But because I had already written quite a few books set in England during World War II, I decided to do something different here, more interesting and certainly more unusual, something which is more about the universal suffering in any war, all wars. I would set it in Germany. I knew, of course, about the Allied bombing, mostly by the Americans and the British, of Germany, and in particular, of the terrible destruction of Dresden in 1945. I discovered they had a zoo there too, and I discovered also that exactly the same order had gone out in that zoo, to shoot all the large animals if the bombers came, our bombers.
The second inspirational root of my story came from a friend whose family had joined hundreds of thousands of other German refugees in 1945, making their way westward towards the advancing Allies, safer they thought than the Russian army that was invading from the east. The grandmother of this family wrote a wonderfully detailed account of this flight to safety, for her children and her grandchildren, so that the story wouldn’t be forgotten, and so that her husband, who had been killed, would be remembered. He had been one of the officers who had plotted to kill Hitler in 1944, but failed. He had been executed, as they all were. She was kind enough to show her account to me, and it became another important inspiration for the book, and the countess in particular.
There is a third inspiration for the story though: elephants themselves. I have always thought they are the noblest and wisest and most sensitive of all creatures. I think in my next life, I would like to be an elephant, please. Then I could write about people, who, as you can tell from this story, and from human history, are often not nearly as noble and wise as they should be, sadly.
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AN ELEPHANT IN THE GARDEN
possible are:
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publisher
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A FEIWEL AND FRIENDS BOOK
AN ELEPHANT IN THE GARDEN. Copyright © 2010 by Michael Morpurgo. All rights reserved. For information, address Feiwel and Friends, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
First published in the United States in 2011 by Feiwel and Friends Originally published in Great Britain in 2010 by HarperCollins Children’s Books
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available
ISBN: 978-1-4668-0445-6
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Michael Morpurgo, An Elephant in the Garden
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