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

loved after the war, a camp survivor like herself. They were married for 35 years, moved to Florida and had children. Yet her husband could not get over the experience of the camp, and one day he took his own life. In his suicide note he wrote, “The memories haunt me every day. I just can’t go on.”
    I am standing in the basement of my grandfather’s house, in the darkness of Helen’s room, where the only light comes from a small window. You can see a small patch of the garden. It was warm here; she didn’t have to sleep on straw in the drafty barracks and was certain to have had more to eat than the other detainees. She didn’t have to perform hard labor in the quarries like most of the other women in the camp; she wore a black dress with a white apron and served roast meat and wine. Yet she was living beneath the same roof as the man who could kill her at any time. She expected to die in this house.
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    When you saw Goeth, you saw death, one survivor said. The Płaszów camp became the stage for Amon Goeth’s cruelty.
    There are many eyewitness reports relating to this. Goeth’s Jewish assistant, Mietek Pemper, described how once, in the middle of a dictation, the commandant suddenly grabbed his rifle, opened a window, and started shooting at prisoners. Pemper heard screams; Goeth then returned to his desk and asked calmly, as if nothing had happened, Where were we?
    When Amon Goeth killed somebody, he would have their relatives killed, too, because he didn’t want to see any “unhappy” faces in his camp.
    In her memoirs, Płaszów survivor Stella Müller-Madej writes about Goeth, “If there was somebody he didn’t like the look of, he’d grab him by the hair and shoot him on the spot. He was a giant of a man, a powerful, imposing figure with beautiful, gentle features and an even gentler expression on his face. So this is what a cruel, murdering monster looks like! How can that be?”
    Goeth used publicly celebrated executions to crush any thought of escape or resistance the detainees might have had. Public hangings and shootings on the parade ground were accompanied by popular music. Larger groups of people were usually shot on a hill a little further away; the pit for the bodies was just below.
    The Płaszów camp was growing, and the prisoners were now coming from further afield. Survivors from other ghettos, Polish prisoners, Romany from other camps, as well as Hungarian Jews all joined the Jews from the Krakow ghetto. Sometimes the Płaszów concentration camp held more than 20,000 detainees in its 180 barracks surrounded by two and half miles of barbed wire.
    Within the SS, Amon Goeth was promoted to the rank of Hauptsturmführer , captain, which was an extraordinarily fast rise. He got rich on the prisoners’ possessions and lived a life of luxury. He had a Jewish cobbler make new shoes for him every week and a pastry chef bake fancy cakes for him until he was piling on the pounds. In his villa, he held parties; alcohol, music, and women were offered in abundance to humor the SS men. Goeth owned riding horses and a number of cars; he enjoyed riding through the camp on his white horse or racing around the lanes in his BMW.

    Goeth would often ride around the camp on his white horse
    Mietek Pemper, the commandant’s assistant, also took dictation of Goeth’s personal letters to his family in Vienna. Omitting the details of everyday life in the camp, he would ask his father about the progress of the business and his wife about the children: Anna Goeth had given birth to two more children, Ingeborg and Werner. When Amon Goeth learned that Werner was hitting his sister Ingeborg, he told Pemper to write in his letter to his wife Anna: “He must have got the hitting from me.”
    Eyewitnesses reported that Goeth would wear different accessories depending on his mood on a given day. If he put on white gloves or a white scarf, combined with a peaked cap or a Tyrolean hat, the detainees had to