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

superior Odilo Globocnik was co-responsible for the construction of concentration camps and the installation of gas chambers. In consultation with Adolf Eichmann he planned the factory-style murder of millions of people. In Poland, extermination camps were being commissioned: Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka.
    Soon Odilo Globocnik charged Amon Goeth with the liquidation of the ghettos. Liquidation meant rounding up the able ghetto population into forced labor; those too weak or too ill to work were shot, including children and the elderly. Historian Johannes Sachslehner describes the process as “blood-thirsty manhunts following a proven formula. . . . In the thick of it is Amon Goeth, who is soon entrusted with leading roles.”
    If he hadn’t done so already, Goeth surely now discovered the lucrative side of genocide: Jews who offered him valuables such as furs, fine china, or jewelry were not killed immediately but were “allowed” to go to the labor camps.
    Around this time Amon Goeth also started to drink more and more heavily.
    Soon the ambitious Goeth was given more tasks: He was to lead the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto and establish a forced labor camp in Płaszów. In letters to his friends and to his father in Vienna he said, “Now I am the commandant at last.”
    On March 13 and 14, 1943, he ordered the clearance of the Krakow ghetto. Around 2,000 people are killed during these two days; a further 4,000 are deported, many to Auschwitz.
    The survivors were taken to Amon Goeth’s realm: Płaszów. Almost 200 acres in size, the camp was first a labor camp and later a concentration camp. The German occupiers had built it on Jewish cemeteries. They built barracks on top of the demolished graves and used the gravestones to pave the streets in the camp.
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    THE OLD MAN LEADS ME into the basement. “This is where the commandant stored his wine,” he says. And then he points proudly to a rusty tub: “Amon Goeth’s authentic bathtub.”
    Opposite the wine cellar and next to the kitchen was the maids’ room. So this was Helen’s place, here in the basement—Helen Rosenzweig, Amon Goeth’s former Jewish maid from the American documentary I watched on TV the day after I discovered the book.
    My mother met Helen here in this house. Ultimately it was a very sad encounter: Helen was shocked because my mother had such a striking resemblance to Amon Goeth. And even though Helen and my mother both try very hard, they cannot form a relationship with each other; history stands between them. Helen sees Amon Goeth in my mother.
    In the film, when my mother tries to find an explanation for Amon Goeth’s actions, Helen snaps angrily: “He was a monster. He was smiling and whistling when he came back from killing. He had the urge to kill, like an animal. It was obvious.”
    My brother Matthias has given me the documentary on DVD so that I can watch it again and again. At first I focused only on my mother and didn’t pay much attention to Helen. The film begins with my mother writing a letter to Helen asking her for a meeting. In the letter she says that she imagines Helen might be afraid of meeting her—she herself is scared to meet Helen.
    At the start, I wasn’t so concerned about the actual contents of the letter. All I could think was, why does my mother spend so much time writing a letter to Helen? Why doesn’t she write to me? Why does she share Helen’s pain but not that of her own child?
    Then gradually my feelings faded into the background and suddenly I saw Helen. I saw her, after all those years, returning anxiously to this house that used to be her dreadful prison. I saw how she is still plagued by her memories. She recounts how Amon Goeth used to beat the maids, how he pushed them down these very stairs, how he screamed at them and called them slut, bitch, dirty Jewess.
    Helen’s boyfriend was a member of the Jewish Resistance in the camp and was shot by Goeth. Helen also talks about the man she