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
Hareetz | Feb. 6, 2015
In the mid-1990s, near the end of the period during which she lived
in Israel, Jennifer Teege watched Steven Spielberg’s film “Schindler’s
List.” She hadn’t 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 didn’t
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. “I’d
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 didn’t 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.
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