THEn the occasion of the next Remembrance Day this evening it airs at 9.20pm on Rai 1 When Hitler stole the pink rabbit. Film based on novel by Judith Kerr on his escape from Germany together with his family to escape Nazi persecution. A classic of children’s literature that the German director Caroline Link has transposed for the cinema with delicacy and fidelity.
When Hitler stole the pink rabbitthe plot
Berlin, 1933. Anna (Riva Krymalowkski) is 9 years old and his brother Max (Marinus Hohmann) is 12. Their father is Arthur Kemper (Oliver Masucci), famous and severe theater critic journalistwhile his mother Dorothea (Carla Juri) is a pianist.
For the Jewish family (wealthy and very close-knit) everything changes when Hitler takes power and Arthur ends up on the Nazi blacklist because of his biting comments in the newspaper pages. The man thus decides to flee to Switzerlandtemporarily leaving the family. Anna, Max and his mother join him a little later, but given the lack of a job they are forced to move house again, and go to Paris.
Even there, however, things don’t go as they hoped – life is marked by poverty and lack of certainties. Thus, in the autumn of 1935, the family moves to Londonfacing new challenges related to the Nazi threat.
Riva Krymalowkski in a scene from “When Hitler Stole the Pink Rabbit”. (More Stories)
A touching film about a stolen childhood
Directed by Caroline Link – Oscar winner 2003 for Best Foreign Film a Nowhere in Africa – When Hitler stole the pink rabbit adapts the novel of the same name with absolute fidelity autobiographical by Judith Kerr. That is, the tragic story of a childhood marked by fear and from the escape in the Nazi era.
Kerr herself – who died in 2019 at the age of 95 shortly before the film’s release – he gave his blessing to the script. A sign of the respect that the director and screenwriter brought to the literary source material.
Riva Krymalowkski and Marinus Hohmann in a scene from “When Hitler Stole the Pink Rabbit”. (More Stories)
Telling Nazism from the point of view of children it has often been an interesting and successful key to understanding – you see Life is Beautiful by Roberto Benigni –, e this choice allows the film to combine drama and lightness. In fact, the rabbit of the title is none other than the symbol of lost innocence of Anna and all the Jewish children of the time.
The director intelligently chooses to tell this tragedy by focusing on the details and the small suggestions, even imaginative, of everyday life.
The only flaw, unfortunately, is the overly perfect staging and glossy photography which takes away realism from the crudest scenes. Stay anyway an honest and never blackmailing workembellished by the recitation of very good little protagonist. The Swiss Riva Krymalowkski, a talent that we will certainly see again in adulthood.
Judith Kerr’s novel
Judith Keer decided to write When Hitler stole the pink rabbit – published in 1971, translated in Italy 5 years later – after watching with her eight-year-old son All together passionately with Julie Andrews (the musical is set in Austrian 1938, when the Nazis invade the country).
Leaving the cinema, she feels that he has arrived the moment to tell the drama experienced firsthand, the cruelty of daily life in the Nazi era.
After the success of the novel, Judith becomes one of the most beloved children’s writers, thanks especially to sagas like that of the cat Mog And a second novel, always autobiographical and always set during Nazism: The bomb season.
In 2012, shortly before her death, she was awarded the prestigious Order of the British Empire for his contribution to children’s literature and memory teaching.
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