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

to exert a moderating influence on Amon Goeth’s behavior. She is said to have taken a stand for individual prisoners and to have prevented the torture and shooting of a number of inmates. In her presence, Amon Goeth is said to have been more restrained and mild-mannered. In another example, according to contemporary witnesses, she once called Goeth away from the parade ground while he was having prisoners whipped. Ruth Irene Kalder, however, would later claim that she never set foot in the camp.
    Emilie Schindler recounted that around the middle of 1944, her husband Oskar reported that Goeth was getting tired of his girlfriend; the woman was “too peace-loving” and always trying “to dissuade him from his sadistic excesses.”
    That said, the fact that Ruth Irene Kalder sometimes half-heartedly tried to help the victims goes to show that she knew how Amon Goeth was treating them and what crimes were being committed in the camp.
    In his autobiography, Goeth’s secretary Mietek Pemper writes that Ruth Irene Kalder would sometimes type highly confidential documents for Goeth. Pemper believes that she also helped compile a list of prisoners to be executed.
    Later, Ruth Irene Kalder would often stress two things, namely that Płaszów had only ever been a labor camp, not a death camp, and that there had been only adults in the camp, and no children.
    Nonetheless, she told her daughter Monika that she had once observed children being transported from the camp by truck. Monika Goeth has said that her mother could not stop thinking about those children and that she believes her mother put her memories of the event to paper.
    The trucks Ruth Irene Kalder remembered were probably those which took the children from Płaszów to Auschwitz on May 14, 1944. Goeth needed to create space in his camp for a number of Hungarian Jews who were due to arrive. Accordingly, he wrote in a letter to an SS leader, he had to “purge” the camp of its old, ill, and weak inmates, as well as its children, and thereby liquidate all the “unproductive elements.” In other words, he was going to deport the weak and the ill from Płaszów to the gas chambers at the nearby camp of Auschwitz, for “special treatment.”
    Notices were put up at the parade ground proclaiming “Appropriate work for every prisoner.” Loudspeakers blared out cheery tunes as the prisoners were told to undress and parade past the camp doctors. According to an eyewitness, among them was Josef Mengele, the infamous camp doctor from Auschwitz, who had come specially and was noting down the names of the children. A week later, the result of this so-called “health action” was announced. Those who were to be removed to Auschwitz had to gather on one side of the square: around 1,200 people in total, including about 250 children.
    Płaszów survivor Stella Mueller-Madej describes the scene as the children were being herded onto the truck: “The whole place is pandemonium. Fathers and mothers are sobbing. The children, who until then had been silent like dolls and frozen with horror, are now screaming and pleading . . . They are crying for help . . . A very young child tries to crawl away to safety on all fours. A female guard . . . grabs . . . her by her hands and throws her little body onto the truck bed like a sack of potatoes. It is unbearable. Everyone on the parade ground is crying, the whips are lashing down, the dogs are barking . . . At that moment the loudspeakers start to play waltz music . . . and the trucks head off to the camp gate.”
    Shortly after their arrival at Auschwitz, the children were killed.
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    JUST AS MY GRANDMOTHER, HER WHOLE LIFE, made excuses for Amon Goeth and romanticized him, I tended to regard her too favorably in the beginning of my research. I told myself, “She didn’t do anyone any harm. She was not actively involved in his deeds.”
    I knew so little about my grandmother. I saw my mother once again in my early twenties, but