The Healing Wound: Experiences and Reflections, Germany, 1938-2001

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.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 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. After the war she worked in Displaced Persons camps for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) in occupied Germany.When Sereny became a writer, the Nazi period and its lasting impact on Germany not surprisingly became one of her main themes. 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. 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.