My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me

Jennifer Teege did not know, until she was in her late thirties, that her grandfather was Amon Göth — the SS commandant of the Płaszów concentration camp, the man depicted in Schindler’s List as a monster who shot prisoners from his villa balcony for sport. The discovery, made when she stumbled upon a library book about her own mother, set off a crisis that became this extraordinary memoir, co-written with journalist Nikola Sellmair.

My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me — the title is not metaphorical — traces Teege’s reckoning with an inheritance she never chose and cannot disown. Born in Munich to a German mother and a Nigerian father, adopted as an infant by a German-Jewish family, Teege grew up without knowledge of her biological family. When she finally learns her history, the book she finds in the library is about her mother and grandmother — the latter of whom was Göth’s mistress and who, after his execution for war crimes, continued to speak of him with devotion.

The structural conceit of the book is elegant and painful: Teege’s first-person narrative alternates with Sellmair’s chapters providing historical and psychological context. This dual approach allows the book to be simultaneously intimate memoir and careful historical document without either register overwhelming the other. Teege does not let herself off the hook for the complexity of her feelings — the revulsion and the grief and, hardest to admit, the search for traces of herself in photographs of a man who would have killed her for being who she is.

The question at the heart of the book is one without a clean answer: what do we inherit from people we never knew, whose crimes preceded our existence? Teege is not interested in absolution. She travels to Israel, visits Płaszów, speaks with descendants of survivors. She undergoes years of therapy. She does not arrive at peace so much as at the ability to carry what cannot be put down.

This is a book about the long reach of atrocity into ordinary life, about the particular burden of German postwar identity, and about a woman’s determined refusal to let her grandfather’s crimes define her while insisting on confronting them fully. Remarkable, unsettling, and deeply necessary.