Hitler, the Tiger and Me imagine...

Come on then, Puss, come on.

Come on, then.

AIR RAID SIREN

CHILD SCREAMS

-It's come to see you.

-Oh, hello, hello then. It is the other one.

They take it in turns.

Judith Kerr is one of our best loved children's writers and illustrators.

She was born in Berlin,

but had to flee with her family from the Nazis when she was nine.

The dangers she has been through in life lie under

the surface of her fiction.

Yet she creates a warm, safe world we can all respond to.

She has just turned 90 and has published a memoir, Creatures.

She is being feted in Britain where she has lived all her adult life.

She is one of the great writers of children's literature,

and not just in this country but throughout the world.

She is a remarkable lady who has had the most remarkable life.

And in that life, which has not been easy,

she has produced the most extraordinary range of books.

Please, welcome the wonderful Judith Kerr!

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

# Happy birthday to you

# Happy birthday to you

# Happy birthday dear Judith

# Happy birthday to you! #

She is totally unique.

Her writing and her books are her absolute life.

She is absolutely devoted to it.

And she writes during the morning, then she has a little break

for lunch, and I think a little sip of Martini,

because she says it gives her a bit of sugar,

and then she finishes like early evening and that is her regime.

And she sticks to it.

And she does an evening walk all the way around Barnes.

It is over an hour's walk and there she is striding along, fantastic.

Toadstools.

She is always walking down to the shops much faster than I ever do,

rushing past us. I say, "Judith, hang on a minute."

"Oh, OK," and she slows down and you have a chat.

And we talk about all sorts of lovely things.

She was our children's favourite authoress.

All the Mog books, The Tiger Who Came To Tea,

we've read vigorously, and excitedly every night,

so she's very much part of our lives.

We don't know that whole hinterland that Judith has.

It was a nightmarish time that she came from.

But this is a wonderful resource for children's writer.

At these publishing dos, she is always the person

I want to talk to

because she is the most fun person there, usually.

She is so much in the present. She is not living in the past.

She has an immediate reaction to things.

That's what makes her feel like such an optimistic person.

She is kind of squeezing every ounce out of the day.

Hey, Judith, are you trying to have a race?

-You steam up those stairs every morning...

-Yes.

-..at a pace.

-Yes.

Is this is where you've worked for 50 years, more or less?

40-odd years, yes.

When we first moved here, I was looking after the children

when they were small, so I couldn't work then.

But, yes, I love this room.

Everything I've done, I've done on this thing.

I don't know what would happen if I had to work anywhere else.

I don't know if I could.

What are you working on now?

I thought of doing this book,

much of which takes place in a sort of jungle, and I thought, because

I am not good at trees and things, and I thought I can't do that.

But then I thought, Rousseau, if I look at Rousseau,

-if I think of Rousseau, I might be able to do it.

-Jungles in cities.

Yes, he is a wonderful man.

-And Chagall.

-The fantasy?

Yes, there is a lot of flying in Chagall, couples and animals flying.

Yes, that is Chagall.

I mean, it is not Chagall, God knows, it is not Chagall,

but he has lovers floating.

It just seemed the right thing for this book.

"They think I am sitting in this chair just waiting for my tea.

"In fact, I'm flying through the air with Henry holding me.

"My Henry died and went to heaven, but now he's got his wings.

"They let him out from 4 till 7, and we do all sorts of things."

JUDITH CHUCKLES

I mean, this is the great thing about doing a book like this,

is that you don't have a plot.

You can just pick something that amuses you and do it,

and particularly if it rhymes.

"It's things we've never tried before, they are the greatest fun,

"like riding on a dinosaur which I had never done."

You see an old lady sitting there and you think, that's

just an old lady, and she has got all that going on inside her,

because she has had a life, which may have been very ordinary.

It should have been very ordinary, but it was marvellous to her.

'Judith's husband, known as Tom,

'the writer Nigel Kneale, died seven years ago.'

Like everything else you have written, in a way,

all your books are kind of autobiographical, all of them.

And My Henry, of course,

is about this afterlife you are living with Tom.

Yes, I didn't mean particularly with Tom, I just meant any very

happily married couple.

I know so many widows and on the whole,

the people who have been happiest,

in some ways find it almost easier because one has had all that.

It makes one stronger, I think.

There's a picture there of, I take it, your father and mother,

-and you and your brother Michael.

-Yes, yes.

That must have been in Berlin?

It was in Berlin and I had just inherited my brother's tricycle,

which was iron, as they were in those days, very, very heavy.

I found that for the first time I could turn corners in it.

And so when they said, come and have this photograph taken, I thought

now, I must look like somebody who can turn corners on a tricycle.

And that the expression of somebody who can go round

corners on a tricycle!

You are still the child, aren't you,

somehow one feels that you are still inside that child's head.

I don't know. I don't know.

I feel much the same as I did then.

I wanted to draw things and look at things

and thought the world was very beautiful.

Which I do more than ever now, because one does when one is old.

Judith's life's work is stored at this archive in Newcastle,

the National Centre for Children's Books.

They are holding a retrospective of Judith's life and work.

German snakes and ladders. It's fantastic!

Before the War, her father was a leading Jewish intellectual

in Berlin, and her mother, 30 years his junior, was a composer.

Judith has written a string of books based upon their experiences.

These are drawings Judith did in Germany,

before she left aged just nine.

Now this one is the big city of Berlin, tram and cars.

I remember doing this.

I remember drawing this lady there with a newspaper

and I've put "BT" because that was my father's paper that he

wrote for, Berliner Tageblatt.

There are some quite good back views of people, with fur collars,

on their coats, and she's got a parcel.

That's pure sort of '20s getup.

I don't seem to have been able to draw noses, side view.

They seem to have very little in the way of noses.

But the sort of movement is all right.

And here, you see, this one, I think we'd been to some kind of fair.

I think that must be a stall where you could win things,

because there seems to be a toy lamb hung up.

Oh, yes, and there's somebody shooting at a target.

My brother and I were each given, I think it was a bit of paper,

which meant we could go on everything free. And it was unbelievable.

And then we lost it and we thought the world was over,

everything was finished, but they just gave us another one!

As a child, you always have worries

and secret things that you think about.

I remember very clearly drawing these children on the slide and

I drew this one, who is sliding, you know, as you do with your feet front,

and another one on his stomach, and then there had to be a third one

and I knew it had to be different

and I remember thinking about it very hard,

and then coming up with the idea of her having knees bent

and hair flying out behind and it totally worked.

I remember being terribly pleased.

One doesn't really change in these matters, I don't think.

This is a good one, actually, I remember being obsessed with

trying to draw children and people going in a circle.

The difficulty is always the child at the edge,

the ones at the front of the circle, you have back views, and the ones at

the back you have front views,

but the ones at the side are of sort of tricky.

A girl here who is sort of tilting slightly

as though she's really dancing.

This is obviously a great party.

Men all wearing top hats and the ladies dressed rather splendidly.

And I like this man sitting on the grass and smoking a cigarette.

And this, I think, was a sort of lantern with a little candle inside.

We used to have them a lot as children, and bunting.

It was purely a very joyful time, must have been.

At least, that's all I drew at that time.

But this was my world in Berlin.

It seems to be all shopping and parties!

It's very touching that these are pictures I did before we left

Berlin and my mother had to pack a few cases in a great rush because...

We had to leave in a great hurry

and it was all dangerous.

I still find it extraordinary

that, with all the things she had to try and remember to pack,

she packed my best drawings,

which she was quite proud of.

Her father was a leading writer and theatre critic

and in the Germany of the '20s and '30s,

that was inevitably political.

Pre-war Berlin was a wonderfully diverse city,

a cultural hub and the family were in the thick of it.

But it was also under the shadow of a rising Nazi Party.

While they lived here, her father was in great danger.

"She did not remember the streets, only the feel of them.

"She and her brother Max walking home after dark.

"Playing a game of jumping on each other's shadows

"as they slid and leapt between one street lamp and the next.

"Herself thinking, 'This is the best game we've ever played,

" 'we'll play it always, always, always.' "

By 1932, Alfred Kerr had to have bodyguards to go to work

and was said to be second on the Nazis' death list.

The family fled this house the very day before Hitler took power.

It has haunted her imagination.

"Suddenly, Anna remembered their old house

"so vividly she could almost see it.

"In her mind,

"she walked right through the house from top through to bottom.

"But it was no use going on going on thinking about it,

"so she closed her eyes and went to sleep."

Hello.

"It was hardly recognisable, it had been extended so much.

"Then she noticed something unchanged -

"the steps leading up to the front door

"were exactly as she remembered them.

"The steepness, the colour of the stone,

"all exactly as it had been.

"She stared at it, remembering how after school she had raced up there,

"pulling at the bell, shouting, 'Is mummy home?'

"A small person did not say, 'Is mummy home?' -

"she said, 'Ist mama da?'

"Anna felt shaken by her sudden emergence."

I used to sit up there and draw.

And once I fell down the steps.

In a way...

..it's as though it had happened to somebody else, you know.

I...

The only thing that's the same, I feel is exactly the same,

is that person who used to sit up there and draw.

And...

Once, in a very, very brief religious phase I had,

I thought I ought to sacrifice one of my drawings to God.

And first I was going to tear it up, but then I thought that was a pity.

And so then I thought, "Well, he might not even want it"

so I shut my eyes and threw it in the air and said,

"Here you are, God" and I waited a long time,

but he didn't take it, so I put it back.

I thought, "We don't want to waste it, really" -

it was quite a good drawing.

It was a different world though.

I suppose it always is, wherever you were aged nine is a different world.

But this is extra different, I suppose.

-Guten tag.

-Guten tag.

This street, the sort of feeling of the street, is much the same.

I never really missed it that much, but my poor parents...

SONG IN GERMAN

Before the Nazis came,

Alfred Kerr was really the most influential critic in Berlin.

Berlin was the capital and he was the most important person.

He, very early on, understands that the Nazis are an evil influence,

so he campaigns against the Nazi regime.

And puts himself at risk.

Yes, he did.

These Jewish intellectuals like Alfred Kerr,

they immediately understood that this was an attack...

on the whole humanity,

not only on themselves,

and they were, in a way, followers of the great poet Heinrich Heine,

who had said, "When there are books to be burned,

"human beings will be burned afterwards."

And, of course, Alfred Kerr's books were burned in '33

in the famous Autodafe

that Goebbels directed.

CHILDREN PLAY INSIDE

"The Nazis certainly are very stupid", said Uncle Julius.

"How could you possibly be an enemy of Germany?"

"You know, of course, they burned all your books.

"I was in very good company", said Papa.

"What books?" asked Anna.

"I thought the Nazis had just taken all our things,

"I didn't know they're burned them!"

"These were not the books your father owned", said Uncle Julius.

"They were the books he's written."

How attached do you think he was to Germany?

How difficult was it for him, do you think, to leave Germany?

For Alfred Kerr, like many of his companions,

of course it was a heartbreak, it was a shock.

Because then...

they not only lost their country, they lost their language,

and this was his instrument.

-This is from the Deutsches Theater.

-Oh, yes.

And it must be in 1930.

Alfred Kerr, he's sitting in the first line.

He was a famous man in this time.

And then here...

..is this Alfred and Judith?

This is his daughter Judith.

He was 66 when he had to emigrate.

-You can see that this is an older father as well.

-Yes.

An amazing picture and taken when...

he was obliged to go to Prague and leave his family behind.

He'd been warned by somebody he'd never met - a policeman -

that they were trying to take his passport away.

I couldn't understand where he'd gone overnight.

He wanted us all out of Germany before the elections

because he thought they'd hang onto us to get him back.

And my mother told us that we would be leaving as well.

My immediate reaction was, "Oh, yes, I hope so."

Because I thought it would be so exciting.

My mother said, on the last day at school,

at the end of the day I was to tell my teacher

that I wouldn't be coming to school next day

because we were going to Switzerland.

So I did that...

This I do remember, I think the classrooms are off to the left.

My teacher...

I don't think she was that surprised.

My mother said,

"When we get to the frontier, a man comes to look at our passports,

"I want both of you to be absolutely silent, you're not to say a word."

So when we got to the frontier, the man came

and looked at all the passports and, as he went out, I burst out.

I was going to say, "There you are, nothing's happened"

and my mother just gave me a terrible look, so I stopped.

And I think now, you know...

what I might have done to my family.

My father went to Zurich from Prague and he was there to meet us

at the station.

And he told me afterwards that...

the 20 minutes or so that he spent waiting for the train

were the worst 20 minutes of his life.

"All the famous people had had what was called a difficult childhood.

"Clearly you had to have one if you wanted to become famous.

"As the train rumbled through Germany in the darkness,

"she kept thinking, 'Difficult childhood, difficult childhood' ".

They were refugees and desperately short of money.

In 1934, marooned in Paris,

her father wrote to his friend Einstein for help.

He had the plan to go to America and ask Einstein, who was there,

if he could help him.

He's opening himself, his heart up, to Einstein

and telling him of his problems,

and then there's a letter in reply from Einstein.

SHE SPEAKS GERMAN

I was shattered to receive your letter, is what he's saying.

SHE SPEAKS GERMAN

I am so comfortable here where I am by the sea,

and you're having such a terrible time.

Yeah. Exactly.

But America would not let them in.

The letters...

from my mother to my father are totally shattering.

A lot of talk of suicide,

even one from my father to somebody saying...

"I'm sorry I haven't written, but...

"I've been...

"..frantic, really...

"..because my wife's talk of suicide,

"not just for herself, but the children as well.

"I've had to be terribly careful."

I saw the date on it and I said,

"I just learned to speak French at that point."

And the thought of all that being wasted was very, very annoying.

The worries must have been terrible.

My mother was either very happy or very despairing.

But she was wonderful, I mean, she got us out.

One doesn't know what one would do in those circumstances.

This picture of your mother...

Yes.

..did you paint this?

Yes, I did.

There is something about this, there's real sadness in her eyes.

Yes.

She was the one who really had the hardest time

because my father...

had had a very full life

and had a great talent for happiness.

He was looking at things all the time,

and if you do that you don't despair.

He would think "Yes, this is bad, but it's interesting."

Just like you, Judith, you're always looking.

If you make things, I think you do

because there's this awful thing in one that always thinks,

"Oh, that might come in useful one day."

Isn't there?

"She did not care what England was like,

"just as long as they got there.

"A kind but incomprehensible porter

"put them on the slow train to London.

" 'Where are we now?' Asks Mama.

"Anna spelled out the name of an illuminated sign.

" 'Bovril.' She said.

" 'It can't be,' said Max, 'the last place we stopped was called Bovril.'

"Mama looked for herself.

" 'It's an advertisement,' she said,

" 'Bovril is some kind of English food.

" 'I think they eat it with stewed fruit.' "

Judith was 13 when they arrived in London in 1936.

They lived in a small hotel on this site.

It was bombed out of existence during the Blitz.

"As she picked her way among the fragments of glass

"scattered on the pavement,

"she noticed how the sun sparkled on them.

"Her legs were brown from the endless fine weather

"and she suddenly wanted to run and jump.

"How awful to feel like this, she thought,

"when people had been killed.

"But suddenly she could feel nothing

"but a huge happiness at still being alive."

After 1940,

then the Germans were at Dunkirk.

Well, we thought that was the end.

I didn't think I would ever grow up

or be able to do anything I wanted to do.

Nor did everybody else.

They were just waiting for the invasion.

Is it true that your parents had suicide pills...

-Yes.

-..prepared?

-Yes, because...

Well...

my father would have had very special treatment by the Nazis and...

..so Doctor, a friend of ours gave him suicide pills.

And I said, "What about me?"

And they said, "Well, you speak perfect English,

"you may be able to survive."

"One day Anna discovered a rusty car with no wheels

"and two broken bedsteads dumped in

"the middle of the grass of Russell Square.

"The hotel porter explained to her

"that it was to stop German parachuters from landing.

" 'Could they really land in Russell Square? There doesn't seem room.'

" 'There's no knowing what they can't do.'

"Anna tried not to think about them.

"But sometimes at night her guard slipped

"and she saw them dropping silently down among

"the trees of Russell Square.

"They set off toward the Hotel Continental

"to look for Jews."

Back in Germany of course, things were far worse.

Before she was forced to flee Berlin,

Judith often came to the zoo here.

Look at that?

Isn't that marvellous?

They always look as though they are smiling.

Hello, then.

Hello.

Look at this face.

I mean, look at this, this is a person.

Yes.

That's one of us.

He's looking at our world.

-Isn't he?

-He is.

-Yes.

With the hand, that's us.

Judith used to come to this zoo with a family friend,

who in her books she calls Uncle Julius.

In the book When Hitler Stole The Pink Rabbit,

Uncle Julius has a sort of sad end, doesn't he?

Yes.

He always went to the zoo. He loved it.

And he had a Jewish grandmother

and so they took away his pass to the zoo,

and I think that was the last straw,

apparently that's when he killed himself.

So that was a true story?

Yes.

Apparently in 1938,

they made a law that Jewish families couldn't keep pets,

and they had to be collected, you weren't allowed to kill your pet,

you had to hand it over

and you didn't know what was going to happen to it.

And then...

in 1942...

when they must have had other things on their minds,

somebody decided that mixed families,

if there was a marriage between a Jew and an Aryan,

and they'd stayed together, but they couldn't keep pets either.

Who thinks of things like that?

I mean, why?

Extraordinary.

I don't believe in God at all,

but whoever it was, was a very good designer.

And not only to...

make that extraordinary shape, but then cover it in a pattern.

In war, I was drawing more

and being staggered by all these incredible creatures.

During the war as the bombs fell, Judith was drawing obsessively.

"She felt almost painfully aware of all the sounds,

"shapes and colours around her and wanted to draw everything in sight.

"She filled one notebook after another,

"and when she was not drawing, she thought about it.

"She felt as though she had been asleep for years

"and had just woken up."

In 1945, she won a scholarship to

the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London.

We ran up these stairs...

..and the life room was on the top floor.

She hovered on the brink of an affair with her teacher.

" 'I'm being kissed,' she thought.

"And was horrified to find herself looking past him at

"the mirror to see what it looked like.

" 'You're very young,' he said, 'I wouldn't want to disturb you.'

" 'Disturb me?' She said. 'If I made love to you now..."

I think this must have been the life room.

I think this must have been it.

"What did he mean, make love to her?"

" 'An English girl would know', she thought desperately,

"why couldn't I have grown up in one country like everybody else."

Her German roots seemed to emerge in her paintings,

a kind of brooding expressionism.

I think she's just such a lovely painter.

And her colour is beautiful.

And there's a sort of energy in them that's really amazing.

The light and everything that she gets into that piece of work.

I love this place.

Painting was her first love, but she got work as a textile designer.

I love these textiles, they are like paintings.

And they're like illustrations.

But they make the most wonderful prints, and they're very sensitive.

And strangely in a way, quite modern,

there's something about them that feels very contemporary.

Her palette is lovely.

But the fact that you can sort of see the paint in them,

and in this one there's no real line,

but they are so elegant

and the way that she gets this sense of movement in everything.

And I shouldn't be surprised because she's an illustrator,

but I am surprised that she could design such amazing textiles.

It was a training ground for

the children's illustrator she would become.

Her career was taking shape, but her father had struggled in Britain.

In 1948, exile appeared to be over at last.

When he got off the plane in Germany,

there were journalists and photographers

and he normally made a special face for being photographed.

-And he didn't have time...

-What was his special face?

It was sort of...

A writer's face, you know.

And they got him as he really looked, you can see him smile,

and like himself,

which was lovely.

He was welcomed as a returning hero.

It was one of the first public recognitions of all those who

Germany had thrown away.

But he was not to live to enjoy it.

That very night he had a stroke and made the decision to commit suicide

in which he was assisted by his wife Julia.

While he was actually dying, having already taken the pills,

he wrote these letters to Julia whom he called Mouse.

SHE SPEAKS GERMAN

You were everything to me.

And the last hours gave me everything.

For god's sake, be happy.

Don't be a widow.

You were the sweetest in all eternity.

And the two children also.

Thank you.

I feel that I am dying.

Judith's mother too had attempted suicide and would do so again.

In a sense, the war had destroyed them both.

In 1951, Judith found her security.

She met Tom, better known as Nigel Kneale,

in the canteen at the BBC where he was a script writer.

She was teaching art at a school across the road.

Tom, Nigel Kneale, went on to create Quatermass,

it was a landmark series which had the nation glued to their screens.

The thing is about astronauts going into space

and they hadn't actually done that,

they didn't do that for another eight years.

Three go up and only one comes back.

They're gone. They're gone!

What?

-What's he talking about?

-They're not inside.

-They must be!

Unless they opened the door and got swept away.

I've checked all the instruments,

that door hasn't been opened until now.

Something else has got in and it grows into a sort of vegetation.

All this vegetation came to life?

It moved. It had to move on cue.

It wasn't a recording.

-This was live television.

-Yes.

Tom and I had to make the special effects.

At exactly the right moment,

he moved his fingers very, very, very, slowly

and the entire nation was terrified.

It was wonderful you could to that.

A stored image is obtained of a race purge on ancient Mars.

The monster is from Quatermass And The Pit,

which is the best of them.

Can I pick him up?

He's lost one of his legs.

Oh, my God, it's amazing.

Oh, there it is!

Tom, being a Manxman, gave it three legs.

I think it goes at the back probably.

Tell me about this, how did this happen?

What, that the leg came off?

Victor! What happened?

Judith and Tom bought this house in Barnes 50 years ago.

I've got a Mog mug.

I used to have two, I must have given it to somebody.

They had two children, Tacy and Matthew.

Judith stayed at home to look after them.

It was in this kitchen that she invented The Tiger Who Came To Tea.

Tom was out filming all the time.

It got really very boring, I mean, you go for a walk and have tea

and then...

that was it really, and we wished somebody would come.

And so I thought, "Well...

"..why not have a tiger come?"

And so that's where the story came from really.

-I'll pour the tea.

-Thank you.

I thought I'd try and make a picture book

and because I told Tacy that story so often,

I actually knew it by heart, every word, it hadn't changed.

-Milk?

-Yes, please.

Thank you.

In a way it's the only picture book I've ever done like that

because normally I think of the pictures as I think of the story.

But this I really had no idea how to do it.

I wondered whether the tiger should wear clothes,

I didn't what to do with it.

The doorbell rings just as Sophie and her mummy

are sitting down to tea.

Who could it possibly be?

What they certainly don't expect to see at the door

is a big, furry, stripy tiger.

When A Tiger Comes To Tea, I mean, it is actually a tiger.

For two and three year olds, it's quite hard for us to remember that.

That when they see the tiger peep round the door and come in,

well, that is a tiger.

Because when you're two and three, why wouldn't a tiger come to tea?

If you open the door, you don't know who's going to come in.

But then obviously if you want to say, metaphorically,

what is going on here, who is this tiger?

It's the person who walks in and starts grabbing stuff.

He drinks all the water out of the tap.

Well, I mean, he is a tiger, what do tigers do, they eat people.

Yes.

And so tigers are dangerous.

Well, Judith knows about dangerous people

who come to your house and take people away.

You know, this was her experience as a young child,

she knew this could happen, you know,

she was told as a young child that her father

could be grabbed at any moment by either the Gestapo or the SS.

You know, he was in great danger.

So, I mean, I don't know whether Judith did it consciously or not,

I wouldn't want to go there,

but the point is he's a jokey tiger, but still...he is a tiger.

The tiger, I never found threatening.

It's just a strange happening.

I like the way that the mother and the daughter,

they're not scared of it.

They're just trying to offer their hospitality.

And then in that, kind of...

They don't tell it to stop - they just let it eat everything,

drink everything and then it goes.

It's all a very polite sort of interaction,

there's nothing sinister about it.

It's just that you end up with a bit of a mess

and there's nothing to eat.

That's the only bad thing.

I also love the shopping trip.

They restock their larder

and they buy something in case this should ever happen again.

But I like the slightly sad note that it doesn't happen again,

there's something about that that's...

You actually want it to happen again,

but it's lovely that it doesn't.

And then in what is one of the most memorable scenes in this book,

or really in any children's book and one of the first ever,

was a positive picture of the city.

So, here we have the family moving through the city,

it's new and exciting.

Tiger was published in 1968 and has never been out of print since.

Her next books would be prompted by her son's reaction

to the reading schemes available at the time -

like the Janet and John series.

I remember the one he had,

the climax was that his parents bought him his school uniform

and, for some reason, in a fit of confusion,

they both bought him a cap.

And so the climax of the whole story was John has two caps.

And for that you are supposed to learn to read!

Matthew said, "I'm sorry, Mummy,

"but I cannot read these books any more, they are too boring."

And I began to say, "But you've got to learn to read,"

and he said, "I am going to learn to read with The Cat In The Hat books."

-Dr Seuss. And he did.

-So, when you came to do your picture books...

This influenced me very much when I did the Mog books.

Never, ever, write something that's already in the picture.

They can look at the picture and they knew that already

and they've made all that effort.

"He had a sh...shirt."

You know, it's mad.

I knew nothing about small children.

You know, you're trying to get them to do this or that and I made

this great discovery that it was all much easier if it was funny.

Children must get terribly fed up,

because everybody always knows more than they do.

People say, "No, no, that's not right, don't do this.

"Do that," or "Trees grow in the ground,

"they don't fall from the sky," or whatever a child might believe.

Tacy used to make me play a terrible game which was called Big Wawas.

And a wawa was some sort of a creature which I had to be

and I had to crawl about on the floor while Tacy walked ahead of me.

And I had to pretend to be frightened.

"He won't hurt you. He likes you."

And she'd say, "Oh, no, Big Wawa, that's all right."

Obviously, this gave her a terrific sort of sense of power

and confidence -

that at last there was somebody who knew less than she did.

That's the attraction of Mog.

She's not afraid of scaring the child.

When I've read books with my children, this might well be

the kind of spread where they go,

"I don't want to look at that one. Turn that over."

And then secretly they go and have another look at it,

because books are about facing fears.

Because at the end of the day it's not you in the sky,

you're not facing those birds, somebody else is doing it for you.

Mog is saying, "I am not the supper."

"But who else can fly in the dark?

"The big birds with teeth! They are here in the dark!

"They want supper and who is the supper?"

Now, this is the terrifying thing at the heart of many children's books -

will you be eaten?

It's in many fairy stories, think of Hansel and Gretel.

So, here is a core fear - might you be consumed?

RADIO: 'Mog is dead.

'Sorry to be brutal about it to those of you who were brought up

'on the Mog the cat stories, but there's no getting away from the fact

'that after 30 years of Mog books,

'Judith Kerr, her creator, has killed her off.

'Mog's died. I'm really sad.

'I really like Mog and I used to read the books a lot.'

-MICHAEL ROSEN:

-Very few characters who've become established die.

People are preserved in a kind of childhood eternity.

That is the tradition of the children's book.

La fin! The end!

There's a whole subtext going on of the kitten

being able to communicate with the spirit of Mog.

She's gone into kind of pagan territory.

Mog goes to the sun, so that replenisher of life

is installed at the end in our imagination,

so it's risky territory to go there for children's books.

I guess she's facing up to her own mortality.

Many of the people in her life have passed away.

She knows she's writing about a tough thing, but the key thing

about a writer, if you do that, is not to be afraid of it.

You say that you wrote When Hitler Sold Pink Rabbit

because your children didn't quite get your childhood.

We went to see that awful film, um...

The Sound Of Music.

SIRENS BLARE

-Awful? Some people would feel...

-HE LAUGHS

Well, we went to see it anyhow. All the other children were going.

Its dramatic images of escape

didn't reflect the reality she had experienced.

DOORBELL RINGS

Quickly! Quickly! I have a place you can hide.

Tom and I looked sort of slightly, you know, "Oh, God!" Um...

Matthew was terribly pleased and he said, er,

"Now we know exactly what it was like when Mummy was a little girl."

'I had been thinking about writing something.

'And I thought, "Well, perhaps it's time I did." '

All right, if the borders are closed...

..then we'll drive up into the hills and go over those mountains on foot.

-But the children!

-We'll help them, they'll be all right.

We can do it without help, father!

"When she was small,

"she'd been comforted by the sound of a goods train

"rumbling interminably through the night.

"After Hitler, of course, goods trains had carried

"quite different cargoes to quite different destinations.

"She wondered if other German children had still been comforted

"by their sound in the night, not knowing what was inside them.

"She wondered what had happened to the trains afterwards

"and if they were still in use."

Perhaps the strangest twist to Judith Kerr's story is that

When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit has been acclaimed,

not only in Britain, but in Germany too.

SCHOOL BELL RINGS

It's a set text in German schools.

'It is definitely something,'

with the children, it's their age group and it's something...

fear, um, family life that has been totally, er...totally interrupted.

That is something that the children can relate to.

'Tammy and I, we're also Jewish.'

It's not so nice that they don't, um, like Jews,

that Hitler don't like Jews, and it's, um...

a little bit hard for her, because you that care...

You don't want to be some different person,

because everybody is the same,

and she feels like she's one other person.

The other book that I imagine German children read at school is

-The Anne Frank Diaries.

-Yes.

I'm not Anne Frank.

My life up to that point,

the first three years of being refugees, was an adventure.

Nothing awful happened to us. Compared with what happened

to the people who didn't get out, it was nothing.

ANNOUNCEMENT IN GERMAN

This was Judith's local station,

which the Nazis would put to a different use.

This was where the Jews were transported to Auschwitz.

"In memory of the people who were deported between 1941 and 1945

"by German trains to the death camps."

It was put up by the German railway company.

I remember, when we were in Switzerland, saying,

"When I'm grown-up, I'm going to murder Hitler,"

and being told not to be so stupid.

SHE LAUGHS I had no idea.

We reached Zurich on the 4th of March and the elections were on the 5th.

And we heard afterwards that, er, at eight o'clock the following morning,

on the 6th, they came to our house for our passports

and so, it's extraordinary to think, you know...

all this very happy life I've had is because of that

and, er...

..terribly lucky...

"11th of June, 1942. 15. Berlin to Theresienstadt."

"12/06/1942.

"50 Juden..." "50 Jews. Berlin to Theresienstadt."

On the 13th, we've got 746.

Auschwitz was the end, wasn't it? Theresienstadt, they had a chance.

-956 to Minsk.

-Yeah.

-And then here - 1,002.

-Yes.

So now, they're going in their thousands.

-Each one of these now...

-Yes.

-..is huge.

What they would feel looking at this, you know.

It's all very well, but nobody did anything.

No.

In a way, you feel you owe it to them to do something with our lives.

What they wouldn't have done was just a little bit of what we had.

This is not one of Judith's drawings.

It was drawn and scribbled out by a child

who was held at Theresienstadt and later gassed at Auschwitz.

-MICHAEL ROSEN:

-'99% of children's books end

'with some kind of coming home,

'some kind of redemption, some kind of safety.'

But, of course, that's reflected in Judith's own life.

She went on a nightmarish journey, she didn't know where she was going.

After all that scary stuff, poor old Mog,

with his downward-facing mouth, and then we get to the end.

Mog's in his basket again. Oh, and he's got a fish in his mouth.

Here, the kind of home that Judith wanted to make.

And look, they're all having supper.

There, and Mog asleep.

If you're Kafka, you can make a world

that is perpetually terrifying.

If you're attracted to children's books, you will create,

you will find this safety place is there waiting for you.

JUDITH: 'Tomorrow, I'm going to have a day off.'

"So they went out in the dark and all the street lamps were lit

"and all the cars had their lights on.

"And they walked down the road to a cafe."

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd