Into the Darkness (Darkness #1)

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Decades later, biographer Gitta Sereny interviewed Stangl and challenged him to describe his life and crimes in his own words. And after 60 hours of interviews spanning several sessions, the previously resolute Stangl finally broke down. The strain of describing the horrors he facilitated proved too much for him. "In reality I share the guilt" he finally admitted. "Because my guilt... my guilt... only now in these talks... now that I have talked about it all for the first time." He even went so far as to say "I should have died, that was my guilt." Sereny does not stop there. Extermination camp, uprising. Inevitably she adds interviews with survivors of Sobibor. Add to that the fact that Stangl worked for the T4 program and that he made it to Brazil thanks to some help of a certain Roman cardinal and the whole book evolves into a razor-sharp mythbuster of the entire Holocaust and the adjunct "Odessa" escape network. Spoiler alert: you had to make your own Odessa, mostly. And apparently you can be recruited into T4 without the slightest inkling of what it entails. Perhaps the definition of a worthy book about the Holocaust is that it leaves you asking more questions than it answers. That, ultimately, it is unsatisfactory. Satisfaction, after all, allows one to move on.

Into the Darkness’ Review: Making Excuses for Collaboration ‘Into the Darkness’ Review: Making Excuses for Collaboration

Her yellow raincoat flapped in the cool breeze when she walked by, that blonde hair making her look like a drowned rat as she stopped to taste the rain. The author directs her efforts at investigating the personality of Franz Stangl with whom she spoke in Düsseldorf prison where he was awaiting the result of his appeal against a life sentence. Within minutes, the sound of sirens filled the hall as police cars from the nearby police station filled the front forecourt in response to the day manager‘s call. So began the so-called investigation into the sudden death of a young woman called Phoebe Handsjuk. Barbara Michaels was a pen name of Barbara Mertz. She also wrote as Elizabeth Peters, as well as under her own name. A questo proposito, Sereny mette a confronto i racconti e i ricordi di Richard Glazer, ebreo cèco, sopravvissuto a Treblinka, proprio con quelli del personaggio principale del suo studio: i primi lucidi, dettagliati, privi di retorica, elaborati, pregnanti – l’altro, invece, si contraddice, cambia versione, indora la pillola, a se stesso e all’ascoltatrice.

Into the Darkness

I've read countless books about the Holocaust and recently I started to question what my fascination is with the subject. I came to the conclusion that it's the psychology of what leads a country towards genocide and the mentality that enables individuals to carry out such terrible crimes against humanity. Whilst undoubtedly some individuals were sadistic what is apparent in so many books that I've read is how un extraordinary most of the perpetrators were, it's this aspect that I find the most disturbing. Gitta attributed her fascination with evil to her own experiences of Nazism as a child of central Europe in the early 20th century. Hers was not a happy childhood. 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. 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. Sasha has been different her whole life. She sees things in the shadows that no one else can see. But it isn’t until a mishap on the wrong side of town that she meets him. When I started Into the Dark i was very aware of every triggers and I knew that there wouldn’t have been an HEA. Both MC completely flawed with traumatic pasts and mental illness. These two belonged together. Each one understands the other and with no judgment. As much as I love both characters, Him’s was something else, to get into his head as to why and talking to his demon.

Into the Darkness | Book | Scribe US Into the Darkness | Book | Scribe US

Although it unmasks the liars, killers and torturers responsible for Tazmamart, it refuses to dwell on them. Although it is told in the first person, it is not an autobiography. Although it is technically a novel, it is a novel stripped, like its subject, of all life's comforts. Nella storia di Franz Stangl si vede come una persona normale, all'interno di un certo contesto, possa ritrovarsi a osservar compiersi il male assoluto sotto i suoi occhi senza muovere un dito, nell'indifferenza e poi nell'apatia. Sereny fördjupar sig i Stangls snedvridna verklighetsuppfattning, förnekande attityd och uppbyggda fasad och skalar av lager efter lager för att slutligen avslöja den innersta kärnan. Var i processen han slutligen tappade fotfästet om verkligheten och sin egen moral. Var i processen han upphörde att vara människa. Hon kartlägger och ställer olika vittnesskildringar mot varandra. Likt ett fotografi i mörkrummet framträder de skuggor av minnen som utgör en bild av vad som en gång var. Små småningom blir skuggorna allt djupare, konturerna allt tydligare, kontrasterna allt skarpare och den gåtfulla mannen i centrum allt mer levande. Gestalten formas snart till en mänsklig varelse. Eller till ett monster. Stangl jämför Treblinka med Dantes inferno, som ”att stiga ner i en avgrund där orden förlorar sin mening”. Inte förrän det sista samtalet bryter sanningen igenom den före detta kommendantens illusion och han inser vem han var i helvetets avgrund. Sereny fångar bilden och med den fångar hon läsaren. There is something about Gitta Sereny's writing that reminds me of sitting down with my mother, who also lived through the war as a (slightly younger) woman. She brings an immediacy, almost first-hand account to the retelling of these terrible tales, probably because she interviewed her subjects first hand.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. These favourable impressions of the Nazis survived both a reading of Mein Kampf and the 1938 Anschluss, when Hitler annexed a quiescent Austria. The grim realities of Nazism, however, soon began to affect her life in Vienna where she was, by then, a drama student.