The House

Gemmon looking for Amon Göth's house

Gemmon came to Krakow with one site she wanted to be sure to see: Amon Göth's house and I went with her. She knew about the Plaszow concentration camp commandant from the survivors' stories she's read as well as a book by Harold Welzer, that hasn't been translated into English yet: Täter or Perpetrator: How Ordinary People become Mass Murderers that she's been unable to read more than fifty pages of -- it was too painful. Plaszow was just outside of Krakow. Gemmon said she wanted to see the second floor balcony where some accounts -- including Stephen Spielberg's movie Schindler's List - say Göth stood and shot prisoners when the mood struck him.**

We found the house the guidebooks list as Amon Göth's house fairly easily: 22 Heltmana.

It's for sale.

Amon Goth's house

I wonder how long it's been for sale...and who on earth would buy it?

But it was the balcony on the back side of Göth's house that we came to see and it sure wasn't easy to figure out how to get there.

We walked back down to the entrance of the Plaszow concentration camp site.The Nazis tried to wipe out any evidence of the camp before the Russian army came so all that remains of Plaszow is an empty expanse of land with awkward man-made hills, worn signs marking the perimeter, and some memorial monuments.  The sign asks that people "please respect the grievous history of the site."

One of the signs marking the site
where Plaszow once stood

What the Plaszow site looks like now

It was just before All Saints' Day so there a few candles and some fresh flowers by the stone marker near the entrance. But there were no markings, no path, and we had to wade through brambles and low scrubby brush to be able to a place where we could see Göth's balcony through a chain link fence.

The back of Amon Göth's house.
It's hard to see but the balcony
is in front of that second story wondow 

From the back, it was clear that someone is living in the house -- there were clean lace curtains over the windows. I don't know why I found this so shocking, but I did. Then I remembered that, when the Germans invaded Poland, they took over most of the buildings so, when the war ended, there were few buildings that couldn't have been set aside as scenes of atrocities or, at the very least, occupation. Still, that the house is listed in guide books as the former home of Amon Göth yet someone is living in it and anyone can buy it as if it were just another house.

In the Schindler factory museum, one fourteen-year-old girl's note described being taunted and jeered as she walked down the street."It's not good being Jewish," she wrote. How often have I felt that way, relieved that I wasn't "fully" Jewish, embarrassed that I was partly? More often than I'd like to admit, even to myself. The Holocaust made one thing very clear to me as a child: there was something very, very wrong about being Jewish if an entire nation of people would want to kill you - or look the other way while others killed you - just for being Jewish.

And I can't even write this off to a crazed group that doesn't exist anymore. I went to school in a community that did not allow Jews to join their clubs. In the late 60s and early 70s. I had classmates in elementary school, in high school and even at Harvard who ridiculed Jews in front of me...and I kept quiet, I am deeply ashamed to admit, because part of me was relieved because it meant that they didn't know I was part Jewish. I have been told, on more than one occasion when someone's found out that my father's family was Jewish, that I don't "look Jewish." What does that mean? Was I, am I Jewish? To whom? We celebrated Christmas (presents) and Easter (candy). I was never taught a single thing about Judaism. Yet if I lived in Germany in the 1940s, I would have been Jewish enough to end up in Amon Göth's camp.

I don't really know what not looking Jewish has actually meant except that, because of it, I have been privileged to hear just how antisemitic some people are. I have heard people say that Jewish people "eat weird food", are "money grubbing", and that "if you throw a penny, a Jew will chase it."

I'll never forget one afternoon in the summer after my freshman year, my preppy boyfriend and his best friend came to my house to stay for a weekend. Both were classmates of mine at Harvard. I'll call Preppy Boyfriend's pal "Paul." "Paul" was the wise-cracking grandson of a prominent New England politician. When my best friend from high school, Naomi, came over, "Paul" made it pretty clear he wanted to sleep with her. Naomi was Jewish. She was gorgeous. Yet, when Naomi was playing the piano, her attention on her fingers, "Paul" put his two fingers up over his own tiny up-turned nose to mimic the shape of her's. My boyfriend laughed.

I did not kick them out of my house. I did not break up with my boyfriend right then and there. I watched all of this and said nothing.

Within a few years, Naomi got a nose job.

But what does all this have to do with faith? With religion? With belief? Does it at all? Just because there are antisemites, people who dislike Jews, they say, simply because they are Jewish, (and others like me who say nothing while it's going on) does this really have anything to do with religion? When religion is used as a pretext for war or atrocities, are my parents right, that religion, itself, is to blame? And, while this kind of hatred makes the desire for a separate land filled with only people of your same faith make sense, where do you get this land free of others? Can you get it without doing to others what was done to you?

I just cannot go here, into the confused place where land and faith, property and religion, power and belief  get jumbled together...at least not right now. But is it meaningless to try to understand the beliefs and practices of faith while ignoring some of the ways these groups of believers have behaved towards others? The way I stayed silent while group hate and disrespect happened right in front of me?

As a religious blank slate, I really have no choice but to start at the beginning: what do people believe and how do they manifest that faith in their every day lives? But the question of what goes wrong after that -- and why -- is always lurking.

I am so confused by all of this and I'm starting to realize just how much of my ignorance has been self-inflicted, a choice I've actually made as if the less I knew about these horrific actions and times, the less it has to do with me and my little life. Well, it does have something to do with me, whether I choose to know something about it or not, whether I choose to look at it, to see it, or not. Human beings like me did these things. Human beings are still capable of doing these things. Human beings are still doing these things in large ways and in small ones, every day, so it does, right now, have to do with every one of us. And it certainly has to do with me. I am capable of the kind of personal cowardice that allowed the Holocaust to happen.

~ ~ ~

**There's an argument about where Amon Göth actually stood when he shot people.  Stephen Spielberg's movie, Schindler's List, shows Göth shooting people from the balcony of his home but others argue the location was elsewhere. A documentary in which Amon Göth's youngest daughter spoke shows the balcony of the house at 22 Heltmana. Under any circumstances, Göth was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people and even the Nazis considered him mentally ill. He was actually taken into custody by the US military from a mental institution where the Nazis incarcerated him in 1944. Here's the United Nations War Crimes report about Göth which only says that he did shoot people himself but doesn't go into any more detail than that.

The concentration camp in Plaszow near Krakow 
erected by nazi-Germany in 1942.

Amon  Göth on the balcony of one of the
places that he lived.
Clearly this is not the same balcony
as the house Gemmon and I saw.

Amon Göth's daughter, Monika
She was interviewed in a documentary about
her father in front of the balcony Gemmon and I saw

Oskar Schindler's factory...

On the way to find Amon Göth's house, Gemmon and I stopped by Oskar Schindler's factory.

I don't know where I thought Oskar Schindler's factory was but I know I didn't think it was just on the edge of Krakow. In fact, if you walk from the central market square, you walk through the old Jewish community  (Kasimierz) to get there. Nearby is one of the two remaining sections of the old ghetto walls that are still standing.(for more about the Krakow Ghetto...)

One of the two remaining sections
of the Krakow Ghetto wall

Their tombstone-shaped cement still looks oddly fresh more than sixty years later.

The permanent exhibit at The Schindler factory is called Krakow Under Nazi Occupation 1939-1945 and it's devastating. It's a fairly confusing exhibit in that you feel like you are supposed to walk along in proscribed direction but it's never all that clear which way you are supposed to go and most of the ways to go are narrow, wind around small exhibits in a warren of tiny rooms, some with staircases between them. Twice, I followed a staircase to a complete dead end. It's made even more challenging by the fact that many of the museum exhibits aren't explained or set in context.

One example is this exhibit of marionettes... 

Puppets in the Schindler Museum

Whose were they? Why were they made? Who used them and where? Without that information which I could find nowhere -- either in the museum or online -- it's hard to know how to react to these puppets.

Another example is the very first exhibit I saw, a black and white film that played in a monitor set on a slant. It was a documentary about Jews made for who knows what purpose that may have meant to be supportive but the subtitles talked about how "they" "scurried to work", "liked playing in the park" and "of course, talked about work." It had no label that explained the source of the film, or even when it was made, so it compounded the horror of walking through room after room of evidence of group hatred by making me nervous that the museum was trying to stake out some separate, defensive position for the Poles -- either that they were just as victimized as their Jewish citizens or that they were, ultimately, heroic. Mercifully, this didn't turn out to be the case at all - the museum was an incredibly powerful and moving experience - so I can only think this museum is new enough that it hasn't the money or manpower to work out all the kinks quite yet. I write all this to say that, if you go, walk through to the end. I was so put off and confused by the beginning, I almost didn't.

I was especially happy to be there with Gemmon because I would have missed the full horror of the hall of proclamations that were issued by the Germans when they took over Poland in 1939. Before the Nazis got  their public address speakers installed all over Krakow, they issued orders to the populace through orders plastered on the walls in both Polish and German. The Schindler factory museum has created an exhibit you walk through with those orders from floor to ceiling on either side of you. Gemmon translated them for me..

"All Jews and Poles are required to bring their cars to be inspected and registered."

"No one who isn't Jewish can go in to a Jewish business and all businesses whose ownership was more than 50% Jewish must prominently identify themselves as a Jewish business."

"Everyone must turn in any guns or uniforms they have. Anyone found with either of these after (a certain date) will be shot."

It went on and on. And there was a horrific snapshot of a couple of jocular Nazis, smiling for the camera, as they took scissors to chop off a random man's beard and side curls.

By the end, Gemmon and I couldn't speak. We sat, for a bit, near some production stills from the Spielberg movie in the museum's "Movie Cafe". To be reminded of Hollywood felt a bit incongruous but, if it hadn't been for Stephen Spielberg, his movie and his money, there probably wouldn't have been a museum there at all. We then set off to find the house of Amon Göth. Gemmon has the address from a guide book and she led the way.