Heidi

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When I was seven years old I had to flee from Austria, where I was born, and seek refuge in England.

I was lucky — all my family escaped from Hitler — but I was terribly homesick. Until then we had spent summer in the freedom of the mountains, and now I was in a crowded and dirty part of London, shut in by high walls.

Then one day my grandmother took me to the public library, and there on the shelf was Heidi. I pounced on it: the picture on the cover was of a young girl sitting in a flower‐filled meadow, inside were illustrations of rampaging goats, a hawk circling the high peaks… I had read the book in German, now I had to learn English quickly so that I could read it again — and when I had done so I felt a wonderful sense of homecoming. It was all there, everything I yearned for and remembered: the rocky peaks turned to rose when the sun went down, the neat wooden houses, the brilliant stars. And the sound of the wind in the fir trees, which will follow Heidi in her dreams wherever life will take her.

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