Author
and journalist Gitta Sereny
has
been peering into the glass darkly of evil
for decades, writes Sarah
Lyall. Sereny
is being sued
by author David
Irving
in libel in the British High
Court
| Murder, She
Wrote IN THREE DECADES of studying guilt,
responsibility and the nature of evil through the
twin obsessions of her professional life, Nazis and
child criminals, Gitta Sereny has been
accused of growing too close to her subjects, of
becoming not only a confessor, but also an
apologist. When she wrote Into That
Darkness (Random House, 1983), a rigorous
examination of the unspeakable crimes of Franz
Stangl, the fearsome commandant of the
Treblinka death camp and one of Nazism's cruellest
practitioners, a critic demanded to know how she
could have, as she described in the book, made soup
for the ailing Stangl on the last day she spent
with him. ("I had to ask myself whether there was
something morally wrong with what I had done,"
Sereny says now. "But it was a pragmatic thing: I
needed him for another day.")  And
when she published Albert
Speer: His Battle With Truth (Knopf, 1995),
the result of a 16-year project that delved deep
into the conscience of [Albert]
Speer, Hitler's
brilliant, urbane architect and one of his closest
confidants, Sereny daringly revealed in her first
sentence that she "grew to like" her subject.
Albert
Speer (Photo:
by Walter Frentz, from Hitler's
War) But the great accomplishment of the book served
to quell all but the most carping criticism:
Sereny, through her relentless questioning and
amassing of evidence, finally forced Speer to admit
what he had been concealing even from himself: that
he had known and tacitly consented to Hitler's
"final solution". Nothing in her journalistic
career, however, prepared the formidable Sereny,
now 76, for the uproar that greeted her in Britain
last spring. when she published her most recent
book, Cries Unheard.
The book is about Mary Bell, who became one
of Britain's most notorious criminals in 1968 when,
barely 11, she murdered two young boys and then
appeared, at least to a horrified nation that
followed the news of her case, to show no
remorse. With her customary habit of becoming immersed in
her subject, Sereny spoke to Bell over a period of
months, sometimes for as long as 10 hours a day, in
an effort to understand what drove her to commit
her crimes. But this time, Sereny's involvement in
her subject went even further, and she grew to like
Bell and to believe that the convicted killer had
redeemed herself. Reaction in Britain was swift and condemnatory,
particularly when it emerged that Sereny had paid
Bell for her co-operation. Fury and moral outrage
greeted Sereny's conclusion that Mary Bell had not
been morally responsible for her crimes because of
her age and because she had suffered abuse as a
young girl. The British tabloids referred to Bell's
"blood money" and "depraved story". "I think Gitta Sereny is confused when it comes
to issues of moral blame," Andrew O'Hagen,
author of The Missing,
an account of violence and murder in Britain, told
The Guardian, criticising the way she "found it
easy to enter into complicity with Mary Bell in her
more self-redeeming aspects". | As in Sereny's other work,
Cries Unheard wrestles
with the idea of guilt, evil and the possibility of
redemption in a civilised society. It also speaks
to the fraught, sometimes mutually exploitative
relationship between subject and biographer, a
relationship whose implications Sereny said she
fully understood from the start. Speaking in her book-filled London apartment
recently, Sereny remained resolute in her
conviction that she was right to produce the book
and research it the way she had. "What they don't
understand is that if you do what I do, you have to
develop a relationship," she said. "There is no
other way. Your relationship is always at a
distance, of course. But it's not possible to spend
weeks or months with someone and not develop a
relationship." Cries Unheard
examines the Mary Bell murders in excruciating
detail and is not, Sereny says, intended to justify
what Bell did. But the book dwells at length on
Bell's time in prison at the mercy of a system that
Sereny says is woefully inadequate for child
criminals. It also provides a wrenching chronicle of her
childhood: Bell was abandoned by her father and
unloved by her mother, a prostitute who tried to
murder her on a number of occasions and who forced
her to perform sex acts with her customers. Through her work with Mary Bell, who is now
living somewhere in the north of England under a
new name and with her 14-year-old daughter, Sereny
became convinced there was no such thing as an evil
child. That notion, she says, puts her in conflict
with what seems to be the conventional wisdom in
Britain, where Mary Bell and the two young boys who
killed three-year-old Jamie Bulger in
another notorious case several years ago, are seen
as the embodiment of wickedness. "Behind their reaction is the idea of the Devil,
the idea of evil." she says of her critics. "There
is this belief that the evil person is evil,
period. There's no rehabilitation, no redemption.
This is a Christian nation, but the Christianity
stops short of redemption." Sereny's examination of these issues is
pertinent now, as the US grapples with a rash of
horrific murders by children. In the most recent
case, two boys, aged seven and eight, have been
accused of sexually assaulting and killing an
11-year-old girl in Chicago, raising calls for them
to be tried as adults. Sereny disagrees. "I think 14 is a fair age to
make a child morally responsible, because there's
been a moral growth," she says. "Children at 10,
nine and eight are not morally grown. Why should
they be, any more than intellectually or
physically?" Bell's daughter, a straight-A student who seems
untouched by the chain of hatred and violence that
so affected her mother, is living proof that
redemption is possible, Sereny says. "Mary Bell has
broken the cycle by her own character, her own
strength. Instead of being demonised, she should be
celebrated for what she has accomplished." Even after a career spent facing down the
perpetrators of evil, Sereny does not believe that
people are evil, except perhaps in exceptional
cases like those of Hitler or Fred and Rosemary
West, the notorious British child-killers who
tortured and sexually assaulted their victims. But
those sorts of people are rare, she says, and hold
no interest for her. "I am a great believer in people's capacity to
change, to find themselves, to understand if they
have done something terribly bad," Sereny says.
That, she says, is partly why she had sympathy for
Speer, who was consumed by guilt and tried to
redeem himself by relentlessly examining his own
soul. "I grew to like him when I realised he really
wanted to find out the truth for himself," she
says. "That is very likeable, when the truth is so
terrible." | Sereny's own search for the truth has lasted
almost all her life. She was born in Vienna, read
Mein Kampf as a
teenager and, though not Jewish, began to recognise
the horrors of Nazis, as she saw Jews beginning to
disappear from her neighborhood. She was in Paris,
studying at the Sorbonne, when France fell to the
Nazis, and she left school and began working as a
nurse at a camp for abandoned children. When her
anti-Nazi work made it impossible for her to
remain, she left Europe, returning after the war as
a United Nations child welfare officer, working
with children who had been in concentration
camps. "People are made by the circumstances of their
lives, and what I am involved in comes out of the
war," she says. Sereny began to work as a journalist, and gained
a reputation as a dogged investigator who would not
stop until she wrestled her subject into
submission. About 20 years later, living in London
with her husband, Don Honeyman, a
photographer, she was sent by The Daily Telegraph
magazine to cover the war-crimes trials of former
Nazis in Düsseldorf, Hamburg and other German
cities. On and off for six months, Ms. Sereny sat
and listened as witness after witness described the
indescribable. And as the stories began to come
alive, the truth became in a way more elusive. "All of them -- the accused and the witnesses --
had two things in common," she said. "None of them
wanted to be there, and they had all seen or done
things no human being should ever see or do. The
blocking of these experiences and these feelings,
and the guilt at what they had felt or seen or
done, was so strong." "What you didn't get was themselves," she says.
"You got their descriptions of what happened, but
you didn't get themselves, because it was
unfaceable. None of them could speak out about what
they had felt and what it had done to them inside
themselves, I kept thinking, 'Why isn't anyone
asking these questions?"' Sereny decided that she would ask the questions,
looking at individual guilt as a way to examine
society's collective culpability. That is why she
studied every available document and spoke to every
available acquaintance and colleague about Speer,
building up to the point where she confronted him
with the biggest paradox of his life: that although
he was in Hitler's inner circle during the worst
excesses of the Third Reich, he professed to know
nothing about the systematic extermination of the
Jews. And that is why, after covering the trial of
Mary Bell in 1968 (she wrote an earlier book about
it, called The Case of Mary Bell), Sereny waited
almost 30 years for the chance to meet Bell face to
face and question her until she was satisfied with
the explanations. "In all these things, what I want
to find out is what that makes them capable of
doing what they do, or incapable of doing what they
didn't do," she says. Referring again to the Second World War, she
says: "Like all of my generation across the Western
world, whether Jews or Christians, we have been
deeply affected by what the Germans did. It was the
worst kind of inhumanity, such an enormous wrong,
and we were all in my generation part of it.
Because of it, humanity lost something. We lost a
moral part of ourselves, and somehow we must regain
this part. Maybe my way of regaining it is by doing
what I'm doing." This article was published
by The New York Times, The Age (Melbourne) and
other newspapers around the world© NEW YORK
TIMES |
|
write
to David Irving