When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit: Fifty years of the classic family story of escape and refuge (Essential Modern Classics) Kindle Edition

I teach gifted fourth grade readers and writers. We study bias with an emphasis on the Holocaust as a topic. I included this book as a choice for my students to read. When one of the students read it, she finished it in less than a week and brought it back hugging it to her heart, her eyes glowing..."Can I check it out again??" My other students took one look at her expression and reached eagerly for it. "I guess not yet!" I replied. What more do you need for a recommendation of a history book?

When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit was written by Judith Kerr. This story begins in Berlin and takes us to Switzerland and then to Paris. It begins in about 1933 and ends in 1936. In her story, Anna keeps the reader aware of what is going on in the rest of the world so the reader can put what is happening to them into the story interpret there. Anna is approximately 9 in the story. She is on her way home with her friend for lunch. They stop in to purchase crayons and overhear a conversation about Hitler. Although she doesn’t know who Hitler is, she does feel uneasy.Anna’s Father is a writer who writes against the policies Hitler. He is being watched by the SS and knows he must be careful. He learned the SS is going to take his passport away, he leaves Berlin for Switzerland. Mrs. Kerr and the children stay to pack up the house. Their Christian servant, Heimpi, will put their things in storage and send them to the family later. They leave on Saturday and the SS comes to get their passports on Sunday. What a miracle.After a time in Switzerland, Father decides that they should check about going to England. He thinks he can get a better job the. He suggests he go to England for a month to find a job and house then send for his family. Mother objects saying she will go with him to pick out the house this time. The children stay with the people who run the inn. They all manage to survive the separation but it is hard on all of them. Anna vows the family won’t be separated again.The book is good although it is a little dry. It does give us a look at one family trying to find a safe place during Hitler’s rise to power!

This is a good story for Middle Schoolers when discussing Hitler and the its effect on families living in Germany. It tells through the eyes of a 9 yr. old child, the moving into a new country with new customs and languages. It is "simply" written and easily understood. it is not graphic in its harshness of the time.

I am considerably older than a middle schooler and, despite a lifetime of reading books for both the young and the mature, had never encountered “When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit” before. It’s a sweet, moving, surprisingly realistic and understated little memoir, and well written to boot.What a relief to read a Holocaust-era autobiography that’s not sunk under the weight of atrocities or buried under special effects. The reader feels Anna’s frustrations, her sorrows, and above all her hopes. The book is also quirky and even funny, as when a mob of lunkish Swiss schoolboys tries to express their love for assertive Anna by throwing rocks at her.I came to this book after reading Judith Kerr’s obituary and realizing I’d missed out on the work of a truly formidable children’s book author. Kerr’s determination, talent, and humane view of life shine in “Pink Rabbit.” But I don’t know if I have the fortitude to read about where life takes her estimable cat hero, Mog. All along, Anna/Judith never shrank from life the way it is.

Engrossing.as withAnna all the way. It brought back memorie s of my post war childhood. I was nine in 1950 living in Heidelberg and going into the 1st grade. I sympathized with the characters even though I was not their religion. T he book should be a recommended class

I never write reviews but this book was so fantastic I couldn't put it down. I bought it for a child who is about to study WW2 and thought this would be a nice addition to regular school work. It skimmed the gruesome bits of WW2 and told more about the escape as a family and what they went through. I loved the book and bought the sequel. For both adults and kids my guess would be middle school and above.

This book is the perfect primer for teaching children the truth about Hitler's evil ideology. As a homeschool mom, I was looking for a way to tackle the subject with my tenderhearted kids, and this was perfect. As we read, they asked questions about Hitler, the Nazi party, and refugees. I answered all of them and included the topics of antisemitism and the holocaust as we went along. We're starting the second book in the series next. I'm so grateful to have found this book.

With a story line in the beginning of World War Two, the author was able to write about the terror and shock of those times from a child's perspective. To learn that this was her childhood tells me that she has very real talent

My nine-year-old daughter has started becoming aware of the atrocities of World War Two, so I have read this aloud to her at bedtime. It is the memoir of the author's own childhood, when as a nine-year-old she had to flee Germany with her family in 1933 because her famous writer father had been satirising the Nazis, and the family were also ancestorally Jewish. This is the first part of a trilogy, and takes events up to when Anna, the title character, is twelve.Anna had been enjoying an upper-middle-class life in Berlin, and is an engaging, intelligent and artistically talented child. A policeman tips off her father that the family have to leave the country, and they manage to do so literally twenty four hours before the Nazis arrive at the house. For the next three years they are refugees ("Mummy, what's a refugee?"), wandering through Switzerland, then Paris, and finally to England. Money is very tight; they can no longer afford servants so Anna's mother has to learn how to cook and sew; Anna's father struggles to sell his writing and almost dies of shame when Anna is offered charity; and Anna has to go to a school where she is the only child who cannot speak French. Little snippets of what is happening in Germany arrive via visiting adults, but on the whole, Anna doesn't hear much about that. For most of the book she regards the whole experience as a glorious adventure, and her parents help her find the humour in life - for example, her father's mock complaint that Hitler is offering such a low reward for his capture.If this was just a children's novel, it would be a classic. Because it is also true, it had quite an impact on my daughter, who kept wanting to know what happened next, and did the entire family survive? (I haven't read the next two books, so I don't know.) It is beautifully written; it focuses very much on what a child wants to know (there are plenty of descriptions of cakes and drawing supplies and the subjects Anna studied at school), and every chapter finishes on a little note of tension, making it an exciting story in its own right. Reading age 8+ years.

After hearing a Holocaust survivor, Eve Kugler, speak at a Holocaust memorial day event in my department last week, I read this book, aimed at older children but really for readers of all ages, which is a fictionalised account of the author's own childhood experiences in Germany in the early 1930s. Her father, journalist Alfred Kerr was a prominent Jewish journalist and critic of the Nazis in Berlin. Warned of a plan to take away his passport, he was able to smuggle his wife and children to Switzerland on the very day of the election in March 1933 where the Nazis became the biggest single party (though, despite being emboldened by Hitler's appointment as Chancellor and brutal intimidation against their opponents, without achieving an overall majority). The family, here fictionalised as the Papa and Mama of Anna (Judith) and her brother Max, later move to France when Switzerland's neutral state is compromised by Nazi pressure. After nearly getting sent by a porter onto the wrong train, bound for Stuttgart, the family settles in Paris and makes a decent life there, though suffering some hardship as Anna's father tries to get work. After a couple of years they move to London. Told from Anna's point of view (she turns ten shortly after they arrive in Switzerland), the story shows how she views her life as a child refugee, punctuated by the odd incident of anti-Semitic behaviour, though thankfully it never gets worse for her than bad words and rejection by some non-Jewish families. The author continues to live in this country, now in her 90s still illustrating children's books (and there is a bilingual English-German school in south London named after her).

I suspected this was an important omission from my knowledge of children’s literature, and I wasn’t wrong. It is a truly wonderful book. Judith Kerr (best known for the Mog stories and The Tiger Who Came To Tea) was nine when her parents fled Germany in 1933, shielding their two children from full knowledge of what they were running from. Judith’s journalist father, an outspoken critic of Hitler, was high on the Nazi hit-list when they came to power, and the family left only hours before their passports would have been confiscated. This is a brilliant child’s-eye-view account of their nail-biting escape, their village life in Switzerland, their impoverished refugee existence in Paris (where the two children became fluent French speakers) and their final arrival in England. Judith (Ann Frank’s contemporary) died in London in May 2019, aged 95. Highly recommended for adult readers as well as children.

When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit is based on the life of Judith Kerr during her and her family's time in Germany. Although the book is based on Judith's childhood the characters are not named the same. Judith has changed the names of the characters. Anna's father is a journalist in Germany and he has left his homeland in the dead of night. Anna does not know why. Anna has been told she cannot tell anyone. She has to tell people her father is sick and he has the flu. Then on the eve of Hitler's election Anna, her brother Max and their mother leave secretly to go to Switzerland. The book continues the story of Anna and where her family are taken too in order to survive. Making their way across Europe in order to survive.It is during their time in Switzerland that Anna becomes aware of the dangers she has left. She has to learn a new language and learn to fit into a new society and community without making it known she is Jewish. As seen in the above quote there is the stereotypical view of Jewish people and the view which has been influenced through propaganda and the media. Anna's friend Elsbeth does not believe she is Jewish because "she doesn't have a bent nose". It is this that I struggle to comprehend when it comes to this part of history. I can understand how people who are young and impressionable and those who were scared could share the opinion that Jewish people were evil but that leaves a large proportion of the country who were convinced that Jewish people were to play for the demise of Germany.I found the book easy to read and that with Judith not referring to herself it was easier to read as it distanced my feelings from Judith. For her to write a book depicting the persecution her family were subjected to and for her to be able to write it with such grace and conviction when the story is about herself this is something she should be very proud of that.I would definitely recommend reading this book to other people and I look forward to reading the other books in the series Bombs on Aunt Dainty and A Small Person Far Away which I am sure I will in time. I really look forward to finding out what happens in the rest of Judith's/Anna's life.Rating: 8/1010-Word-Review: An insightful look into the life of a war-torn child.

If Judith Kerr's father hadn't been so far sighted, as she states, it would have been too late. She and her brother would have died in a Nazi concentration camp like the million and a half perhaps more other Jewish children. Her parents too would have been murdered. Instead, fleeing Germany in 1933 and becoming refugees, we have this account, the first in a trilogy of her adventures. We are so lucky to have this wonderful book as well as other famous books she has written. It is a great children 's book that will be loved by children and adults alike. Warm, funny, delightfully told through a child's eyes. I don't know why it has taken me so many years to pick up and read. I had certainly heard of it. I am so glad I did.