Jennifer Teege (R) speaks at the Galicia Jewiah Museum in Krakow. Photo: PAP/Stanislaw Rozpedzik
Goeth, also known as the 'Butcher of Plaszów' and played by Ralph Fiennes in the 1993 movie Schindler's List - much of it set in Krakow, where the Austrian Nazi was based during WWII occupied Poland - was executed in 1946 after a trial in Poland found him guilty of personally ordering the imprisonment, torture, and extermination of mostly Jewish prisoners.
Born in 1970, Jennifer Teege was adopted as a child and grew up in a comfortable middle-class home in Munich, unaware of the identity of her grandfather.
Although she occasionally saw her biological mother and grandmother, it was only aged 38, after stumbling upon a book about Amon Goeth in a library that the penny dropped.
“I saw my mother's name on the cover, and I found a photograph of my grandmother in the middle,” she told the Polish Press Agency, after speaking at Krakow's Galicia Jewish Museum at the launch of the Polish langauge of her book My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me.
“In the beginning there was shock and disbelief, but it all made sense. I already felt that something was not right with my biological mother's family,” she said.
photo: PAP/Stanislaw Rozpedzik
Teege, whose mother had a fling with a Nigerian student while at university, says she never felt any love from her biological mother.
However, that was not the case with her grandmother, Ruth, who had been Goeth's secretary and lover in the Plaszow district of Krakow.
“I loved Grandma and felt safe with her.
“She was a beautiful and elegant woman. She was open, and the colour of my skin was not a problem for her.”
Nevertheless, Teege insists that her grandmother “must have known what was going on” at the labour camp near the house where she worked.
Teege discovered as an adult that her maternal grandmother always “spoke of him with affection” and described the two years with Goeth as “the happiest period in her life.”
Vienna-born Goeth reputedly took pot shots at the mainly Jewish prisoners in the Plaszow camp. He was also placed in charge of the 1943 liquidation of the Jewish Ghetto in the nearby city of Tarnow.
He was hanged for war crimes in Krakow in 1946.
Teege's maternal grandmother committed suicide the day after completing filming for a 1983 documentary about her former lover.
The author, who was 13 at the time, says that although Goeth “would have shot me,” she does not regret discovering the truth about her background.
“Absolutely not,” she says, “the experience was painful but liberating.”
The book My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me has been published in Polish by Proszynski I S-ka under the title Amon: Moj Dziadek By Mnie Strzelil. (nh/pg)