Suppose your country began to change. Suppose that without your noticing, it became dangerous for some people to live in any longer. Suppose you found, to your complete surprise, that your own father was one of those people.

That is what happened to Anna, in Germany in 1933.

She was nine years old when it began, too busy with her schoolwork and tobogganing to take much notice of political posters, but out of them glared the face of Adolf Hitler, the man who would soon change the whole of Europe—starting with her own small life.

Anna suddenly found things moving too fast for her to understand. One day her father was unaccountably, frighteningly, missing. Then she herself and her brother Max were being rushed by their mother in alarming secrecy away from everything they knew—home and schoolmates and well-loved toys—right out of Germany.

In a foreign land the family was reunited, moving into a huge adventure that was to go on for years through country after country. For Anna and Max it meant learning all the way—new languages and peoples, how to pick their way through the wildest confusions and how to be poor. There were special skills to being a refugee, Anna discovered, and against all expectations she could actually enjoy them. So long as the family stayed together, that was all that mattered. Tight together, nothing mattered. But if anything should crack them apart...

Judith Kerr is already well known for her children's picture books. With this delightful and moving novel for older readers, she breaks new ground. Perhaps not quite a novel. Most of it is true.

From the dust jacket