The world observed the International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27 and, while people remembered the day when the Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated by the Soviets on the same day in 1945, Jennifer Teege shared the story of the horror she felt when she discovered she was related to a notorious Nazi commandant.
Teege visited Emory College on Jan. 25 to discuss her memoir "My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family's Nazi Past." In the book, Teege details her discovery, shock and eventual coming to terms with the fact that her grandfather is Amon Goeth, the commandant of the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp in Poland during World War II. Goeth was known for his sadistic torture and extermination of individuals and groups sent his way.
Teege did not discover this fact until she was 38 years old because her mother, Monika Hertwig, Amon Goeth's daughter with Ruth Irene Kalder, had left her in the care of nuns at Munich orphanage Salberg House when she was just 4 weeks old. Teege, whose father was Nigerian, was adopted at age 7 and she had lost contact with her biological mother until she reached her twenties.
Teege discovered her mother's memoir "I Have To Love My Father, Don't I?" in a public library when she was 38. Hertwig had written it in 2002.
"Getting the information so spontaneously, so out of the blue, it was almost impossible to make it fit in with my understanding of who I am ... It was very distressing to know that Amon Goeth and I are genetically linked," she wrote in an article in 2013.
Teege says that, since her discovery about her roots, she believed in destiny. After finishing high school, she studied at the Sorbonne and met an Israeli woman who became her friend. She took a vacation in Israel some time later then went on to study in Tel Aviv University and learned to speak Hebrew.
Teege gained many friends who were descended from victims and survivors of the Holocaust. When she discovered her connection to Goeth, she became afraid of how her friends would react. She never thought she would receive their empathy.
"They cried with me," she said.
Now, Teege doesn't live in fear of how she and Goeth could be similar and she has finally accepted that it is part of her identity without letting it affect her own perceptions.
Photo: Michael Panse | Flickr
