Needless to say, I was completely bowled over by her vitality. Certainly her pre-war experiences, as detailed, seem far too various for someone who would only have been in their mid- teens. I think it conceivable that she may be at least six years older than she admits. Like a hawk I regarded every particle of what she said for competing evidence of her chronology. Sereny's were almost unlined and not remotely gnarled - the hands of a woman in her early forties. I looked intently at her hands always - allegedly - the feature which gives a real lie to someone's age. I stress that there was nothing affected, creepy or ostentatious about this: it is obviously the way they are together. They've been married for 51 years, but have the air about them of a couple in the first flush of a relationship. When her husband, Don, came to say hello before I left, the two of them embraced in a wholly natural and unembarrassed fashion. There was nothing intrusive about this - she's a warm and tactile person. She made coffee daintily and efficiently, and when we were seated in the main room - she on the sofa, me in an adjacent easy chair - she continually darted forward to touch my arm or knee when she wanted to emphasise a point. Small and plump, she danced around the spick and span space like someone in their early twenties. Just how old is Sereny? Older than her claimed 76 years? Or far younger? I kept wondering for the three hours we were together. It is a face that has been decorated with laughter and baked with experience, before being irradiated by time. In contrast, Sereny's face could reasonably be described as a wedding cake left out in the sun. Ken Tynan described Auden's face as resembling "a wedding cake left out in the rain", and this captures perfectly the odd cohabitation in the poet's visage of intense feeling and soft living. The door was wrenched open and there she was. I took the lift up to the second floor of the comfortable and elegant block of Sixties flats and before I'd touched the buzzer I could hear a loud, Central European-accented voice from within, unguarded and laughing. Eventually, in the late Fifties, after spells in Paris and New York, they settled in London and have remained there ever since. She met the American photographer Don Honeyman in the late Forties and married him. After the war she tried to help the children who came out of the concentration camps. (Her father died when she was two years old.) Educated in England, she spent the Second World War in France working with child refugees from occupied Europe. A scion of Hungarian landowners, Sereny was born in Vienna, the daughter of a beautiful, capricious and charming actress. She has written books on Franz Stangl, the commander of the Sobibor extermination camp Albert Speer, Hitler's architect child prostitution and, most notoriously, two accounts of the life and crimes of Mary Bell, who in 1968 when she was 11 years old killed two small boys on Tyneside in 1968. ![]() Gitta Sereny, some would say, has spent her life steeped in violence. ![]() ![]() At one point during the three hours we spent together, I referred to "us" - who did I mean? Society? Me and her? The whole world? - as being "between nail bombs", a ghastly piece of accidental prophecy, as another nail bomb was to go off in Soho the following evening. Three days previously a prominent television presenter had been murdered a mile or so away from there two days before that a nail bomb had exploded in London's East End and two days before that two teenage boys had gone on a killing spree at their high school in Colorado. On the morning I arrived to speak to Gitta Sereny at her flat near Olympia I'd just dropped my two older children at their schools in Hammersmith. THE AUGURIES for our encounter were upsetting and yet oddly propitious.
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