Trains to Life—Trains to Death

In 2008, children’s author-illustrator Judith Kerr deposited her archive to Seven Stories: The National Centre for Children’s Books in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. The archive includes two illustrated stories Kerr made as a child in exile from Nazi Germany that narrate her experience of train travel in the Hitler years. This chapter reads these stories as intergenerationally solidaristic: firstly, it builds on the text by an author and an illustrator of an older generation and, secondly, it creates a bond between herself and her parents in a period of separation as a consequence of forced migration. The final part of this chapter turns to an example of train travel in When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit and finds that Kerr’s intergenerational solidaristic practice continued in adulthood. In this example, the children’s novel also forges a link between daughter and parents; the train in Emil and the Detectives can again be read as a departure point.