Out of the Hitler Time Books in Order

The Out of the Hitler Time books form a semi‑autobiographical trilogy that follows a girl called Anna from the age of nine into adulthood. Through her eyes Judith Kerr reworks her own experience of fleeing Nazi Germany, growing up as a refugee and later returning to the city she left behind.

The first book, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, begins in Berlin in 1933. Anna’s father, a well‑known Jewish writer, is in danger after criticising Hitler, so the family leave in haste, travelling first to Switzerland and then to Paris. Anna must choose one toy to take and leaves her much‑loved pink rabbit behind, a small decision that comes to stand for everything the family loses. The story shows new schools, new languages, money worries and small moments of happiness as the family slowly adjusts.

The second book, The Other Way Round (also published as Bombs on Aunt Dainty), moves the story to London during the Second World War. Teenaged Anna faces air raids, blackout curtains and rationing while trying to finish school and help support her parents. Her father struggles to find work in a new language, relatives are scattered, and the war creeps ever closer, but there is also humour, friendship and the sense of a makeshift home taking shape.

In the final book, A Small Person Far Away, Anna is a young married woman living in London in the 1950s. News of her mother’s suicide attempt pulls her back to West Berlin, now a divided city at the edge of the Cold War. While visiting, she is drawn into her mother’s fragile life and the wider tensions of the time, including the arrival of refugees from the Hungarian uprising, and has to decide where her responsibilities lie.

Across the trilogy Kerr keeps the focus firmly on family life: school lessons, threadbare coats, boarding houses, small quarrels and private jokes. Political events and antisemitism are never minimised, but they are shown at child height, in ways that invite questions rather than giving lectures. The writing is clear and understated, making difficult history approachable for confident younger readers and early teens.

Read in order, the three books let children grow up alongside Anna, from the shock of leaving home to the complicated task of building a new one. They work both as gripping stories about one family and as a gentle introduction to the realities of exile, war and post‑war Europe.