The Book

There's a Guardian Witness assignment called "A book that changed me". I started reading through it out of curiosity, and then I wondered about books that have had any effect on me whatsoever.

I really love reading, but I tend to downplay the effect books have on me. I often insist that I don't really have a favourite book (if I had to choose one it would have to be the Harry Potter series, I was completely obsessed for the span of about seven or eight years, not a day would go by that I wouldn't talk about it, but it feels like a weak answer to the question), to me it's kind of a ridiculous question, there's too many books to pick just one (but then, I have a favourite movie, so what am I saying really?). Reading is a escape from reality, a way to see the world (or a world) through someone else's eyes, and as such, I often view it as pure entertainment, but not really affecting me. So when I started reading people's accounts of books that changed them my attitude was dismissive.

I have a confession to make now. I do have a "book that changed me". Possibly more than one, but this one has had a huge effect on who I am now. I read it when I was relatively young, nine or ten, so I don't know if it "changed me" as much as it just affected me, it put me in touch with the first thing that taught me what humanity means.

"When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit", by Judith Kerr is a children's novel, but (like any good children's novel) it can be read by anyone. Put simply, it's about Anna, a girl whose family escapes Germany in 1933 when the Nazi party is elected. It is about her journey from Berlin to Switzerland, then to Paris, and finally to London. The story is continued in "The Other Way Around" and "A Small Person Far Away", but it's "When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit" that feels the most real and the most necessary.

The book is about a lot of things: it is about the holocaust, of course, but it is about family, and growing up, and learning new languages. It is also about freedom. The book is a perfect introduction to the Holocaust for children because it's written from a child's perspective, but also because the people in it leave Germany very early on. I am not one to say that children should be spared violence (I liked the original versions of the Grimm fairy tales) but I do think that there are things children can't understand. The power in "When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit" is that it shows the brutality of Nazism, the horror of being a refugee, without being grisly. The main character is a child, and as a child she adapts to the new situations. She is not always happy, but she makes friends, she plays, she grows up.

This was the book that introduced me to the Holocaust. I hesitate to say why the subject is so important to me, but it is. I am not Jewish. I come from a traditionally antisemitic country. Learning about the Holocaust has made me a better human being. It has taught me a lot about human nature, and it has helped me question and understand (and therefore strengthen) certain aspects of my own morality.

Firstly, "hope is the last thing we lose". The first time I had a conversation about the Holocaust with my parents, I asked why Jewish people didn't leave. Why a lot of them didn't escape. The simple answer is that by the time things started getting difficult for the Jews in Germany, it wasn't easy for them to leave the country anymore. The more complicated answer, the answer my parents gave me, and one of the truths that have stuck with me, has to do with human nature. No one wants to leave their home, especially knowing they may never return. No one wants to give up their job, their friends, their family, their neighbourhood, their house, their things. But more than anything, few people believe that things are really that bad. People keep hoping. Hoping that it's all a mistake. Hoping that it won't happen to them. Hoping that if they are "good" they will be spared any horrors. It's human nature to think that if something bad happened, you would be one of the survivors. This truth is an important one. It taught me that there's nowhere to hide, that if someone is treating a person unfairly, at some point they will treat everyone unfairly.

Secondly, humans can be monsters, and humans can be monsters without realizing they are. During the Nazi regime, neighbours gave each other up, friends gave each other up, people betrayed each other. But more than that: they did it not for personal gain, or out of anger or spite, they did it because they thought it was the right thing to do. One of the most horrifically successful aspects of Nazism is that for a long time it brainwashed people into actually believing at first that Jewish people were dangerous and a threat to society, and then that they were inferior. This is scary. A bad economic situation was used to convince people that a certain group of society was inferior. And people fell for it, ate it up. Part of it was fear, I'm sure, but part of it was simply that it was the easy thing to do. It's a lot easier to think "they must have done something wrong", when your neighbours start being persecuted, than it is to accept that authority, the people who control the police and the army, the people who make the laws, could be crazy and could be doing something scarily, horrifically wrong.

Three, I have a core of beliefs. In general, I am an extremely morally flexible person. I don't care what anyone else does as long as it doesn't involve any other person (unless the other person agrees to be involved of course). I've changed my mind on many topics many times, and there's very few things I think are wrong (compared to a lot of people). But there are certain things that I think are right, and people who I feel truly disregard these things scare me. One of them is that all people are equally "valid". All people. Everyone has the right to live, and to live with dignity, no one should be "under" anyone else. That's it. That is my core. Most of the rest of my opinions can probably be derived from a combination of this with what I know, and with the belief that we are equally "valid", but we are not equal. Take all of those together and you have what I won't change.

"When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit" put me in touch with everything I've just written. But it also taught me something else: it's possible to write a book about a horrific situation and make it a wonderful book.