My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family’s Nazi Past (1/26/18)
January 26th at 7 p.m.
Benton Chapel, Vanderbilt University
Jennifer Teege, an international best-selling author, will be the HLS keynote speaker for spring semester. At age thirty-eight Teege happened to pluck a library book from the shelf having no idea that her life would be irrevocably altered. Recognizing photos of her mother and grandmother in the book, she discovered a horrifying fact: Her grandfather was Amon Goeth, the vicious Nazi commandant chillingly depicted by Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List.
Although raised in an orphanage and eventually adopted, Teege had some contact with her biological mother and grandmother as a child. Yet neither revealed that Teege’s grandfather was the Nazi “butcher of Plaszow,” executed for crimes against humanity in 1946. The more Teege reads about Amon Goeth, the more certain she becomes: If her grandfather had met her – a black woman – he would have killed her.
Jennifer Teege will share her emotional pilgrimage as she wrestled with depression, race, and identity, and what it takes to be a liberated human being.