This is Judith Kerr, and while you might not recognize her face, you might recognize the characters she is famous for creating. Mog the forgetful cat was recently bought back to life in this years Christmas advert for Sainsbury's. Mog was the basis for a series of childrens books which were part of my own childhood. She also wrote the Tiger Who Came to Tea, which was a favorite in my house as well as many others I'm sure. I could totally nerd over how much I used to love her books when I was little, and I will always appreciate that it was her words that my mum used to read to me to make me fall asleep, but she is so much more than that.
Judith Kerr is the most amazing person, she was born into a Jewish family in Berlin in 1923, she spent, a great deal of her childhood, moving around, living in hotels with her only worldly possessions in the suitcase she carried while her family fled the Nazi's. She went to 11 different schools before her family eventually ended up in England where she still lives today. What I love about her is her outlook on everything, her endless positivity and wisdom. She would have loved to have a terrible childhood, because all great writers have had bad childhoods and that's how they write so well. But despite everything, she doesn't say she had a bad childhood, to her, her family was together, always, and that was all that mattered.
Even now, she is an elderly lady and her husband passed away in 2006. She has spent her most recent years writing like crazy and says that it has been the saving of her, because she has had nothing else to do.
She was the subject of a BBC documentary a couple of years ago which is when I fell in love with her. It was called "Hitler the Tiger and Me" and I knew it had something to do with the Tiger who Came to Tea and that is all that peaked my interest. Towards the end of the documentary, she is visiting GEIS 17 a train station where thousands of Jews were taken to board trains that would take them to concentration camps. Judiths family, were extremely lucky and were warned with enough time to escape to Switzerland before Hitler came into power, they reached Zurich the day the Nazi's went to their house in Berlin for their passports. She comments on how her happy life, she has been able to live, has all been down to that warning, and her father making the decision to leave when he did. She looks at the memorial sculptures and says "the way you feel now, we owe it to them, to make something of our lives". Something I found so profound. The idea that if you are lucky enough to have lived, where others haven't been so lucky, you owe it to them to do something with your life. I think of everything that is going on in the world right now, babies being washed up in beaches because their parents are fleeing war torn countries, people in Africa, just getting over the ebola crisis again, and just yesterday the terrorist attacks in Paris. These people have lost their lives because of situations that are out of their control, wars that they didn't create, diseases that they can't fight alone.
I have non of their problems, I owe it to all of them to do something with my life, to not give up, to keep running, to keep speaking out, to not be afraid to fight, and to make the most of the opportunity that could just as easily be taken from me.
Mog the Forgetful Cat
Mog is the star of her own book series which in recent years came to end when Mog dies of old age in a book called "Goodbye Mog". Some might disagree that mortality is something that should be in a children's book, I personally think that it's necessary and it makes me love Judith all the more for doing it in the way she has. Mog has however been given a new life in Sainsbury's Christmas Advert for 2015. And I love it!
This book made me want to have a pet tiger, and I always looked in the Supermarket for tins of Tiger food. Apparently Judith wrote this to be a metaphor for the Gestapo coming into her life without warning and messing everything up. Powerful stuff for a kids book!
I strongly recommend her as an author, obviously if you have young kids then brilliant, but she has also written some semi biographical novels which are a brilliant read, again so profound and hopeful in time where so many had no hope at all.
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