- Gitta Sereny was born on March 13, 1921 in Vienna, Austria. She is known for Channel 4 News (1982), The Tramp and the Dictator (2002) and Reputations (1994). She was married to Don Honeyman. She died on June 14, 2012 in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, UK.
- SpouseDon Honeyman(1948 - 2011) (his death, 2 children)
- Heavily accented English.
- Historian and author who specialized in Nazi Germany and Nazi criminals.
- Sereny had Jewish heritage and was the daughter of a Hungarian father and a German mother. Her father died in 1923. She was raised by her mother, an actress. She studied in England and then in Vienna, Austria, at the drama school founded by Max Reinhardt. In 1938, when Nazi Germany annexed Austria, she was physically removed from the drama school by fellow students wearing swastika armbands. Sereny had to leave for France, where she became a volunteer nurse for displaced children from German occupation. She later immigrated to the USA. When Sereny returned to Europe after the war in 1945, she claimed to be a Catholic. Later, she continued to publicly deny her Jewish heritage, probably because of security reasons and out of fear of prejudice.
- After World War II, she returned to Europe as a welfare officer with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration trying to reunite child survivors of Dachau Concentration Camp with their families.
- She married her husband, Donald Honeymoon (a Vogue photographer) in 1948. She is survived by their daughter, Mandy Honeymoon; a son, Chris Honeymoon; two grandchildren; and a great-grandchild.
- In Düsseldorf, Germany, Sereny attended the trial of Franz Stangl, the commander of two extermination camps - Sobibor and Treblinka - where he supervised the mass murder of more than 1,250,000 Jews. Sereny persuaded him to give her a series of interviews for a biography. According to her, on the last day she interviewed Stabgl, his last words were "In reality, I share the guilt". He died on the next day.
- I am so ashamed. When I was young I wanted to be younger and so shaved two years off my age. Still, I'm not close to getting a telegram from the Queen just yet. [2006]
- I know this is difficult to believe, but I'm really, in the old sense of the word, quite a gay person. I'm very optimistic. About the world. About people. I believe the majority of people are good.
- [on paying child murderer Mary Bell £50,000 for collaborating on her book] If I hadn't done so. I would have made myself guilty of doing what was done to her virtually since she was born - to use her.
- [on Martin Gray's "For Those I Loved"] When I myself told Gray that he has manifestly never been to, nor escaped from Treblinka, he finally asked despairingly: "But what does it matter? Wasn't the only thing that Treblinka did happen, that it should be written about and that some Jews should be shown to be heroic?" Every falsification, every error, every slick re-write job is an advantage to the Neo-Nazis. [from her article "The Men Who Whitewash Hitler", 1979]
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