Gitta Sereny
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| Gitta Sereny | |
|---|---|
| Born | Vienna, Austria |
| Occupation | Writer, journalist |
| Language | English |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| Subjects | The Holocaust, child abuse, society |
| Notable work(s) | The Case of Mary Bell: A Portrait of a Child Who Murdered (1972) Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth (1995) |
| Notable award(s) | James Tait Black Memorial Prize (1995), CBE |
| Spouse(s) | Don Honeyman |
| Relative(s) | Ludwig von Mises (stepfather) |
Gitta Sereny (born 13 March 1921) is an Austrian-born biographer, historian and investigative journalist whose writing focuses mainly on the Holocaust and child abuse. She is the stepdaughter of the economist Ludwig von Mises.[1]
She married Don Honeyman in 1948 and moved to London where they raised their two children. Don Honeyman (who died 1st June 2011) was a photographer, who worked for, among others, Vogue, the Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Times. The poster of Che Guevara on a red background [2] (1968) is one of his most famous creations.
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[edit] Biography
Sereny was born in Vienna, Austria in 1921. Her father was a Hungarian Protestant aristocrat, Ferdinand Serény, and her mother was a former actress from Hamburg, Margit Herzfeld, of German origin.[3]
When she was thirteen, her train journey to a boarding school in the United Kingdom was delayed in Nuremberg where she attended one of the annual Nuremberg rallies. After writing about the rally for a class assignment she was given Mein Kampf to read by her teacher so she might be able to understand what she saw there. After the Nazi takeover of Austria in 1938, she moved to France where she worked with refugee children during the German occupation until she was warned of her imminent arrest. She then fled to the United States.
After World War II, she worked for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration with refugees in Allied-occupied Germany. Among her tasks was reuniting children—who had been kidnapped by the Nazis to be raised as "Aryans" -- with their biological families.[4] This could be a traumatic experience because the children did not always remember their original family, but she also accompanied a train-load of such children back to Poland and saw the delight of the original family members at the restoration of the children.[4]
She attended the Nuremberg Trials for four days in 1945 as an observer and it was here that she first saw Albert Speer about whom she would later write the book Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth. It was for this book that she was awarded the 1995 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. The book was also later adapted by David Edgar as the play Albert Speer and directed by Trevor Nunn at the National Theatre in 2000.[5]
From the mid-sixties and throughout the 1970s she wrote extensively for The Daily Telegraph Magazine under the editorship of John Anstey. These articles were often about young people, the social services, children and their relationships with their parents and society. This led to her covering the trial of eleven year old Mary Bell and would further lead to her first investigative book:
[edit] The Case of Mary Bell
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The Case of Mary Bell was first published in 1972 following Mary Bell's trial; in it Sereny interviewed her family, friends and the professionals involved in looking after Mary during her trial. This book was edited by Diana Athill who would also edit Sereny's Into That Darkness.
[edit] Into That Darkness
This book (also following an initial article for the Telegraph magazine) was an examination of the guilt of Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Treblinka and Sobibor extermination camps. She spent 60 hours interviewing him in prison for the article and when she had finished he finally admitted his guilt; he died of a heart attack 18 hours later.
[edit] Cries Unheard
In 1998, she was embroiled in a controversy in the British press when her second book on Mary Bell, Cries Unheard [2] was published and she announced that she was sharing the publishing fee, from MacMillan Publishers, with Mary Bell for collaborating on the book. Sereny was initially criticized in the British press and by the British government, though the book quickly became, and remains, a standard text for professionals working with problem children.
[edit] The German Trauma (UK)/The Healing Wound (US): Experiences and Reflections, Germany, 1938-2001
"The nineteen chapters in this book, all intimately concerned with Germany before, during and since the end of the Third Rech, describe more or less sequentially what I saw and learned from 1938 to 1999, thus almost over a lifetime."[6]
[edit] David Irving libel case
British historian and Holocaust denier David Irving initiated a libel case against Sereny and the Guardian Media Group for two reviews in The Observer where she asserted he deliberately falsified the historical record in an attempt to rehabilitate the Nazis. Irving maintains a personal animosity for Sereny, whom he calls "that shriveled Nazi hunter", for successfully refuting his claims since the publication of his book Hitler's War. When, in 1977, Sereny cross-checked the source he cited for his assertion that Hitler knew nothing about the Final Solution, and therefore could not have ordered it, she found he had excised a caveat which would have contradicted his claim. "I know many of the same people as he does who were of Hitler's circle," Sereny said. "That is scary for him. He says we jostle at the same trough. The difference is that he loves that trough, and I don't... There is, I think, [for him] despair in all of this." Although the case did not go to court, the cost to The Observer for preparing their legal defense amounted to £800,000.[7]
[edit] Honours
In the 2004 New Years Honours List, Sereny was awarded a CBE for services to journalism, which she received at a special ceremony at the Foreign Office.
[edit] Bibliography
Educated in England and France in addition to her Austrian schooling, her writings include:
- The Case of Mary Bell: A Portrait of a Child Who Murdered (1972, second edition [3] 1995)
- Into That Darkness: from Mercy Killing to Mass Murder, a study of Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka (1974, second edition 1995)
- The Invisible Children: Child Prostitution in America, West Germany and Great Britain (1984)
- Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth (1995, 1996 paperback)
- Cries Unheard: The Story of Mary Bell (1998)
- The German Trauma: Experiences and Reflections, 1938-2001 (2002) [8]
The second edition of The Case of Mary Bell contains an appendix on the murder of James Bulger.
[edit] References
- ^ The legacy of Ludwig Von Mises by Peter J. Boettke, Peter T. Leeson, p. xiv
- ^ [1]
- ^ Biography of Margit von Mises by Murray N. Rothbard
- ^ a b Lynn H. Nicholas, Cruel World: The Children of Europe in the Nazi Web p 511 ISBN 0-679-77663-X
- ^ http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/1245/productions/albert-speer.html
- ^ The German Trauma pp xi Introduction by Gitta Sereny
- ^ Tim Adams (24 February, 2002). "Memories are made of this". The Observer. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/feb/24/historybooks.features. Retrieved 28 September, 2010.
- ^ ISBN 039332382X, 9780393323825
