What would you do if you uncovered your family’s darkest secret?
That is exactly what happened when Jennifer Teege, a German-Nigerian woman, happened to pluck a library book from the shelf. In that moment, she had no idea that her life would be irrevocably altered.
As she flicked through the book’s photographs, she realised that her grandfather was Amon Goeth, the vicious Nazi commandant chillingly depicted by Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List – a man known and reviled the world over.
Although raised in an orphanage and eventually adopted, Teege had some contact with her biological mother and grandmother as a child. Yet neither revealed that Teege’s grandfather was the Nazi ‘butcher of Plaszów’, executed for crimes against humanity in 1946. The more Teege read about Amon Goeth, the more certain she became: if her grandfather had met her – a Black woman – he would have killed her.
Teege’s discovery sent her, at age 38, into a severe depression – and on a quest to unearth and fully comprehend her family’s haunted history. Her research took her to Krakow – to the sites of the Jewish ghetto her grandfather ‘cleared’ in 1943 and the Plaszów concentration camp he then commanded – and back to Israel, where she herself once attended college, learned fluent Hebrew, and formed lasting friendships.
Co-written with award-winning journalist Nikola Sellmair, My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me traces Teege’s resolute search for the truth, leading her, step by step, to the possibility of her own liberation.
