![]() ![]() Genuinely harrowing and illuminating, anybody who hopes ever to attempt an understanding of how the Holocaust happened really has to be acquainted with the book. Into That Darkness: from mercy killing to mass murder, about the Kommandant of Treblinka, Franz Stangl, is not only Sereny’s masterpiece, but one of the finest books I know. The first is to mention another book of Sereny’s which will outlive all this. These are arguments that will be picked over again. The Church of England is on the brink of a crisis But against this can be put not only the minimal likelihood of anybody taking from this an idea that Bell’s path was one to follow, but the not inconsiderable fact that the result is one of the most penetrating books ever written on a criminal. On the one hand, by paying for her co-operation, Sereny could be said to have helped Bell (by then an adult who had served her time in prison) profit from her crime. I suppose the rights and wrongs can never be settled. That book, her second book on Bell, still rankles with many people. The second critical item on the charge-sheet was that Sereny paid money to the murderer Mary Bell for her cooperation on the book Cries Unheard: the story of Mary Bell (1998). But the resulting book remains a masterpiece, and even Speer’s caginess on certain subjects is more revealing in Sereny’s work than in others. It is also true that some revelations that have come out since her book was published in 1995 (and doubtless more still to come) suggest more complicity and guilt on Speer’s part than either he acknowledged or Sereny knew. It is true that Sereny got close to Speer and liked him. ![]() ![]() It is probably on the basis of her biography of Albert Speer that most of the criticism has come. The claim was, essentially, that Sereny grew too uncomfortably close to her subjects and even ended up on occasions sympathising with them or excusing them. Though this was a dissenting view, there was a more general seam of criticism which ran through many obituaries. One piece even tried to blame her for a current cultural tendency to claim people are not responsible for their own actions. The death of the author and journalist Gitta Sereny earlier this month drew some strangely critical notices. ![]()
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