Explaining Tragic Historical Moments in Children Voice

I´ve always found difficult to explain to children tragedies, both personal and historical, in writing or through direct speech. How, for instance, to explain in an easy, without the adult emotions, to a child, that once upon a time one country stand united in killing my relatives and other 6 million innocent people? Or that other humans, made from the same flesh and blood as the rest of the humans, might happily wipe me and the rest of my family out of the maps and world because we are assumed to pray to a different Gd or born with a different name.

Judith Kerr in When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit - I had access to the audiobook version in the German language, Als Hitler das rosa Kaninchen stahl - succeeded to give children voice to a terrible century in a very genuine way. 

Anna, the daughter of an inconvenient Jewish-German journalist, is forced to leave Berlin together with his brother Max and his mother. They join their father first in Switzerland, but there is no place for the truth of his father, therefore they move to Paris, a stop before crossing the Channel and moving to England. 

We, as adults, we may take those changes of language and environment and address as a serious challenge and we can keep complaining and talk about it for ever. Children, though, they see it in a different note, with a curiosity of world adventurers and with the innocence that does not see the trauma, the dangers and the difficulties. Playing with children whose language they cannot understand, learning a new language and trying to keep quiet during the passport control from Germany to Switzerland are facts that a child will just register. The meta-analysis comes later, eventually during a therapy session. 

I am in love withe Anna´s voice and with the art of the author. I´ve read other books by Judith Kerr but this book is something to remember for a long time and probably would be curious to watch the movie too that was released the last year. But about my relationship with me and movies made after books in another post...

Rating: 4 stars