(by Massimo Lomonaco)
(ANSA) – TEL AVIV, 7 FEB – Jennifer Teege is sure of it: her grandfather would surely have shot her too. Just as she did with the Jews by targeting them every morning from the veranda of the house that overlooked the Plaszow concentration camp in Poland. For the simple fact that she too, as black, for her grandfather, like the Jews, belonged to an inferior race. A characteristic therefore unforgivable in the eyes of the progenitor:
butcher Amon Goeth, the SS camp manager played by Ralph Fiennes in Steven Spielberg’s ‘Schindler’s List’. An incredible story is that of Teege, Goeth’s granddaughter who, after discovering the Nazi past of her maternal family, found the courage, after years of psychoanalysis, to tell the story in a book coming to the ‘International Fair’ in Jerusalem, scheduled from 8 to 12 February.
Teege, born in Munich, Germany in 1970, is the result of the fleeting relationship between a Nigerian and Monika, herself the daughter of Amon Goeth and Irene Kalder, a Wehrmacht employee who became the lover of Plaszow’s murder during the war. Introducing Kalder to Goeth was Oskar Schindler himself in need of good relations with the Nazi in order to get Jewish workers for his company and save them. Goeth was already
married in Austria but this did not prevent him from making Irene Kalder his true partner: the two lived together in the most sumptuous luxury in the house overlooking the concentration camp where 8,000 Jews died. They would also have married but the arrival of the Soviets put an end to the projects. Goeth was brought to trial: held responsible for the death of the Jews of Plaszov and of another 2,000 killed in the evacuation of the Krakow Ghetto (the one in which in Spielberg’s film there is the girl with the red coat), he was sentenced to death and hanged in 1946. His last words were, ‘Heil Hitler’.
Irene and Monika Goeth survived. Sixty-two years later, in 2008, Jennifer Teege – who shortly after her birth was given up for adoption to another family, without losing her relationship with her biological one until she was seven – casually discovered a book in a library in Hamburg that had a cover the photo of his mother and whose existence he was unaware of. In that book Monika told about her mother Irene and her father Amon Goeth. For Teege it was a bolt from the blue: ” the first shock was that – she told Haaretz – of learning from a book the story, which had been hidden from me, of my biological family. The second was information about my grandfather. ” But there is more: without knowing anything about this past, she Teege lived from 1990 to 1995 in Israel where she learned Hebrew, has many friends and has worked among other things at the Goethe Institut. And there often – has
remembered – they were Holocaust survivors with the number stamped on their arm. Jennifer Teege said today that she strongly wanted her book (released in 2013 in Germany) to be translated into Hebrew to make known her story and ” to wait impatiently now how it will be received ”. It is no coincidence that the book is entitled: ‘Amon. My grandfather would have shot me. ‘ REPRODUCTION RESERVED © Copyright ANSA
