Hay Festival archive: Gitta Sereny At the Hay Festival in 1998, the Austrain-born historian and journalist Gitta Sereny spoke to the legendary interviewer and psychiatrist Anthony Clare. Sereny's life story was extraordinary: she had attended a Nuremberg rally as a child, escaped to France to work with orphans during the war, then had to flee when her connections to the French Resistance became known. After the war, she attended the Nuremberg Trials, where she first encountered the subject of her 1995 biographical masterpiece, Albert Speer. In the UK, she championed many children's causes through her journalism, and wrote a famous book about Mary Bell, a child murderer of another child. At the time of this interview, Sereny was fighting a libel suit brought against her by the Holocaust denier David Irving, which she went on to win. She had also just published her second, controversial, book about Mary Bell, Cries Unheard. Her book about Albert Speer would later be adapted by David Edgar into a play, directed at the National Theatre by Trevor Nunn. She died in June 2012, almost exactly four years after this conversation took place.