What do you do if you find out your grandfather was a Nazi officer?
That’s the crisis Jennifer Teege confronted in a Hamburg library in 2008 when she stumbled upon “I Have to Love My Father, Right?” The book was written by her mother, Monika Hertwig, and according to the dust jacket, Hertwig’s father was Amon Goeth, commandant of the Plaszow concentration camp.
Teege, now 44, remembered Goeth from the 1993 film “Schindler’s List,” where he was portrayed by the actor Ralph Fiennes. As a student, she had taken a particular interest in the Holocaust an even spent four years in Israel. But until that day in the library, she had no idea her grandfather was a Nazi.
“It even got worse by getting this information, to realize that this was not a random man but someone who belonged to my family, someone I had a connection with,” Teege told JTA in an interview at the Jerusalem International Book Fair. “It felt like it was a bad dream.”
Teege’s struggle with her family history is the subject of “My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me,” a book she wrote in 2013 that is due out in English this year. Teege was born in southern Germany to a Nigerian father and German mother and the book chronicles her uncovering of her roots and subsequent struggle with what her ancestry means for her own life — particularly as someone whom the Nazis would have persecuted.
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