Getting Started With When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit
The book is a memoir-style novel by Judith Kerr, published in 1958. It follows nine-year-old Anna Brunn as her Jewish-German family flees Berlin in 1933, just weeks after Hitler becomes chancellor. They go first to Switzerland, then Paris, and eventually London. The tone is remarkably understated. Kids don't panic in the book. They pack, they cross borders, they try to pretend everything is fine. I've watched this title cycle through search traffic every few years. It usually spikes around Remembrance Day discussions, homeschool curriculum searches, or when a teacher is putting together a WWII literature unit for upper elementary students. The book is short, around 170 pages, and written in simple prose that younger readers can handle without feeling talked to. One thing people get wrong about it: this isn't a graphic depiction of the Holocaust. It's the perspective of a child leaving home. The horror is in what isn't described. Anna's grandfather stays behind and we never hear from him again. That's the whole point of the narrative choice. If you're looking for concentration camp fiction, this isn't it. It's about displacement and the fragile normalcy adults try to maintain for kids during exile.
I used this book in a reading group once with a mixed-age class, grades four through six. The six graders mostly skipped ahead. The fourth graders were the ones who asked questions about why people had to leave. The book does that naturally without lecturing. I found that pairing it with a short documentary clip about the Reichstag fire or the early boycotts of Jewish businesses gave the older kids enough context to stay engaged without dumbing down the text for the younger ones. There's also a 2019 BBC film adaptation directed by Fiona Moore that runs about 95 minutes. It stars Ronnie Ahern as Anna and David Tennant as the grandfather. The film is faithful to the book but adds more visual weight to the border crossing scenes. If you're assigning this for a class, watch the adaptation first and then have students compare how the book handles the grandfather's final chapter differently than the film does. The book is deliberately quiet there. The film has to show more because it's visual medium. I should mention a practical issue I ran into. A few years ago I was tracking down a specific edition for a student who needed the original British text because the American edition has slight title variations and a different foreword. The original UK edition is published by Jonathan Cape. The US edition came out through Alfred A. Knopf. The text itself is essentially identical, but the front matter differs. If you're building a bibliography or citations for academic work, make sure you note which edition you're using. I wasted about forty minutes on a reference check once because I didn't verify the publisher on the copy sitting on my shelf.
The book has remained in print continuously since 1958. That's unusual for children's literature from that era. It's been translated into multiple languages and is regularly assigned in German schools as part of history and literature curricula. The German title is "Das tote Pferd von Plohn," which literally translates to something quite different and might confuse anyone searching for it by that name. If you're looking to get a copy, it's widely available through standard booksellers. Project Gutenberg doesn't carry it since the copyright hasn't expired in most jurisdictions. Used copies in decent condition run anywhere from five to fifteen dollars depending on the edition. New copies from most retailers are usually under ten dollars for the paperback. Audiobook versions exist too, narrated by Julia Whelan, and they're solid if you want to use it as a listening text alongside reading. One thing I wish more people understood about this book is how useful it is for teaching the concept of refugee experience without graphic content. It opens the door for conversations about identity, belonging, and what it means to lose a home you've never known anything else as. The follow-up books in the semi-autobiographical series, "The Magic Pudding" isn't related, but Kerr wrote "If That Is the Man" and "Shooting by Moonlight," which continue Anna's story through the war years and her eventual return to Germany, are worth noting if you find the first one resonates with your readers or students.
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