The Florida Holocaust Museum in partnership with Boxser Diversity Initiative will host two interactive discussions featuring International Selling Author, Jennifer Teege on both Tuesday, March 22 Live at The Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, and Wednesday, March 23 Live at Temple Beth Sholom in Sarasota, Florida, at 6:30 PM.

 

My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me, an international bestseller, is a book born of a shocking discovery: At age 38, married with two children, Jennifer Teege picked up a book by chance at Hamburg’s main library and discovered that her grandfather was the brutal Nazi commandant of the Plaszow concentration camp, portrayed so memorably by Ralph Fiennes in the film Schindler’s List.

 

Teege, who was born Jennifer Göth to a Nigerian father and an Austrian-German mother, grew up in foster care. She was adopted at the age of seven. Her grandmother was Ruth Irene Kalder, who had a two-year relationship with Amon Göth until the end of the Second World War, and with whom she had a daughter, Monika Hertwig, who was born in November 1945 and whom he never met. Teege studied at the Sorbonne, and learned Hebrew in Israel where she studied for five years. At the age of 38, Teege unexpectedly found out about her family history, by picking up a book in a Hamburg library which happened to be her mother Monika Hertwig’s biography and where she discovered that Amon Göth was her grandfather, which caused her to plunge into a severe depression. She decided to combat her depression and come to terms with this revelation by writing her book “My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me.” Her book was a success and became a New York Times bestseller. Translations of the book, which was originally published in Teege’s native language, German, have been made into Danish, English, French, Hebrew, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish.

 

With our thanks to our community partners at the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), St. Petersburg Chapter.