Film documents survivor's 'Inheritance'

By Lauren Matthew

The Jewish State

Three years ago, Helen Rosenzweig took a trip to Poland with her daughter to meet the daughter of a man whose name inspires fear in thousands of people all over the world.

The man's name was Amon Goeth.

He was the commandant of Plaszow concentration camp, a man known for cruelty and for waking up in the morning and shooting at prisoners walking by.

During the Holocaust, Helen worked for Goeth at his villa, overlooking Plaszow. Part of her story -- and Goeth's -- was told in Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List. But three years ago, a new chapter was added to that story.

On Aug. 26, a documentary on that meeting, nheritance, was shown at Temple Beth Ahm, Aberdeen, and Rosenzweig addressed a packed room, telling them what her life had been like at Plaszow and beyond.

Rosenzweig, now 82 and living in Monroe, found out through a friend at the Shoah Foundation that Spielberg was interested in making a documentary about Monika Hertwig, Goeth's daughter. At first, she said, she wanted no part in it.

But Spielberg kept at it.

"Anything Steven Spielberg would ask me to do, I would do," Rosenzweig said. "He made the movie (Schindler's List) and he awakened the whole world."

Once the agreement for her to participate was made, she told Spielberg that she was doing this difficult thing, for him. But Spielberg, Rosenzweig said, told her differently.

"Remember, Helen," he said, "you're doing it for the whole world."

The goal was to shine further light on the Holocaust and its victims -- a term that, the documentary explains, applies to a wider portion of the population than once thought.

You are like your father

Monika Hertwig is a housewife, living in Weissenberg, Germany. She calls her grandson, David, her "life." She's quiet, and hopes that David will never hold a rifle in his hands.

Growing up, she was told her father died in the war. Everyone told her that if he were alive, he'd do anything for her. He was, she was told, a wonderful man. But she remembers, quite clearly, the day her mother shattered that image.

There was a fight, and Monika, then 11, said something her mother didn't like. Her mother's response was, "You, you are like your father. And one time, you will die like him."

"I said to my grandmother, what does she mean, that I will die like Amon? My father died in the war..." Hertwig said in the film.

Her grandmother told her the truth -- that her father had been hanged for what he'd done during the war, that he had killed thousands of Jews.

"I didn't know anything about Jews," Hertwig said. "I had never seen a Jew in my life. The only one I knew was a Jew was Jesus... that Jews had lived in Germany, I didn't know."

She wanted to know what happened to the Jews, and what exactly her father had done.

Helena and Susanna

The third day that Rosenzweig was at Plaszow, she was cleaning barracks. A very tall SS man came in, she remembered, and he was the new commandant of the camp -- Goeth. He looked at her, cleaning the windows of the barracks, and said, "If a Jewish girl is smart enough to clean a window on a sunny day, she'll probably be good for me."

When Goeth asked what her name was, she told him. His response was to change it.

"He said, 'I already have one Helena (working in the house). Your name will be Susanna,'" Rosenzweig said.

The villa at the camp was built especially for Goeth, and Rosenzweig was to stay there and work. She was not allowed to go out into the camp and mingle with other people, even though some of her family, including her mother, was there.

Helena and Susanna were the first names Hertwig ever learned among the many of her father's victims. They were the two young girls that worked there as maids.

Spielberg told me the truth

In 1993, Hertwig read about the upcoming release of Spielberg's Schindler's List, and she went to see it.

"I was looking for my father," she said.

Watching the movie, she said, she didn't see him for the first half hour.

"Then, suddenly, there was a car driving through the ghetto. And I knew, from the first moment...this was my father. I knew it," Hertwig said. "I had a photo of my father. It was the same profile, just the same (as actor Ralph Fiennes). And then the shock I had when this young woman said (in the film), 'Herr Commandant, I do just my work.' And my father looked at her and said, 'Me too. I do my job, too. I kill you now.'"

When she came home from the movie theater, Hertwig was sick. "I started to hate that Spielberg," she said. "Spielberg told me the truth."

She'd seen Rosenzweig on a documentary made for German TV about Schindler's List (the list itself, not the film), and knew she was living in the U.S. She wrote her a letter.

That letter made Rosenzweig realize how important it would be -- for both of them -- to meet. They agreed to meet in Poland.

Rosenzweig's daughter, Vivian, went with her.

"I never thought I would be willing to go back to Poland," Rosenzweig said before the meeting. "But I want to go to Plaszow, and go to the villa... because maybe that will bring some closure for me."

On the plane from Germany to Poland, a visibly nervous Hertwig said there was no way she could apologize for her father's actions.
"I think at least she should know that I'm not like my father," Hertwig said in the documentary. "We can't wait for the next 60 years."

I thought about her father

As soon as she says the name "Helen" into the receiver, Hertwig is crying.

The two women are orchestrating their meeting, and Rosenzweig, in a hotel room with her daughter, is telling Hertwig that there are going to be some things they must talk about that will be difficult, things that will deal with her father.

"He's Amon," Hertwig said, immediately. "I never said 'father.' He's Amon."

When the two women finally meet, in the film, Hertwig breaks down. And when Rosenzweig tells her about all the things Goeth did, almost as if to illustrate that she is not her father, Hertwig is calmly shooing a bee away from Rosenzweig.

But she said she didn't have any sympathy for anyone else in her own position.

"The daughter of Herman Goering (Etta) was living near our house," Hertwig said. "When I saw that girl, I didn't like that girl. I thought about her father... The children are innocent, but I still see their fathers, and I can't help myself. I never would have any pity with the children of perpetrators."

But Rosenzweig told her she had a chance, a chance to show everyone that she was, in fact, not like her father. And she told her over and over that it was okay.

"I think my mom was sympathetic to Monika, but she had to limit it for her own preservation," Rosenzweig's daughter said during the documentary.

And she was right.

"I had a difficult time meeting with Monika because I felt bad for her," Rosenzweig said. "At the same time, I kept seeing him, remembering all the horrors that I experienced in the villa."

I never took them one step at a time

The three women -- Rosenzweig, her daughter, and Hertwig -- went to the villa. Rosenzweig thought it was important she go, and the image of the three walking down the road together in the film is powerful.

"Every room brings sad memories," Rosenzweig said, "but I want to face them."

The documentary follows her throughout the house, and puts those watching it in a fly-on-the-wall perspective to what's going on.

Standing in what used to be her room, Rosenzweig tells her daughter -- and Goeth's -- that when she heard footsteps upstairs, she would shudder. When she reaches the stairs, stairs she later says she was pushed down more times than she can count, she's almost sobbing.

"See the stairs? I never took them one step at a time," Rosenzweig said. "I always step like this," she said, going up two and three at once, "to be fast."

It's in the villa that Hertwig gets her answers about her mother, Ruth Kalder. At the time Rosenzweig was a prisoner, Kalder was Goeth's mistress, not yet his wife. But she was a presence.

"She didn't see anything," Hertwig said, speaking of her mother.

"Yes, she saw, she heard shots.... It was very obvious. You could see it," Rosenzweig responded.

When Hertwig begins to recount what she was told as a child, the reasons she knew for Jews being killed, Rosenzweig, shaking her head, cuts her off.

"Monika, I have to stop you right now," she said. "You can see... they were killed just simply because they were Jews...This is why people are mislead. We have to start something different. It's not true. It's bad, and it's dangerous."

"I can't explain to you what this room is to me," she said, standing in the area in front of the villa's French doors. "I was treated like a criminal."

Remember the story of Egypt?

Though he was indeed a great man, Oskar Schindler was a Nazi.

"Oskar Schindler was a very good friend of Amon Goeth because I saw them embracing each other, and Oskar Schindler used to call him ‘Moony,' which was his nickname..." Rosenzweig remembered.

But he was different. And she is not the only survivor to say so; there are pages and pages of testimony in Schindler's favor from survivors.

"He would pet my hair, (and say) 'don't worry, don't worry,'" Rosenzweig said. "And I was scared. I was scared because I said to myself, he's upstairs with them. Who is he? But there was something different about him."

Hertwig met Schindler once, with her mother, and he told her how much she resembled Goeth, clapping her on the back. She said she waited for him to tell her something about her father, but he never did.

"(Schindler) pointed one day, he said, 'See the people working there, remember the story of Egypt? They were slaves? They were freed, right? Remember, they were freed? You'll be freed, too,'" Rosenzweig said.

In 1944, Goeth was arrested on corruption charges. He left the villa calmly, with the men who came for him, and "we were in the villa not knowing what to do for days," Rosenzweig remembered.

The charges were that Goeth had stolen people's goods, embezzling money as a result of the war.

"All the SS men did it," Hertwig said. "All the SS men kept money."

After being in limbo for a while, Rosenzweig remembered the doorbell of the villa ringing.

"And who is there, but Oskar Schindler is standing on the step. And he said, 'You're coming with me,' and everything he told me came back to me," she said. "And he said, 'You'll be all right, you're coming with me to my factory.' He kept his promise."

She went to Brunnlitz, Czechoslovakia, to Schindler's factory, but while the list was being made, she didn't know it existed.

"Schindler had the list," Rosenzweig said. "I didn't know about the list."

Rosenzweig told those present at the shul for the screening that it was "impossible" for those working at the villa not to have been killed.

"We knew too much," she said. "We saw what was going on upstairs."

Rosenzweig noted that she was actually set to testify against Goeth, but she blacked out when asked about his dogs. (Goeth had two; he trained both of them to rip people apart.)

In Sept. 1946, the Polish authorities hanged Goeth. Hertwig was still a baby, but a few years ago, she saw the footage of his execution. It took them three tries to hang him.

Just silence

War crimes do not end with war. The aftermath of the Holocaust continued to affect both Rosenzweig and Hertwig, and their families.

Hertwig remembers her mother saying that she should've done more for the Jews. It wasn't something said often, but it was said. (While at Plaszow, Rosenzweig told Hertwig about an encounter that she remembered with Kalder, in the villa kitchen. Kalder told her "If I could help you, I would, but I can't.")

"She said it to me," Hertwig said.

In an interview in 1983, Kalder described Goeth as a charming man with impeccable table manners. She said that she never regretted, for one second, her relationship with him -- something that Hertwig echoed throughout the documentary.

The day after the interview, Kalder committed suicide. Hertwig was on her way to see her, and knew before she was done ringing the bell what had happened. Her mother had discussed this with her, too.

"She took the pills, and it was just nothing," she said. "Just silence."

Rosenzweig met her husband, Joseph Jonas, two days after liberation. He tried very hard, she said, to give them both a normal life.

They were married for 35 years, but Jonas could not cope with what had happened to him and to his family. He killed himself in 1980. He left Rosenzweig a letter, and in it he said he felt haunted every day.

"I miss him," she said, during the documentary. "He would be very proud of me."

Doing something for the future

For Hertwig, meeting Rosenzweig began a new chapter. She said she's teaching her grandson values that are the antithesis of what Goeth stood for.

"I'm teaching him everybody's the same," she said. "It doesn't matter what religion you believe, it doesn't matter, black or white."

"If you can't change the past," Hertwig said, "maybe you can do something for the future."

Rosenzweig is no longer in touch with Hertwig, though she does regularly ask that Rosenzweig keep in touch.

"I just can't do it," she said.

A scene was cut out of the documentary, she noted, and in it, Hertwig asks if she can help Rosenzweig find her mother's body. Her mother died while at Plaszow, but because a friend named Adam buried her and was then shot by Goeth, Rosenzweig cannot find her.

"She said, 'let me do something for you, please,'" Rosenzweig said.

Her request was simple, and it was fulfilled. She asked that Hertwig tell people in Germany what really happened. Two months after that, she got word that Hertwig was lecturing at universities.

"She is a victim," Rosenzweig said of Hertwig. "She's torn. She really can't find peace."

Rosenzweig credits God with her survival, and believes for certain that a higher power kept her safe. There were, she said, "a lot of incidents where I really played with my life." She snuck out of the villa to visit her sick mother. In Auschwitz, she carried photos of her family in her mouth to avoid losing them forever.

When a woman from the packed audience told her she had been in Auschwitz, as well as Plaszow, Rosenzweig's response was to ask, "Do you remember me?" Though there were laughs around the room, she went on to explain. Everyone, Rosenzweig said, passed the villa at some time, and she left out sandwiches and whatever spare food she could for people.

A major mitzvah

"In spite of everything, I love life," Rosenzweig said at the end of the film.

She is now a mother and a grandmother. She smiles warmly, easily, and can capture an audience easily. She's small, and it's difficult to reconcile the strength inside of her with the size of her body.

"We are very lucky people," she told those present, "and be aware of it."

When the entire room stood and applauded her, Rosenzweig nodded.

"She's amazing," said Sandy Percy, a friend of Rosenzweig's that helped bring her to Beth Ahm to speak. "She's like this all the time. Helen is a really special human being. She has a tremendous neshama -- a good soul, a good heart. She feels that God spared her, and so she feels she has this deep obligation to talk about it and to share what she knows about the Shoah."

Percy noted that the program was "a major mitzvah" -- all proceeds from the $5 per person fee were donated to Yad V'Yad, in Israel, which is Rosenzweig's charity of choice.

"I don't want to make money on this," Rosenzweig noted. "I'm doing this for my people. To remember."