Daughter of Evil

Thank God evil is not hereditary, even evil perpetrated by those who commanded the Third Reich’s death camps. Inheritance, which airs on PBS on December 10 and is directed by Academy Award winner James Moll, proves this point with its intimate documentation of a meeting between Monika Hertwig, daughter of Amon Leopold Goeth, SS commandant of the Nazi concentration camp at Plaszów, Poland, and Helen Jonas-Rosenzweig, a Jewish woman who was forced to be Goeth’s servant in the camp and was saved by Oskar Schindler.

Hertwig is now a housewife in her early sixties living in the small German town of Wiessenberg with her husband and grandson. As a child, she was told that her father died for his country and she never found reason to question that version of his death until one day her mother said in anger, “You are like your father and you will die like him.” She pressed her grandmother, Agnes Kalder, for an explanation. “Monika, they hanged him,” she said. “He killed the Jews.” (Goeth was executed as a war criminal when Hertwig was one year old.)

In 1993, Hertwig watched Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. Ralph Fiennes played the role of her father, and for the first time, she fully understood the breadth of the atrocities committed at Goeth’s hands. Horrified, she then learned of Jonas-Rosenzweig in a documentary about Schindler survivors. “I liked her just from seeing her,” she says in English, her voice wavering. “I always wanted to meet Helen, so I wrote a letter to her.”

Jonas-Rosenzweig, now elderly and living in New York, came to Goeth’s attention while cleaning barracks at Plaszów. “He said, ‘If a Jewish girl is smart enough to clean a window on a sunny day, she will probably be good for me,’” she remembers. “He lived like a king and had his mistress with him and his two slaves, and unfortunately I was one of them.”

After receiving Hertwig’s letter, Jonas-Rosenzweig traveled to Poland with her daughter Vivian Delman to meet Hertwig at the Plaszów camp. “I never thought I would be willing to go back to Poland,” says Jonas-Rosenzweig, as the cameras follow her slow movements. “But I thought maybe I can go to the villa and it will bring some closure to me.” Hertwig nervously smokes as Jonas-Rosenzweig, tears in her eyes, nears. “He is Amon,” Hertwig tells her. “I never said ‘father.’ He is Amon.”

“As a mother, I understand that children somehow suffer because of their parents’ backgrounds,” says Jonas-Rosenzweig, who soon recovers her stoicism. “I am the one who can tell her a lot about him because I lived under his roof.”

Moll’s documentary makes the viewer feel intrusive observing Jonas-Rosenzweig as her reserve turns to anger. Memories of Goeth’s brutality overtake her calm as she takes Hertwig through the house where she served him. Shaken and crying, Jonas-Rosenzweig remembers Schindler and contrasts him to Goeth, a vicious man who trained his dogs to rip people apart. She recalls how Schindler spoke to her of the people of Egypt, saying one day she, like them, would be free. And then one day, “He said ‘You’re coming with me.’ Everything he said about being free came back to me. We were sent to his factory. He kept his promise.”

Two days after liberation, Jonas-Rosenzweig met her first husband, Joseph Jonas. “He tried very hard to live a normal life but he was troubled,” she explains toward the end of the film. “He would write his father’s name over and over again, ‘Solomon, Solomon.’ In 1980, [Jonas] took his life.”

Hertwig’s mother also committed suicide after saying to her daughter, “I didn’t do enough for the Jews.” Hertwig, for her part, speaks of suffering and says it’s fair that the children of perpetrators should suffer. Clearly she is tormented by the actions of a father she never knew.

“I am teaching my grandson, David, it doesn’t matter what religion you are or if you are black or white,” she says, pushing him on a swing.

In New York, Jonas-Rosenzweig has found a renewed peace. “In spite of everything, I love life. I think I was spared for a reason,” she says. Perhaps, one of the reasons was to meet Monika Hertwig and discover that evil is not passed from parent to child, and that absolutely nothing can extinguish the human heart.—Karin Tanabe