Arthur is very well-educated and refined and is an ambulatory encyclopedia. They subsist on eggs, cheese and baguettes. Prune when he can’t pay the rent.Īnna and Max go diving in a Paris fountain to retrieve coins. Arthur, who gets a part-time job at a Jewish newspaper, must dodge Mme. The Kempers have a neighbor upstairs, a young woman who is an anti-Semite. Prune is both unpleasant and darkly comical. They move into garret-like servants’ quarters in an apartment house run by the cruel concierge Madame Prune (Anne Bennent). After Switzerland, the family moves to Paris, where the children must learn a new language. He takes the family boating on Lake Zurich for Anna’s 10 th birthday. Swiss publishers are afraid to publish Arthur’s anti-Nazi stories. Life is difficult for the Kempers to be sure. But it is not as emotionally devastating as Agnieszka Holland’s “Europa Europa” (1990), for example. But, alas, like the pink rabbit, Heimpi must stay behind.ĭirected by German filmmaker Caroline Link and adapted by her and Anna Bruggemann, “When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit” is a coming-of-age refugee story set during the rise of Hitler. Anna wishes their German housekeeper Heimpi (veteran Ursula Werner) could come with them. After sad consideration she leaves behind her pink rabbit. Her mother only allows her and Max to take one suitcase apiece, and she must choose only one toy to bring with her. But Switzerland, where the people, according to Anna, only “think” they speak German, has things to offer such as a rock and, of course, a mountain or two. She begins to draw a series of “disasters” beginning with a shipwreck. Anna mourns the loss of her friends and classmates and family home.

How this uprooting affects his children and his wife is the subject of the story. When Arthur, on his sickbed with the flu, finds out that the Nazis plan to confiscate his passport and make it impossible for him to leave the country, he flees to Prague and then brings his entire family to Switzerland. The film beings in Berlin in 1933 and tells the story of 9-year-old Anna Kemper (the delightful Riva Krymalowski) and her Jewish family: her older brother Max (Marinus Hohmann), who calls her “little man,” her father Arthur (Oliver Masucci), a critic and journalist wanted by the Nazis, and her beautiful musician mother Dorothea (Carla Juri).

While not going the full “Jojo Rabbit,” similarly bunny-minded “When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, which is based on a best-selling children’s book by Judith Kerr, is not your ordinary Holocaust-era entry.

When hitler stole the pink rabbit book