30/04/2026
She had two stuffed animals in her Berlin bedroom on the morning of March 4, 1933.
One was an old pink rabbit she had slept with since she was tiny. Its fur was rubbed bald in places.
The other was a new woolly dog. She had not had it very long.
Her mother came in and told her she could take one. They were going on a holiday, her mother said. Only one.
Judith Kerr, who was nine years old, chose the dog.
She never saw the rabbit again.
Thirty-eight years later, as a middle-aged woman in London, she wrote a children's book about what had happened to her family. She called it When Hi**er Stole Pink Rabbit.
It is still assigned in British and German schools in 2026.
Her father was Alfred Kerr, probably the most famous theater critic in the German-speaking world. He was Jewish. For years, he had been using his influential columns and his radio broadcasts to publicly mock Adolf Hi**er.
When the N***s placed a price on his head, he laughed.
He said the amount was insulting, Judith remembered later. He said he felt they should have offered more.
Her mother, Julia, was a pianist and composer. Her older brother Michael was eleven.
On the evening of March 3, 1933 — two days before the election in which everyone already knew the N***s were going to take power — Alfred got a phone call from a friend. A sympathetic police official was warning him that if the N***s won on Sunday, a team would be sent to his home on Monday morning to confiscate his passport and arrest him.
Alfred packed a small bag that night and got on the last train to Prague.
His wife and children would follow the next day.
Early on March 4, Julia woke the children.
They were told they were going on a short holiday to Switzerland to be with Papa. They could each take one small suitcase. They could each take one stuffed animal.
Judith, age nine, looked at her bed. She reasoned, as a child would reason, that she would only be gone a few weeks. She chose the one she had not yet spent enough time with.
She left the pink rabbit on the pillow.
They boarded the train at the Anhalter Bahnhof and crossed into Switzerland that same day.
The next morning, the Gestapo came to the Kerr house in Berlin to arrest Alfred. He was already gone.
A few weeks later, on May 10, 1933, Alfred Kerr's books were piled onto a bonfire in front of the Berlin Opera House and burned in one of the most infamous N**i book burnings.
Alfred, in Prague, heard about it on the radio.
The family was now refugees.
They moved from Switzerland to Paris, and from Paris, eventually, to London, which they reached in 1936. Judith was twelve. She had had to learn French, and then English, inside of three years. She had lost all her friends. She had lost her bedroom. She had lost her native country.
She had lost the rabbit.
She later said that she thought about it a great deal, especially at night. She thought about the N**i soldiers who had searched her family's house, and what they must have done with the pink rabbit when they found it.
Judith went to art school in London. During the war, she volunteered with the British Red Cross, treating wounded soldiers. After the war she became an illustrator. She married a BBC screenwriter named Nigel Kneale in 1954.
In 1968, she wrote a small picture book for children called The Tiger Who Came to Tea. It is about a tiger who rings the doorbell of a small English house and eats everything in the kitchen.
It has not been out of print since. British schoolchildren grow up with it.
Then, in 1971, her 8-year-old son Matthew saw the film The Sound of Music and turned to his mother and said:
Now we know what it was like when Mummy was a little girl.
She wanted her son to know what it had actually been like.
Not songs in the Alps. Not a waltz in a ballroom. A small suitcase. A woolly dog. An empty pillow on a bed in Berlin. A train, a border, a father already gone.
She sat down and wrote a book called When Hi**er Stole Pink Rabbit.
It won the German Youth Literature Prize in 1974. It became one of the most-read books in British and German schools.
In 2012, at the age of 88, Queen Elizabeth II awarded her the OBE for her services to children's literature and to Holocaust education.
The following year, a new bilingual primary school opened in south London. It is called the Judith Kerr Primary School.
Judith Kerr died in her house in Barnes, London, on May 22, 2019. She was 95.
In the book, Anna — the nine-year-old girl Judith is thinly disguised as — asks her father, years into the family's exile, a question.
Do you think we'll ever really belong anywhere?
Not the way people belong who have lived in one place all their lives, Papa answers. But we'll belong a little in lots of places, and I think that may be just as good.
