An Elephant in the Garden

Content Warning: Quote 3 features discussion of antisemitism and the Holocaust, and Quotes 13 and 14 describe the firebombing of Dresden.

“But I promise you I can remember just how it was when I was young. I remember the important things, the things that matter. It is as if I wrote them down in my mind, so that I should not forget. So I remember very well—it was on the evening of my sixteenth birthday—that I looked out of the window, and saw [an elephant in the garden]. There was no doubt about it. She was an elephant, quite definitely an elephant. I did not know it at the time, of course, but this elephant in our garden was going to change my life forever, change all our lives in my family. And you might say she was going to save all our lives also.”

Lizzie’s memories of “the important things, the things that matter” that occurred when she was young form the plot of the story she tells to her nurse and Karl, the nurse’s son. Her assertion that the elephant would change her life and save “all [her family’s] lives also” is a narrative hook that engages readers’ interest in what Lizzie remembers. It creates anticipation and suspense by foreshadowing that the events in Lizzie’s young life were both dramatic and dangerous.

“And whenever we could on summer nights, Karli and I would sleep up in the tree house on the island [in the pond at Uncle Manfred’s farm]. We would lie awake listening to the gramophone playing far away in the farmhouse, to the owls calling one another. We would watch the moon sailing through the clouds. […] Karli would go riding on Tomi [Manfred’s horse] with Uncle Manfred every day out around the farm, and I would go bicycling on my own. I went off for hours on end. I loved free-wheeling down a hill, the wind in my face. It was our dreamtime, full of sunshine and laughter. But dreams do not last, do they? And sometimes they turn into nightmares.”

Lizzie describes her and Karli’s childhood as their “dreamtime”: a period of joy, peace, beauty, and freedom. Their dreams turning into nightmares alludes to how their lives changed when the war came to Germany. Before the war invaded their lives, Lizzie and Karli existed in a state of childhood innocence. The loss of their dreams suggests their subsequent loss of innocence, which supports the novel’s coming-of-age theme.

“I always recognized injustice when I saw it, and I felt it deeply. And […] there was plenty of it about in those days. I saw the Jews in the streets, with their yellow stars sewn onto their coats. I saw their shops with the [S]tar of David daubed in paint all over the windows. Several times I saw them beaten up by Nazi stormtroopers, and left to lie in the gutter.”

The Nazi government under Adolph Hitler persecuted the Jewish population relentlessly, leading to the horrors of the Holocaust. Lizzie clearly remembers the terrible displays of antisemitism she observed as a child in Germany; they are among “the important things, the things that matter” that she references at the beginning of the book (15).