She was a best-selling children’s author who wrote of her childhood in World War II and a mischievous cat named Mog.
German-born children’s author Judith Kerr in 2018, at work in her London home. By Harrison Smith Harrison Smith Obituary writer Email Bio Follow May 23 at 6:46 PM At first, it was only a bedtime story for her 2-year-old daughter. Judith Kerr’s husband, a screenwriter, was away on a film shoot, and the two of them were left at home, where they amused themselves with occasional trips to see the big cats at the zoo.
For decades, her response was always the same: No. The book was simply about a tiger who came to tea. The cat was featured in more than a dozen books, beginning with “Mog the Forgetful Cat” , Ms. Kerr’s second storybook. It was followed by a work for slightly older readers, “When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit” , inspired by a comment Ms. Kerr’s 8-year-old son made after watching “The Sound of Music”: “Now we know what it was like when Mummy was a little girl.”
The novel chronicled Ms. Kerr and her German-Jewish family’s journey from Nazi Germany to Switzerland, France and finally England, where they initially mistook railway-side advertisements for town names while taking the train to London. Why, Ms. Kerr wondered, did they keep passing the city of Bovril ?
Weeks later, he was followed by Ms. Kerr, her brother Michael and their mother, who met Alfred in Zurich on the night before the German elections that consolidated Hitler’s grip on power. The family arrived in London in 1936, and Ms. Kerr worked as a Red Cross secretary during the war. She received a scholarship in 1945 to study at the Central School of Arts and Crafts.
An illustration from “The Tiger Who Came to Tea.” Ms. Kerr wrote two sequels to her “Pink Rabbit” book, forming a coming-of-age trilogy known as “Out of the Hitler Time”: “Bombs on Aunt Dainty,” originally titled “The Other Way Round” , and “A Small Person Far Away” . She was appointed to the Order of the British Empire in 2012, “for services to children’s literature and Holocaust education.”
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