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S ARA AND M ORRIS T UGMAN
B AIS C HABAD T ORAH C ENTER

43 RD A NNUAL DINNER
ON W EDNESDAY , J UNE 21 6PM
27 S IVAN , 5777

WILL CELEBRATE ITS

Y OUNG I SRAEL OF O AK P ARK ,
15140 W EST T EN M ILE R D .

AT THE

Family Secret

Granddaughter of “butcher of Plaszow”
to share her story at JFS annual event.

BARBARA LEWIS CONTRIBUTING WRITER

THIS YEAR'S HONOREES ARE

Andrea and Andrew Feuereisen and
Cindy and Pinchas Wolf.

Dinner Chairman - Neal Craft

Honorary Chairman - Alan Zekelman

SPECIAL GUEST SPEAKER

the Honorable
Richard H. Bernstein

Associate Justice of
the Michigan Supreme Court

Blind from birth, the Justice will
speak on "Overcoming Obstacles,"
a talk you don't want to miss.

For ticket information or information about
participating in the souvenir journal
contact the Torah Center at

rabbishneur@baischabad.com

22

May 18 • 2017

jn

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W

hen she was in her mid-30s, Jennifer Teege suf-
fered the mother of all identity crises.
The daughter of an unmarried German mother
and African father, she had been placed in an orphanage
as an infant. At 3, she went to live with foster parents who
adopted her at age 7. Questioning why her birth mother
rejected her and where she belonged in the world as a bira-
cial woman, Teege had already been treated for depression.
And then, in the summer of 2008, when she was 38, she
picked a book off a Hamburg library shelf and on the cover
saw a picture of her birth mother, whom she had been in
contact with until her adoption was finalized.
The book’s title, I Have to Love My Father, Don’t I?,
intrigued her. Flipping through the pages, she uncovered a
horrifying family secret: Her grandfather, the father of her
birth mother, was Amon Goeth, the commandant of the
Plaszow concentration camp in Poland.
Goeth, portrayed by actor Ralph Fiennes in the film
Schindler’s List, was a pathological sadist who liked to shoot
random prisoners from his balcony for sport.
Known as the “butcher of Plaszow,” he was executed for
crimes against humanity in 1946.
Finding the book cleaved Teege’s life in two. Before, she
was a happily married middle-class
German mother of two sons, working in
the advertising business. Afterward, she
had to come to grips with knowing she
was descended from a man responsible
for the deaths of 800,000 Jews during the
Holocaust.
Teege details her story in her book, My
Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black
Woman Discovers Her Family’s Nazi Past
Amon Goeth, the “butcher of Plaszow”
(The Experiment LLC, 2015). She will

ABOVE:
Jennifer Teege

continued on page 24