Wednesday, April 5, 2017 at 7 p.m.

Lourdes University Franciscan Center 

6832 Convent Blvd, Sylvania

FREE

 

Jennifer Teege, author of the internationally bestselling memoir My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family%u2019s Nazi Past, will speak locally April 5, 2017.

 

When Jennifer Teege, a German-Nigerian woman, happened to pluck a library book from the shelf, she had no idea that her life would be changed forever. Recognizing photos of her mother and grandmother in the book, she discovers a horrifying fact: her true ancestry. 

 

The daughter of a German mother and a Nigerian father, Jennifer Teege was placed in an orphanage when she was four weeks old and then adopted by a German couple.  It was not until her mid-30s that she inadvertently learned of her family’s complex and unusual history.  She randomly picked up a library book which revealed her biologic lineage. Suddenly her whole sense of self changed irrevocably.  Recognizing photos of her biologic mother and grandmother in the book, she discovered the devastating fact that had been hidden from her – her grandfather was Amon Goeth, the SS officer and concentration camp commandant so chillingly and accurately depicted by Ralph Fiennes in the film Schindler’s List. Goeth was the Nazi who headed the liquidation of the ghettos in Tarnow and Krakow, a man known and despised the world over as the Butcher of Plaszow.  In her book, My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me, Teege comes to grips with the realization that if her grandfather, who began his mornings with random shootings of camp prisoners from his balcony, had met her – a black woman – he would have had no qualms about shooting her.

 

Amon Goeth was executed in 1946 after being found guilty of war crimes by the Supreme National Tribunal of Poland.

 

Jennifer Teege embodies how the Holocaust and its history continue to be relevant across the lines of genealogy, race, and nationality.