Posted by
Billy email MADBillyD@aol.com on Tuesday, December 30, 2008 7:06:14 PM
She says the only Jew she knew was Jesus. There were no Jews around her in Bad Toetz, the West German village where she was born. No one talked about them. No one spoke about where they had gone or the war in which they disappeared, the war in which, she was told, her father died.
She grew up incurious about him -- she was a year old at the time of his death -- but that changed the day her spiteful mother told her, ``You are like your father and you will die like him.''
It turned out her father was a monster named Amon Goethe, and he commanded Plaszow, a forced labor camp in Poland. After the war, he was hanged. Once she knew these things, Monika Hertwig's uninterest became her obsession. ``I wanted to know what happened to the Jews and I wanted to know how my father was involved.''
(The above is from a column written by Leonard Pitts Jr.
More of his column is below.)
If you saw Schindler's List, you remember Ralph Fiennes' portrait of Goethe as a preening, sadistic bully who amused himself by gunning down Jews for sport. That film, says Hertwig, made her ''sick with the truth.'' When she saw Jonas on a German documentary, it became her mission to find her. Eventually, Hertwig sent a letter. I know you are suffering, she wrote. But I am suffering, too.
(Good for this lady trying to change things unlike her evil father. We must never forget the evil of the Holocaust. Read more of the above column Holocaust tale of courage and redemption )
