I couldn’t let this occasion pass without celebrating the life and work of author and journalist Gitta Sereny, who died earlier this month aged 91. In an era distinguished by the ersatz she was that rarest of things, the real deal, a giant among pygmies.
I couldn’t let this occasion pass without celebrating the life and work of author and journalist Gitta Sereny, who died earlier this month aged 91. In an era distinguished by the ersatz she was that rarest of things, the real deal, a giant among pygmies.
Her books on Mary Bell, the child murderer, Franz Stangl, commander of the Treblinka death camp, and Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and war minister, are landmark studies which will never be surpassed. But they go beyond even this to transcend questions of genre and history: put simply, they are books without which it would be impossible to fully examine the tortured moral landscape of the 20th Century, or indeed of the human soul.
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