Free My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family's Nazi Past by Jennifer Teege, Nikola Sellmair

Goeth and his guests. And Ruth Irene Kalder, dressed in fine clothes from Krakow shops, would play the lady of the house.
    One photo from Płaszów shows Ruth Irene posing in an elegant riding dress in front of the somber barracks and barbed-wire fences as if she were modeling the latest fashion on the Champs-Élysées. In other photos she is sunbathing in a swimsuit on the patio of the commandant’s villa. Another picture shows her in a stylish hat and coat, standing with her little black lapdog on one side and Goeth’s favorite dog, his spotted Great Dane Rolf, on the other. Presumably, Amon Goeth took this picture of her.

    Ruth Irene Kalder, photographed by Amon Goeth, with Rolf, the Great Dane that Goeth trained to tear humans apart, and her own lapdog
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    FOR ALL THESE YEARS, I’ve had only one photograph of my grandmother. It shows her wearing a long, flowery dress, her hair combed into a beehive, the golden bangle on her arm twinkling in the sun. She is standing on the grass in the English Garden in Munich. A dachshund is playing behind her, a red ball lying in the grass. She is smiling at the camera and looks young, happy, and relaxed. It is a lovely, natural photo, which I have always treasured.
    Now I am finding very different pictures of her, in the book about my mother and on the Internet. Looking at these pictures of her, posing with a dog that would attack people on Goeth’s command—it is unbearable; it is too upsetting. I am exposing myself to a lot, but I can’t and won’t look at these pictures. How could she touch this dog, how could she bear having it near her? After all, it wasn’t a pet, but an animal trained to kill.
    I cannot reconcile these pictures with my image of her.
    I do not grieve for my grandfather, but I do for my grandmother. I grieve for the person she never really was.
    She was always good to me, which is why I always thought of her as a good person. As a child, you cannot imagine that the person you love could have another side, a darker one.
    I really wish that my memories of her had not been tarnished. Why couldn’t she have been just an ordinary grandmother—a nice lady who died one day?
    I had always thought of Irene as one of my three grandmothers, the other two being my adoptive grandmothers, whom I called Oma Vienna and Oma Bochum .
    Oma Bochum was my adoptive father’s mother. She was very short, had gray curly hair—a typical grandmother’s perm—and an energetic, scurrying walk. She would always wear skirts, covered with an apron to keep them clean. Whenever she left the house she would change into her orthopedic pumps with flat heels—the ones I called “click-clack shoes” as a child. When I went to visit her in Bochum with my adoptive family, we would accompany her to the market or to the butcher’s, or help with her gardening. I was never too enthusiastic about planting vegetables or picking fruit, but I loved the results: The shelves in her basement were loaded with jars of stewed fruit. At dinnertime, a gong would summon us to the table.
    She was very disciplined and also a little strict, not a cuddly grandmother. Yet she had a big heart. Even though my Oma Bochum had two children of her own—my adoptive father and his sister—she regarded it her Christian duty to include other children in her family. Helping orphaned or neglected children was a living family tradition. Growing up with a number of foster siblings was a matter of course for my adoptive father, which is why it later seemed natural to him to take in a foster child—me.
    My Oma Bochum was an active member of the Protestant Church and very popular in the community. She would regularly visit the grave of her late husband, who had died young. She normally went to church on Sundays, and eventually she died there, too: She had a heart attack one Sunday in the middle of a service.
    My Oma Vienna, my adoptive mother’s mother, was also short, but very plump. She exuded something