Grief to Judith Kerr: A life full of children's books

processed their past in Nazi-Germany, in children's books: Judith Kerr, award-winning children's book author and Illustrator, has died at the age of 95 years.

Jens-Peter Marquardt and Stephanie Pieper, ARD Studio London

the UK was Judith Kerr's second home, after the national socialists, she and her family were expelled in 1933 from their first home. Since she was only nine years old. In an Interview with the ARD Studio in London four years ago, she recalled some of her Childhood in the Grunewald in Berlin: "The school, the house, friends, sledding...we had an awful lot of money. In the evening, my parents went to the theatre - it was a normal Childhood."

your father was the famous theatre critic and opponent of Hitler, Alfred Kerr. The Jewish family fled from the Nazis via Switzerland and France to the UK. Judith Kerr had almost said betrayed in the train on the border of the escape plan: "My mother: 'So when we are at the limit, when the man comes to the passes to look at, no word say no word.' I've done that also. But when the passport inspector was out, I said: 'You See, it is nothing happened.'"

Judith Kerr (right) with her parents and brother, Michael approximately in the year 1928. Her father, the critic Alfred Kerr was.

The years of the Emigration were the parents terrible: The father was often unemployed, the mother is depressed. Kerr found, however, this exciting life as a great adventure - new schools, new languages, new friends. Also in London, they went after more of your great passion: Drawing.

This Talent of her daughter, the mother recognized early on, because even though they had to leave Berlin and head over, put the children's drawings of their daughter: "I had never thought about that, you had to pack in a week's time everything should take - and as she took my pictures."

Later, she trained as a draughtswoman. With her late husband, the screenwriter, Thomas Nigel Kneale, had a son and a daughter - and from a story you were both told, in 1968 her first picture book: "A Tiger comes to tea", followed by the British children's popular series of the cat "Mog".

It's your son, Matthew, who suggested after the mother was, your own life story to write - after a visit from "The Sound of Music": "And as he says: 'So, now we finally know exactly how it was when mommy was a little girl.' I had already thought of this and thought: 'I think I need to do now, really.' And the publisher was great, they said: 'Well, make the but - we have nothing about this time.'"