‘When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit’ captures family’s flight amid rise of Nazis

“When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit”

Not Rated. On VOD.

Grade: B+

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. 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). 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. How this uprooting affects his children and his wife is the subject of the story. Anna mourns the loss of her friends and classmates and family home. She begins to draw a series of “disasters” beginning with a shipwreck. 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.

Her mother only allows her and Max to take one suitcase apiece, and she must choose only one toy to bring with her. After sad consideration she leaves behind her pink rabbit. Anna wishes their German housekeeper Heimpi (veteran Ursula Werner) could come with them. She and Anna are very close. But, alas, like the pink rabbit, Heimpi must stay behind.

Directed 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. But it is not as emotionally devastating as Agnieszka Holland’s “Europa Europa” (1990), for example. Life is difficult for the Kempers to be sure. Swiss publishers are afraid to publish Arthur’s anti-Nazi stories. He takes the family boating on Lake Zurich for Anna’s 10^th birthday. After Switzerland, the family moves to Paris, where the children must learn a new language. They move into garret-like servants’ quarters in an apartment house run by the cruel concierge Madame Prune (Anne Bennent). Typical of Kerr’s style, Mme. Prune is both unpleasant and darkly comical. The Kempers have a neighbor upstairs, a young woman who is an anti-Semite. Arthur, who gets a part-time job at a Jewish newspaper, must dodge Mme. Prune when he can’t pay the rent.

Anna and Max go diving in a Paris fountain to retrieve coins. They subsist on eggs, cheese and baguettes. Arthur is very well-educated and refined and is an ambulatory encyclopedia. Pianist Dorothea, who had to leave her piano in Berlin, was working on an opera. She now only has a keyboard made of cloth. Hitler puts a price on Arthur’s head. Arthur does not think it is high enough. The Eiffel Tower becomes the family’s new landmark of choice, and Arthur begins work on a screenplay about Napoleon. Can Anna and the family face another move to London?

Masucci, who once played Hitler, brings great depth and gravitas to the film’s hard-pressed patriarch. Krymalowski makes Anna convincingly wise and full of fighting spirit. Hohmann’s Max struggles with puberty in a foreign land, and Juri’s Dorothea must hold the family together at all costs. The pleasures of “How Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit,” which is based on the first of a trilogy of books by Kerr, do not outweigh the family’s troubles or the darkness of the times. But they ring out loud and clear.

(“When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit” contains mature themes)

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/2T6Gveu