Thursday 14 November 2013



I started watching this really lovely documentary about Judith Kerr  as I was having dinner, thinking that, no matter how fascinating, I knew her story already - then found myself captivated by her childhood drawings of 1920s Berlin. Not only that she was so young when she did them, before her family escaped in 1933, when she was only nine - but that these drawings must have meant so much to her mother, that this what was she packed as she fled on her own with two children, literally on the eve of Hitler coming to power; the very morning after the 1933 election, the Nazis were on the doorstep to confiscate the family's passports. Poignantly, at the end of the programme, Judith - now 90 - revisits their local railway station in Berlin, whence she used to hear the comforting rumble of goods trains in the night, and where plaques set into platform 17 now commemorate the thousands of Jews who departed from that very station to the death camps. One last drawing, full of movement,verve and promise, so similar in style that it could have been Judith's - but isn't - was done by another child who was later gassed at Auschwitz. There are no words.

3 comments:

Sally said...

Thanks for alerting us to this documentary and for the link. I really hope we get to see the series in NZ, this one in particular.

mary said...

Hello, Sally. The Edmund de Waal programme is very good, too, if you get the chance.

Sally said...

Thank you. I will watch that one too