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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWhen a black German woman discovered her grandfather was the Nazi villain of 'Schindler's List'
I just thought this was interesting...
An odd series of events led Jennifer Teege to discover that her grandfather was none other than the notorious Nazi Amon Goeth.
By Avner Shapira | Feb. 6, 2015 | 7:05 PM |
In the mid-1990s, near the end of the period during which she lived in Israel, Jennifer Teege watched Steven Spielbergs film Schindlers List. She hadnt seen the film in a movie theater, and watched it in her rented room in Tel Aviv when it was broadcast on television.
It was a moving experience for me, but I didnt learn much about the Holocaust from it, she tells me by phone from her home in Hamburg, mostly in English with a sprinkling of Hebrew. Id learned and read a great deal about the Holocaust before that. At the time I thought the film was important mainly because it heightened international awareness of the Holocaust, but I didnt think I had a personal connection to it.
Indeed, it was not until years later that Teege, a German-born black woman who was given up for adoption as a child, discovered that one of the central characters in the film, Amon Goeth, was her grandfather. Many viewers recall the figure of Goeth, the brutal commander of the Plaszow concentration camp in Poland played in the film by Ralph Fiennes from the scenes in which he shoots Jewish inmates from the porch of his home. But Teege, who had not been in touch with either her biological mother or biological grandmother for years, had no idea about the identity of her grandfather.
The discovery came like a bolt from the blue in the summer of 2008, when she was 38 years old, as she relates in the memoir Amon, which was published in German in 2013 (co-authored with the German journalist Nikola Sellmair), and is due out in English this April under the title My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Familys Nazi Past.
*read the rest...
http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-features/1.640997
CaliforniaPeggy
(149,580 posts)Omaha Steve
(99,580 posts)K&R!
stevenleser
(32,886 posts)Thank you for posting!
sharp_stick
(14,400 posts)I'm amazed by her strength and character.
Skittles
(153,147 posts)yup
Guy Whitey Corngood
(26,500 posts)SoapBox
(18,791 posts)What a story...no wonder she needed counseling.
If you have time and can emotionally take it, the article at the link is amazing.
mackerel
(4,412 posts)20. In the end even the SS was fed up with him.
BlueJazz
(25,348 posts)SusanCalvin
(6,592 posts)I've never really wanted to know about my ancestors - I prefer to choose my role models. But this is an example of genealogy doing good.