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

labor camps to accommodate Jewish forced laborers.
    In 1943, Heinrich Himmler delivered his infamous speech in front of top SS officials where he propagandized an ideology of hatred and contempt: “Whether other nations are living in prosperity or are starving to death interests me only insofar as we need them as slaves for our culture. . . . Whether or not 10,000 Russian women die of exhaustion during the construction of an anti-tank ditch interests me only insofar as the ditch is being finished. I also want to mention . . . a very difficult subject here. . . . I am talking about the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. . . . Most of you will know what it is like when 100 bodies are piled up together, when there are 500 or when there are 1,000. To have seen this through and to have stayed decent—with the exception of human weaknesses—that is what has made us tough.”
    Amon Goeth soon went on to prove his toughness. The SS taught him how to kill.
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    UPSTAIRS, THE OLD MAN UNLOCKS the door to the former bedroom . There are hooks in the ceiling. This is where Amon Goeth did his exercises, the old man claims. Or maybe, he adds with a wink, he had a love-swing hanging from there.
    I step onto the balcony and look out over the hills covered in brushwood. A cold wind blows in my face. It is a rainy October day. The camp, surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by watchtowers, was located near the house. My grandfather could keep an eye on his prisoners; in the mornings it was only a short walk to work. That blurred photograph of Amon Goeth on the cover of the book about my mother—his open mouth, the bare chest, the rifle in his hand, wearing only shorts on his balcony—who took that photo? Was it my grandmother? Amon Goeth is said to have been proud of his firearms; he liked to carry them around with him. Did that impress my grandmother, or did it frighten her? What did she know? What did she suppress? I cannot imagine her living in this house, yet not being aware of what was happening in the camp. Amon Goeth is said to have beaten his maids. My grandmother must have seen or at least heard that, too. The house isn’t that big.
    After my arrival in Krakow the previous night, on my way to the hotel, I drove past Wawel Castle, the former residence of the kings of Poland, high above the Vistula. The castle was brightly lit. After the German invasion, Hans Frank, Hitler’s governor of Poland, made himself at home there, living a life of luxury surrounded by servants, employing composers and chess players. I can imagine the life he had up there, how powerful he must have felt residing in that grand castle with its view over Krakow.
    By comparison Amon Goeth’s house looks very normal, almost modest. I had imagined it to be bigger, more ostentatious. I find it difficult to imagine that glamorous receptions were held here and that its owner was a man who was master of life and death for thousands of people. A man who thrived on having absolute power, and who wielded and relished this power in the most cynical way.
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    Amon Goeth on the balcony of his villa
    “I am your God,” said Amon Goeth to the prisoners in his inaugural address as commandant of the Płaszów camp. “I dispatched 60,000 Jews in the district of Lublin. Now it’s your turn.”
    In the Polish city of Lublin, Amon Goeth had worked for Odilo Globocnik, an SS man known for his brutality, whom Heinrich Himmler had charged with killing the Jews in occupied Poland. In December 1940, Globocnik updated Hans Frank on the goal he had set out with these words: “In this one year, I have obviously not been able to eradicate all the lice and all the Jews. But I am convinced that in the course of time it can be achieved. . . .”
    When the “Final Solution” was being strategically coordinated at the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, the deportation and mass murder of Polish Jews was already in full swing.
    Goeth’s