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(More customer reviews)Monika is the real-life daughter of Amon Goth, the infamous commandant of the Plaszow concentration camp and a main subject of the "Schindler's List." Monika, a tall, rangy and emotionally fragile woman, has spent a lifetime coming to terms with the monster who was her father. In his film, she arranges to meet Helen Jonas-Rosenzweig, who along with her own mother was employed as a cook by Goth at Plaszow. The women hope for a cathartic encounter that will purge them of their shame and horror.
Oddly, Monika comes off as the more sympathetic of the two women. Her emotions are raw, unhealed and close to the surface. Helen has lived for years with the effects of the cruelty experienced and witnessed at the camp, and her story is smoother for frequent repetition. Both women clearly are victims, and both bear the scars and shame of the past. I felt viscerally how passing through the Holocaust changed lives forever, despite the passage of decades. And I saw how the evil of the fathers is visited on future generations.
The film is generally easy to watch, with many Goth family photos interspersed with photos of Jews being herded onto tricks or marched off to work. An exception is a graphic filmed execution, which though bloodless, is affecting. Such such footage is rarely seen on sanitized American television.
The subtext of "Inheritance" is a meditation on the question of evil. How could the serene and sensitive Monika have been sired by one of the twentieth century's more brutal villains? Her story shows that biology need NOT be destiny. What remains unanswered at the end of the documentary is the question of how Goth's soul became so twisted. Fans of the movie will be interested to see how well Steven Spielberg rendered the Goth villa, Schindler's factory and other landmarks.
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Inheritance is the story of Monika Hertwig, a soft-spoken woman grappling with a profound legacy left to her by a father she never really knew.Monika's father was Amon Goeth.Often described as a monster and inhuman, Amon Goeth was the prominent Nazi leader and commandant of the Plaszow Concentration Camp. Utterly ruthless and sadistic, he murdered thousands of Jews and others during the war.When Schindler's List opened in 1993, Monika watched Ralph Fiennes' chilling portrayal of Amon Goeth. She found this depiction of her father so disturbing that she left the theater more than once.The fact that this man was her father is a brutal reality that Monika didn't know anything about until her teen years. It is a fact that Monika still cannot reconcile. Feeling an aching need to come to terms with this legacy of evil, Monika reaches out to Helen Jonas-Rosenzweig, a survivor of the Holocaust. Helen lived enslaved under Goeth's roof, serving as both his maid and prey for nearly two years.Sixty years after Amon Goeth's arrest and the liberation of Plaszow, Monika and Helen meet for the first time at what was once Goeth's luxurious villa overlooking the concentration camp. It s a brutally honest, gut-wrenching and emotional meeting that brings both closure and new questions for these women.
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