I knew I wanted to read History for eight years before university. My degree has since shown me what I love about my degree and what I don’t. Sometimes, I feel I have fallen out of love with my degree. Now I would say I have fallen back in love with it, thanks to the book that made me love it in the first place: When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit by Judith Kerr. I vividly remember my Year Six teacher handing me the book and asking that I read it, and it retains its impression on me a decade later. Before re-reading it, I had hazy memories about the exact details of the book. Now, nearly ten years later, I re-read Kerr’s work. I wanted to return to the story that prompted me to read History at Edinburgh.
The book focuses on a family, daughter Anna and son Max, and their parents, Papa and Mama. They are a Jewish family living in 1930s Berlin, just before the election of Hitler and the Nazi party. Before the election, Papa decides to flee Germany as he is a journalist not favoured by the Nazis. He planned that if the Nazis won the election, the rest of the family would join him in Switzerland. If they lost, he would return home. The day before the election, the family decided to join him in Switzerland for safety. The day after it, the Nazis came for their passports.
I never remember being sad reading this book as a child. Re-reading it as a twenty-year-old, despite knowing the ending, the opposite happened. When the family arrives in Switzerland, there is a harrowing moment where Papa temporarily can’t see them on the platform. He says to the family that this terrified him. When I first read this, I knew nothing of the extent of the Nazis’ reign of terror, concentration camps, or the Holocaust. Re-reading the book after studying this period has presented it in a different light.
At the start, Anna is nine years old and turns ten as a refugee in Switzerland. There is something so innocent about Anna’s perspective of the war. When a “price is placed on her dad’s head”, she pictures coins falling on his head until he gets buried beneath them. Kerr’s work allows us to see how children view the war, which can make for deeply upsetting reading. Even the book’s title, referencing a pink child’s toy, hints at the child’s perspective and how wildly different the world seems from a younger view.
Remarkably, this is based on Judith Kerr’s own life. Kerr was just nine when her family fled from Germany. When Hitler won, the police came to their house to arrest them. Like Anna, Kerr spent time in both Paris and London. Her father was a scriptwriter; this was how they managed to make money. Knowing this allowed me to read the book through the lens of Kerr’s life, hearing Kerr’s thoughts when she was a refugee.
Despite When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit’s undeniable tragedy, re-reading it took me back to being an eleven-year-old learning about the Second World War for the first time. This made me see why I fell in love with History in the first place: the opportunity to learn about different people’s lives and experiences. Judith Kerr gave me that opportunity all over again.
Image “Judith Kerr – Cambridge 2015” by Chris Boland / www.chrisboland.com is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.