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

still enjoy listening to English-language radio stations; in Hamburg I often tuned into a British military station, and in Israel I’d listen to the Voice of Peace.
    She didn’t have a living room, as such. At home with my adoptive family in the Waldtrudering suburb of Munich, we would hang out on the sofa in the living room, and we would wear comfortable “house clothes” indoors. This would have been unthinkable at Irene’s. It is true that I always felt at ease with my grandmother, but never quite at home: I was still a visitor. She was always elegantly dressed and nicely made up—everything was a little formal. The kitchen was always clean and tidy; I never saw her cooking or baking.
    Unfortunately I have far too few concrete memories of her; I think of her as a child would: someone who cares, someone who protects.
    Whenever my mother picked me up from the orphanage—or later, from my foster family—and dropped me off at my grandmother’s, it meant that I didn’t have to go my mother’s place in Hasenbergl.
    It wasn’t like my mother had a happy family at home: Her then-husband was a drunkard and a wife-beater, and I felt constantly threatened by him. I never knew whether he was going to be there or not. If he was out, I’d hope that he wouldn’t come back. I was always listening for the sound of his key in the lock or his footsteps in the corridor.
    At my grandmother’s, I felt safe. When I entered her kitchen, everything was all right.
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    Helen Rosenzweig, Goeth’s former Jewish maid, tells this story about Ruth Irene Kalder: “Once she came down to see us in the kitchen. She reached out her hands to us and said: ‘If I could send you home I would, but it’s not in my power.’”
    In Amon Goeth’s villa, the maids, Helen Hirsch and Helen Rosenzweig, were subjected to constant abuse: He summoned them by shouting or by ringing a bell that could be heard all over the house. Often he would beat them if they didn’t come running fast enough. One of those beatings left Helen Hirsch with a burst left eardrum; she remained deaf in that ear. Helen Rosenzweig has described how Goeth pushed her down the stairs countless times. “In his house, at his mercy, I lost all fear of death. It was like living under the gallows, twenty-four hours a day.”
    Ruth Irene Kalder later told her daughter Monika that she once intervened when Goeth was threatening to beat one of the maids with a bull pizzle—a dried bull’s penis that was used as a flogging tool in the concentration camps. In the ensuing struggle, Amon ended up hitting Ruth, which he felt awful about. He came close to tears, she said, and apologized over and over, and after that he never again used a bull pizzle in the house. Ruth Irene also told her daughter another grotesque anecdote: She once threatened not to sleep with Goeth anymore “if he didn’t stop shooting at the Jews.” Apparently it worked.
    Helen Rosenzweig felt she had spotted a “shred of humanity” in Ruth Irene Kalder. She remembers, for example, that Ruth would make it a point to praise the maids in front of Amon Goeth and that she always treated them with respect.
    When Helen Rosenzweig’s sisters were to be transported from Płaszów—presumably to Auschwitz—Helen Hirsch ran to Ruth Irene Kalder and begged her to prevent their deportation. At first, she refused: “Please don’t ask me to do this!” Eventually, however, she caved in and called the camp police to stop the deportation of the Rosenzweig sisters. When Ruth Irene confessed her unauthorized rescue mission to Goeth, he was furious. According to Helen Hirsch, he came running to the kitchen with his rifle to find the maids, but eventually he calmed down.
    Helen Hirsch also reported that the inebriated Goeth once tried to sexually assault her. Ruth Irene Kalder heard her cries and came running to her rescue. Goeth then let her go.
    There are a number of eyewitnesses who remember that Ruth Irene Kalder tried