My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family’s Nazi Past by Jennifer Teegee and Nikola Sellmair

My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family’s Nazi Past by Jennifer Teegee and Nikola Sellmair

                Jennifer Teegee was browsing through the library in Hamburg when she came across a book titled I Have to Love My Father, Don’t I? The Life Story of Monica Goeth, Daughter of the Concentration Camp Commandant from “Schindler’s List.” Monica Goeth is Jennifer’s biological mother. Monica placed Jennifer in an orphanage when she was an infant and she had been adopted at the age of 7. She never had a great relationship with her mother, but she did love the company of her maternal grandmother, Irene. Irene was the woman who loved Amon Goeth, the Commandant. Now all Jennifer has is questions about her family, about her life, about the grandfather she saw portrayed in a movie by Ralph Fiennes. He was the man shooting people in the camp from his window. She writes “He in his black uniform with its death-heads, me the black grandchild. What would he have said to a dark-skinned granddaughter, who speaks Hebrew on top of that? I would have been a disgrace, a bastard who brought dishonor to the family. I am sure my grandfather would have shot me.” Now Jennifer is trying to put the pieces of her family’s history together. This memoir is her journey to discovering the secrets she had never been told.

                What does your family legacy say about you? How does the past actions of family members dictate the rest of your life? Should it even have an effect on your life? These were a few of the questions Jennifer wrestled with throughout this memoir. She felt as if her life was split in two: the time before knowing and the time after. What was amazing is the life she chose to have before knowing about her grandfather. She lived in Israel, learned Hebrew, studied the Holocaust, volunteered and had Jewish friends. But what does any of that mean now, after knowing the horror that your grandfather put people through. These are somewhat unanswerable questions. But through this memoir you can see how she learned to cope and live with her family’s history. The love of the family that adopted her and had been a part of her life for three decades helped. But this was a journey she had to take on largely by herself.

                This memoir brings up so man valid points. It’s hard to describe. If you have someone in your family who has done terrible things, should you be held accountable? Is that a weight others should have to carry? What about others who were ambivalent to the things around them like Irene, Jennifer’s biological grandmother? She was living with Amon outside of the concentration camp. How should Jennifer feel about her, especially when she had such fond memories of her grandmother? It’s so complicated and there are no easy answers but her journey is something I can recommend others read. There is a lot of introspection, a lot of research and a certain amount of acceptance. This really is the story of her life and how this new knowledge changed everything for her. My biggest complaint comes from the way this memoir is presented: Jennifer writes part of it in first person narrative while other, more factual, parts are written by Sellmair. These different narratives were present in each chapter and it was really awkward. The choice of format made me rate this a little lower because reading the memoir like this did get tiresome. Still will recommend this and give it 3.5 out of 5 stars.