![]() Don, who died last year, was to prove a good humoured and profoundly supportive companion who accompanied Gitta through the long and painstaking research that became a hallmark of her work. It was in postwar Paris, in 1948, that she met and married the photographer Don Honeyman, with whom she was to have a son and a daughter. The framework of what was to be her life's work – the exploration of childhood trauma and the nature of evil – was in place. She returned to Paris four months after the war ended, to join the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, working with orphans in a ravaged Europe. Gitta, eventually, was also obliged to flee, first across the Pyrenees to Spain, then to the US. Never accommodating to her mother's plans, she promptly absconded, first to London then to Paris. In Switzerland, Gitta was sent to a finishing school. Margit promptly fled to Switzerland with her daughter. Von Mises had left Austria for Switzerland, but a German friend tipped Margit off that the authorities planned to arrest her to oblige him to return. She later described seeing a Jewish doctor she knew well being forced to clean pavements with a toothbrush the terror became more personal after her mother, Margit, with whom Gitta had a poor relationship, became engaged to Ludwig von Mises, the Jewish economist. ![]() The grim realities of Nazism, however, soon began to affect her life in Vienna where she was, by then, a drama student. ![]() These favourable impressions of the Nazis survived both a reading of Mein Kampf and the 1938 Anschluss, when Hitler annexed a quiescent Austria. In 1934, while changing trains in Nuremberg on a journey home from school, she witnessed the Nuremberg Rally and was profoundly moved by the beauty of the spectacle, joining in the crowd's ecstatic cheering. 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. ![]()
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