My girlfriend of the time tried to borrow a copy of Sereny’s book from the local Public Library and was virtually compelled to sign over her soul before a copy was released to her – apparently dozens of copies of the book had been issued and had promptly been stolen from libraries across Tyneside in the years since its publication. When I lived in Newcastle in the 1980’s the city was still scarred by the case and Bell’s name would be mentioned in hushed tones. Sereny’s initial book about the trial and its aftermath was published as ‘The Case of Mary Bell’ in 1972. Penn Street, Scotswood in 1957, the year Mary Bell was born. Sereny’s attempts to understand Mary Bell’s behaviour in the context of her own traumatic childhood have not always played well with the British media who at the time of Bell’s trial had her pigeonholed as a manipulative figure of ‘pure evil’, as though this was some naturally occurring phenomenon rather than the product of Bell’s own experiences with her psychotic mother. Like the late Myra Hindley, Bell has usually been demonised by the British tabloid press as a figure of pure evil. Sereny’s notoriety in the UK stems from the two books she has published about Mary Bell, the Tyneside girl who was responsible for the murder of two young boys in the Scotswood area of Newcastle in 1968. Sereny attended the Nuremburg War Trials as a journalist where she first encountered the Nazi armaments minister, Albert Speer, who would form the subject of one of her later books. After spending most of World War 2 in the USA, she returned to Europe after the war, working for the United Nations in Germany on a programme designed to reunite children (some of whom had been kidnapped by the Nazis as potential ‘Aryan’ breeding stock) with their biological families, even though many of the children could not recall their original families. All of this merely reflects her own personal history as a teenager travelling to boarding school in the UK from Austria, her train was delayed in Nuremburg and she ended up attending one of Hitler’s Nazi rallies there. She has written a number of high-profile biographies of some of the most morally compromised personalities of our times and specialises in books on Nazi Germany and abused children. Gitta Sereny is an Austrian-born writer who is now in her late 80’s.
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