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The German Trauma: Experiences and Reflections
1938-2001 THE TIMES The girl is 11 years old.
One day in 1934, she is travelling from her boarding school in Kent back to her
home in Vienna when her train breaks down in Nuremberg. The German Red Cross,
perhaps thinking to entertain her, finds her a seat at the Nazi Party Congress,
and she is swept away by its fearsome pageantry: when she returns to school she
writes an essay, �The happiest day of my holiday�, describing it. Four years
later, one night in a Viennese park in March, 1938, she hears her best friend
Elfie reveal that her father is a member of the Nazi Party � which had been
illegal � that he says Austria will be �disinfected� of Jews, while all around
them in the dark she hears shouts: Germany awake! Jewry perish! Later, she
stands beneath the balcony of the Imperial Hotel and hears Hitler speak. Later
still, she sees the paediatrician who saved her life made to scrub the pavements
with a toothbrush. Yet it would be some time before that girl, Gitta Sereny,
rejected what she had seen.
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