Her father, Gyula, died when she was a child her elder brother left home at 18 and disappeared from her life Gitta herself was sent to Stonar House boarding school in Sandwich, Kent, an experience she remembered with some affection. She was born in Vienna, the daughter of a beautiful Austrian actress, whom she later described as "without moral opinions", and a wealthy Hungarian landowner. Gitta attributed her fascination with evil to her own experiences of Nazism as a child of central Europe in the early 20th century. She passed away in England aged 91, following a long illness. Gitta Sereny was an Austrian born journalist, biographer and historian. She writes about individuals, many of whom she came to know well, who were deeply involved in the events of the period - among others, Franz Stangl, the Commandant of Treblinka, John Demjanjuk, the alleged Ivan the Terrible, Leni Riefenstahl, Francois Genoud, a Swiss man who loved Hitler, and of course Albert Speer. The Healing Wound gathers together the best of Sereny's writings about Germany over fifty years, exploring the guilt, denials, and deceptions that, in many different ways, the Nazis created. When Sereny became a writer, the Nazi period and its lasting impact on Germany not surprisingly became one of her main themes. After the war she worked in Displaced Persons camps for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) in occupied Germany. In 1940, she was studying in Paris when the Blitzkrieg overran the Allied army she became a nurse in a chateau on the Loire in occupied France, looking after abandoned children, until 1942 when, warned that she was about to be arrested, she escaped across the Pyrenees.
Sereny first encountered the Nazis in 1934, at the age of eleven, when by chance she was taken to a Nuremberg rally, and again four years later when she was in Vienna during the Anschluss. In this memoir spanning more than fifty years, Gitta Sereny confronts Germany's troubled past, investigating the dark moments in the country's history as well as chronicling how her life has been repeatedly linked with that nation's history.
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