In the end, this is not a matter on which Ms Sereny or any outsider can help much.

ECONOMIST: German history

"Sales were completely stalled there until December, " says Bryan Sereny, a broker with Miami-based Zilbert International Realty who has sold several apartments there.

WSJ: Empires of the Sun��WSJ Mansion

For 30 years Mary Bell kept silent until she spoke out to Gitta Sereny, a journalist and author who had covered her trial.

ECONOMIST: The silence of the lambs | The

These, as Ms Sereny says, were not all Jews.

ECONOMIST: German history

Notable is Ms Sereny's account of her sustained interviewing of Franz Stangl, who had been commandant of the extermination camp at Treblinka, after a German court had sentenced him to life imprisonment.

ECONOMIST: German history

It was all 50 or 60 years ago, and Ms Sereny's further concern in this book is with the struggle of later generations of Germans to digest what happened, to accommodate themselves to their history.

ECONOMIST: German history

At this man Ms Sereny probed away, searching for the process by which a dull, provincial Austrian policeman had become the murderer of perhaps a million persons, driven as she always is by her insatiable need to know.

ECONOMIST: German history