need to get out of here as quickly as possible. I need to be alone with this book. I hug it to my chest like something precious and carry it downstairs to the loan counter. I don’t even see the face of the librarian to whom I hand it. I exit through the glass door and emerge onto the big open square in front of the library. My knees go weak. I lie down on a park bench and close my eyes. Behind me traffic rushes by. My car is just across the street, but there’s no way I can drive right now. A couple of times, I sit up and ask myself whether I should resume reading. The thought is too horrible. I need to read this book at home, calmly, from the beginning to the end. It’s a warm day in August, but my hands are ice-cold. I call my husband on the phone. “You have to come pick me up,” I tell him. “I found a book about my mother and her family.” Why has my mother never told me about this? Does she still have that little regard for me? Who is this Amon Göth? What did he do exactly? How come I don’t know anything about him? What precisely happened in Schindler’s List again? Jennifer Teege / Nikola Sellmair, Amon © 2013 by Rowohlt Verlag GmbH For the English translation © 2013 by Jefferson Chase 3 It’s been a while since I saw the film. I remember it was in the mid-1990s while I was studying in Israel. Everyone was talking about Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust movie. I watched it a while after it came out on Israeli TV, alone in my room in a shared apartment in Rehov Engel Street in Tel Aviv. I remember being moved by the film, but thinking that the ending was a bit too kitschy. Typically Hollywood. Back then, in my eyes, Schindler’s List was just a movie. It had nothing to do with me. Why didn’t anyone tell me the truth? Have people been lying to me all these years? Jennifer Teege / Nikola Sellmair, Amon © 2013 by Rowohlt Verlag GmbH For the English translation © 2013 by Jefferson Chase 4 Chapter 1: Me, the Granddaughter of a Mass Murderer I was born on June 29, 1970 to Monika Göth and a Nigerian father. When I was four weeks old, my mother took me to a Catholic home for children. I spent my early childhood in the care of nuns. When I was three, I went to live with my foster family, who adopted me at the age of seven. My skin is dark, while that of my adoptive parents and my two adoptive brothers is white. It was obvious to everyone that I was not my parents’ biological child, but they constantly reassured me that they loved me just as much as their own children. We played and made things together, and they went with me to parent-child gymnastics sessions. As a child, I was still in contact with my biological mother and grandmother, but gradually we went our separate ways. I was 21 the last time I saw my mother. Now at the age of 38, I had discovered this book. What had made me take it, amongst hundreds of thousands of other ones, from the shelf? Was there such a thing as fate? The day had begun normally. My husband had gone to the office. I had taken the kids to kindergarten and then drove into the city to stop by the library. I go there a lot. I like the quiet, the feeling of being able to concentrate on the hundreds of thousands of colorful books that line the shelves. I enjoy people’s muffled steps, the rustling of pages being turned, the hunched backs of people reading. I was looking for something about depression in the psychology section. There, around hip-high, between Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving and a work with the run-of-the-mill title Strength Comes in Crisis was the book with the red cover. The spine read: “Matthias Kessler: I Have to Love My Father, Don’t I?” I didn’t recognize the name of the author, but the title fired my imagination. So I took the book from the shelf. Now my husband Götz finds me lying in shock on a bench in front of the library, feeling sallow under my dark skin. He sits down next to me, examines the book and starts leafing through it. I snatch it back. I don’t want him reading it first. The book is mine. It’s the key to my family history. The key to my life, which I’ve been searching for all these years. All my life I’ve felt that something was wrong with me. Sadness, bouts of depression. But I simply couldn’t find out what was so fundamentally amiss. Götz takes my hand, and we walk over to his car. We hardly say a word during the ride home.

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