My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family's Nazi Past Read Online Free PDF Page A

murdered—beheaded—and afterward his decapitated body was still running around like a headless chicken. That story always gave us the creeps.
    When it came to talking about his superior, Opa only had words of praise. Rommel, the sly Desert Fox, was a “decent” Nazi? An urban legend. What skeletons are my adoptive family hiding in the closet?
    Memories of discussions with my adoptive father are coming back to me. He was a liberal, often volunteered his services to friends and neighbors, and played an active part in the peace movement. On the subject of the Holocaust, however, he could not let go of the question of whether the number of murdered Jews was really accurate, or if it hadn’t been less. He and his friends would argue fiercely about it. My adoptive brothers and I found the discussion unnecessary and didn’t understand why this issue was so important to our father.
    Suddenly I am not so sure anymore: Am I really so different? Have we really left everything behind us? What does it mean for me, for our time, that my grandfather was a war criminal?
    My perception of time is changing. Events that happened a very long time ago are suddenly feeling very recent again. In the last few months I have read so much, have watched so many films; everything seems so immediate. Maybe it’s because, to me, this old story is now very new, very fresh. Often, when I delve into this world my grandfather inhabited, it feels as if these crimes happened only yesterday.
    And now I am standing here in this dilapidated villa in Krakow. I am not quite sure what I’m doing here, in this house, in this city. Does being here make any sense at all? I just know that I had needed to come to Krakow now. Shortly before I came I was in the hospital—I’d had a miscarriage.
    I am feeling sad and exhausted. My therapist advised me not to travel to Krakow in my condition, but I had really wanted to make this trip. First I flew to Warsaw and then I took the train on to Krakow, the city where my grandfather was infamous, where it rained ashes at the end of the war when he had the remains of thousands of people cremated.
    I want to see where my grandfather committed his murders. I want to get close to him—and then put some distance between him and me.
    On the ground floor, the old man is now showing me the living room. This is where the parties were held, he says with a sweep of his arm. Here they sat, my grandfather and the other Nazis, drinking schnapps and wine. Oskar Schindler was there, too. The old man leads me onto the patio. He explains that my grandfather had some building work done, had balconies and patios added. The view of the countryside was important to him, he says.
    The house must have been beautiful once; I like the style. Did my grandfather redesign the building himself? Was he interested in architecture like me? Why am I even thinking about whether we share the same tastes? Amon Goeth is not the kind of grandfather you want to find similarities with. The crimes he committed override everything else. In the book about my mother, I read that my grandmother used to gush about Amon Goeth’s table manners, even long after the war was over. He was a real gentleman, she said.

    Amon Goeth’s former commandant’s villa in Płaszów in 1995
    ■ ■ ■
    A concentration camp commandant who set great store by table manners.
    Emilie Schindler, Oskar Schindler’s wife, later said about Amon Goeth that he had a “split personality.” “On the one hand he played the gentleman, like every man from Vienna; on the other he subjected the Jews under his control to unrelenting terror. . . . He could kill people in cold blood and yet notice any false note on the classical records he played endlessly.”
    Amon Leopold Goeth was born in Vienna on December 11, 1908, the only child of a Catholic family of publishers. His parents Bertha and Amon Franz Goeth named him after his father and grandfather: Amon. In ancient Egypt, Amon was the