Author Judith Kerr, whose Jewish family fled from the Nazis when she was a young girl and whose story "The Tiger Who Came to Tea" enchanted a generation of children, has died at the age of 95.




Her death was announced by her publisher, Harper Collins, which said that Kerr had died after a short illness. It did not specify a cause.
"It is with great sadness that we announce that Judith Kerr OBE, author and illustrator of The Tiger Who Came to Tea, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, Mog the Forgetful Cat and many other classic children’s books, died at home yesterday aged 95 following a short illness," HarperCollins said.
"The Tiger Who Came to Tea" tells the story of a little girl and her mother who are having tea at home when a friendly tiger arrives unannounced, eats all the food and then leaves, never to return.
Kerr told Reuters on 2015 that when her daughter Tacy was a toddler, the girl would often say "Talk the tiger". Years later, when both of her children were at school and she was wondering what to do next, she hit upon the idea of a book.
It was published in 1968 to critical acclaim and has been a bestseller ever since, with "Mog the Forgetful Cat" following in 1970, the first of a long series.
Kerr was often asked whether the tiger has a hidden meaning, and some people have suggested that it might represent Hitler or the Nazis, invading her home and stealing her possessions. Kerr dismissed this, saying the idea for the tiger simply came from a visit to the zoo with Tacy, and the creature was harmless.
"I never think about telling small children what to think," she told Reuters with a grin in 2015.
Kerr was born in Berlin and her family left Germany in 1933 to escape the rise of the Nazi Party and came to Britain via Paris.
The family's struggle to get by as impoverished refugees in Paris and then wartime London formed the subject of Kerr’s autobiographical trilogy that started with "When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit", published in 1971.
The book has been translated into many languages and taught to school children as an introduction to a dark chapter of history. It won the prestigious Youth Book Prize in Germany, and in 1993 a school was named after Kerr in her native Berlin.
Kerr said that as she had got older she had thought more often about the Jewish children from her generation who perished in the Holocaust, and of the lives they might have lived.
"If you’ve got a life that so many people didn’t have, you can’t waste it," she told Reuters.
As a young woman, Kerr worked as a textile designer, art teacher and script writer at the BBC before taking time out from work to raise her and her husband Tom's two children.