Judith Kerr's 'Out of the Hitler Time' Trilogy

Judith Kerr was born in Germany in the 1920s. In 1933, when Hitler came to power, her father just managed to escape the country before being arrested by the Nazis. They didn’t like his opinions. Or the fact that he was Jewish. Not long afterwards, before the Hitler government revoked their passports, Judith and her brother and mother also slipped out of the country.

This is the start of three semi-autobiographical novels, in which we see World War II through the eyes of a child. The first two volumes read like children’s books, by which I mean that there’s a simplicity about their style and content. The reader’s nose isn’t rubbed in the grisly details of war and poverty and suffering. (It is not The Painted Bird.) They capture precisely the way that a crisis for adults is often just a memorable, sometimes even exciting, background for children. But there also are moments when real fear and anxiety poke through.

Racing to catch a connecting train, Anna only realises at the last moment that the one they’ve chosen is heading in the wrong direction. Back to Germany. In Switzerland, games they’re playing with German children are stopped when the German parents realise Anna and her brother are Jews. In London, in the second book, there’s a vivid description of taking shelter in a cramped cellar during a bombing raid in the Blitz. You can feel the fear and claustrophobia as the bombs pound down, coming ever closer.

Things change in the third volume when Anna, ten years after the war, returns to Germany to visit her mother in hospital. It’s no longer a children’s story. It can’t be; Anna is grown up and married. She’s dealing with adult problems. And yet, as she talks to her mother and her brother, and as she visits the old Berlin where she spent the first years of her life, there’s a sense of a circle closing. There’s an understanding and acceptance of how life develops and goes on in ways we can’t foresee. It’s the child truly becoming an adult.

My granddaughter started reading the first volume and was hooked from the first page. No surprise really: she’s the same age as Anna in that book. I think she’d stay hooked all the way through to the end of the second, too. But I wonder about the third. As easy to read as its companions, I think she’d need an adult’s perspective to really appreciate it.It's going to be interesting to see what happens.