Difficult Childhoods
The author illustrator, Judith Kerr, famous for the much-loved picture books The Tiger Who Came to Tea and the Mog series was born into a Jewish family in Berlin. Her family fled Germany in 1933, the year the Nazis came to power, when her father, an outspoken critic of the regime, heard he was to have his passport seized. This and other events are depicted in Kerr’s When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, part autobiography, part fiction, published in 1971 to help Kerr tell her children about her own childhood, which as young Londoners must have been alien to them. Kerr creates a character called Anna but says everything that happened to Anna really happened to her.
I started reading the book on a sleeper train from Brussels to Berlin in late November on a PhD trip to research 1930s Berlin, particularly the pogrom of November 1938, sometimes known as Kristallnacht, and Aktion T4, the state-sponsored murder of disabled people, a pre-cursor to the events of the holocaust. Kerr spoke in her novel about ‘difficult childhoods’, and I decided to read and review it to mark Holocaust Memorial Day, as well as reviewing two other novels about children affected by the treatment of Jewish people in the Second World War.
When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit is in many ways a ‘nice’ story about unpleasant events, as Anna is protected from any true threat by her parents. The most dramatic thing that happens is when they almost board a train leaving Switzerland that would have taken them back to Germany. The outcome could have been catastrophic, but Kerr applies a light touch.
‘I clearly told you the Paris train!’ said Papa, angrily looking around for the porter. But there was no sign of him. He had disappeared.
‘If we’d got on that train,’ asked Anna, ‘would we have been able to get off before it got to Germany?’
‘Possibly,’ said Papa. ‘If we’d realised it was the wrong train.’ He put an arm around her shoulders. ‘I’m certainly very glad you noticed before we ever got on it.’
I stayed in Berlin for a week visiting several archives – one at the excellent Jewish Museum – and walking the streets to imagine the bookstore setting for the novel I’m writing for my PhD. I was thrilled to find Marga Schoeller’s Bookstore that is still trading albeit not on the original site. Schoeller, nicknamed the Lioness of Kurfürstendamm, started trading in 1929 and writers, actors, academics and students gravitated to the place, forming in Schoeller’s own words, the anti-Nazi intelligentsia of the city. Books and free-thinking were famously endangered by the Nazis, but Schoeller kept a good stock of banned material in a secret cellar for her most trusted customers. I want to learn more about her and am certain a fictional version of the Lioness will claw her way into my novel.
I visited the sites of Jewish bookstores that were prevented from trading by the Nazis in the 1930s. Many have stolpersteines outside (10 cm square concrete blocks set into the pavement outside the last known residences of victims of the Nazis. The names and fate of each individual are engraved into a brass plate on top of each stone). All too often their journeys ended in a concentration camp. The next stage of my journey led me to the former camp and now permanent memorial at Sachsenhausen.
A place like this should have a profound effect on anyone who visits, and I humbly took my place among the many schoolchildren to learn what happened there. During my stay in the area, I read John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, an account of the terrible events of Auschwitz as seen through the eyes of a child. Bruno is the youngest son of the Auschwitz camp commandant and befriends a boy prisoner called Shmuel. The book has been criticised recently for focussing the story on the perpetrators point of view, who of course had all the power, and for not giving much voice or agency to the victims. However, I do think it is a thought-provoking read and at the very least a conversation starter for young people. I’d encourage anyone to read it and make up their own minds. Here is a small taster.
Every day Bruno asked Shmuel whether he would be allowed to crawl underneath the wire so that they could play together on the other side of the fence, but every day Shmuel said no, it wasn’t a good idea.
‘I don’t know why you’re so anxious to come across here anyway,’ said Shmuel. ‘It’s not very nice.’
‘You haven’t tried living in my house,’ said Bruno. ‘For one thing it doesn’t have five floors, only three. How can anyone live in so small a place as that?’ He’d forgotten Shmuel’s story about the eleven people all living in the same room together before they had come…’
The final stop in my journey was to visit Pirna-Sonnenstein, a hospital used as a killing centre to facilitate the murder of mainly disabled people as part of Aktion T4. To walk alone on a bleak December Sunday afternoon, following the path into the basement of those who were murdered there was sobering to say the least. The hospital was procured by a business after the war and the gas chamber used as a storeroom. Thankfully, it has now been restored as a permanent memorial to those who were killed.
The final book I’ve chosen to review is the story of a Jewish girl who certainly wrestles the narrative back from the perpetrators. Matt Killeen’s Orphan Monster Spy tells the story of Sarah, a fifteen-year-old Jewish girl, small for her age, who becomes an orphan in the opening pages. Armed with only her wits and the acting skills learned from her late mother, circumstances allow Sarah to be recruited by a British spy and to enter the jaws of the beast when she infiltrates a school for children of the Nazi elite.
In the company of the memorial’s knowledgeable and generous research assistant Hagen Markwardt, I toured the grounds of Pirna-Sonnenstein and was told how a similar school to the fictional Rothenstadt once stood on the grounds adjacent to the hospital. Though Orphan Monster Spy doesn’t feature the events of Aktion T4, the book’s final scenes show how the Nazi’s viewed disabled people. Personally, I think this is a fantastic story but do be prepared to go to some dark places. This story like some of Sarah’s teachers pulls no punches. Here she stands up to one of worst of them, who is bullying her friend.
The clothes of a prisoner at Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp in Oranienburg, where more than 200,000 people deemed as inferior by the Nazis were interned between 1936 and 1945.
Everyone froze. The room went silent except for the whimpers of the Mouse. Sarah was standing in the aisle next to her desk, hands at her sides.
‘What did you say?’ gasped the teacher, her face red.
‘Enough. She doesn’t know. She isn’t going to know, so LEAVE. HER. ALONE.’
The clock ticked.
‘How dare you⎯’
Throughout my research trip the three children’s books anchored me in the past and helped me to see the Holocaust through the eyes of a child. 27 January is Holocaust Memorial Day and if you would like to mark it with literature I recommend one of the three I discussed.
Resources
Booklist:
Judith Kerr’s When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit
John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas,
Matt Killeen’s Orphan Monster Spy
For more information and resources about the Holocaust visit the Holocaust memorial day trust website visit page,
The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust encourages remembrance in a world scarred by prejudice and systematic, targeted persecution. We promote and support Holocaust Memorial Day – the international day on 27 January. The Holocaust is central to Holocaust Memorial Day and we remember the 6 million Jews murdered during the Holocaust. They also commemorate the millions more people murdered through the Nazi persecution of other groups and in the more recent genocides.
Selected images from Steve’s research trip
About the Author
Steve Katon is a post graduate researcher funded by Midlands4Cities with Nottingham Trent University as his home institution. He is studying the underrepresentation of disability in children’s literature.