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A review by firstwords
My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family's Nazi Past by Nikola Sellmair, Jennifer Teege
3.0
2.5 stars.
The co-author (the subject of the book, there was a second author that helped) is the granddaughter of the Nazi Commandant of the Plaszow concentration camp depicted in Schindler's List. The Commandant was play by Ralph Fiennes. That was her grandfather. Suffice it to say he was a horrible human being on virtually all counts. This woman has to deal with the past (she being the daughter of the Commandant's daughter and a Nigerian man), to confront and possibly accept both her grandfather's role, as well as the family's explanation of it (He was a good man! A good father! Your mom was horrible! Your mom was great!).
So why 2.5 stars? Editing. The book jumps chronologically, which is fine. However chronological jumps in a biography/non-fiction should still follow a narrative. You're talking about your children, then jump back in time to talk about how your mother cared for you as a child. That's fine. The mind gets what you're doing. You're talking about children, then jump back in time to talk about the amount of hair that the Russians found when they liberated Auschwitz (a different camp, no less). That does not work. The book was translated from German to English, which adds another layer, as the translation, I think, caused the story to lose some of the passion. It comes across in parts as dry, actually reading more like a Nazi accounting than a narrative. Maybe the Germans are just that dry in books, I don't know. But yeah. Editing.
The interesting story of someone of both African and European descent dealing with a concentration camp-running grandfather should have you glued to the page. Instead, in many places I simply did not care. That's bad. The writing is mediocre, the editing, inexcusable.
The co-author (the subject of the book, there was a second author that helped) is the granddaughter of the Nazi Commandant of the Plaszow concentration camp depicted in Schindler's List. The Commandant was play by Ralph Fiennes. That was her grandfather. Suffice it to say he was a horrible human being on virtually all counts. This woman has to deal with the past (she being the daughter of the Commandant's daughter and a Nigerian man), to confront and possibly accept both her grandfather's role, as well as the family's explanation of it (He was a good man! A good father! Your mom was horrible! Your mom was great!).
So why 2.5 stars? Editing. The book jumps chronologically, which is fine. However chronological jumps in a biography/non-fiction should still follow a narrative. You're talking about your children, then jump back in time to talk about how your mother cared for you as a child. That's fine. The mind gets what you're doing. You're talking about children, then jump back in time to talk about the amount of hair that the Russians found when they liberated Auschwitz (a different camp, no less). That does not work. The book was translated from German to English, which adds another layer, as the translation, I think, caused the story to lose some of the passion. It comes across in parts as dry, actually reading more like a Nazi accounting than a narrative. Maybe the Germans are just that dry in books, I don't know. But yeah. Editing.
The interesting story of someone of both African and European descent dealing with a concentration camp-running grandfather should have you glued to the page. Instead, in many places I simply did not care. That's bad. The writing is mediocre, the editing, inexcusable.