Memorial Page for Gitta Sereny

Gitta Sereny (born 13 March 1921 in Vienna; died 14 June 2012 in Cambridge, England) was an Austrian-British writer, historian and investigative journalist. She became known above all for long, deeply researched work on Nazi crimes, responsibility and serious acts of violence committed by children.

Childhood and a changing Europe

Sereny grew up in Vienna and for periods in Britain. Her father's death, the political upheavals in Austria and the experience of National Socialism shaped her youth. In 1934 she witnessed the Nuremberg Rally while travelling; later she described how strongly the spectacle impressed her at the time and how that view changed through the reality of persecution.

War, flight and relief work

After Austria's annexation, Sereny left Vienna with her mother. She lived in Switzerland, France and later the United States. After the Second World War she returned to Europe and worked for the UN relief agency UNRRA with children who had been liberated from camps or separated from their families. This work connected personal experience with a subject that occupied her throughout her life: how people act under violence, ideology and guilt.

Journalism as questioning

Sereny wrote for newspapers and magazines in Britain, Europe and the United States. Her work relied less on quick judgement than on long conversations, files and persistent questioning. She wanted to understand how responsibility is formed, denied or claimed. For that reason her work also remained controversial: closeness to interview subjects could yield insight, but it could also bring accusations that perpetrators were being given too much space.

Stangl, Speer and guilt

With Into That Darkness, published in 1974, Sereny presented her interviews and research on Franz Stangl, the former commandant of Treblinka. Later she worked for years on Albert Speer and published Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth in 1995. In both cases her purpose was not to relativise crimes. She examined how self-justification, memory and knowledge of guilt are connected.

Mary Bell and public criticism

Another focus was the case of Mary Bell, who had been convicted as a child after the deaths of two younger children. Sereny first wrote about the trial and returned to the case decades later. Her book Cries Unheard caused intense debate, including over her collaboration with Bell. Sereny defended her approach as an attempt to understand causes of violence without excusing the act.

Recognition and death

Sereny received honours including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction and the Stig Dagerman Prize. In 2003 she was appointed an honorary CBE for services to journalism. She died in Cambridge on 14 June 2012. Her work remains linked with a difficult but important form of questioning: how do people speak about guilt when they themselves were involved?