Nothing's exclusive

Chinese edition of Desarthe's book, Les Freres Chats (Cat Brothers). [Photo provided to China Daily]

"It's a problem that I am interested in. It's a crucial issue. It's one of the themes that I put in my books for children because children are very sensitive to exclusion and they are interested in this kind of problem, too," Desarthe tells China Daily.

She says she tries to make fun of such problems, using animals to make the problem look less serious.

"But this is a very serious theme. Why should anyone be excluded from anything?" she says.

Desarthe's maternal grandfather was killed in Auschwitz during World War II. As a writer of Jewish origin, Desarthe takes the responsibility to draw people's attention to that part of history.

"I speak about what I know. For many people in France, it's either mysterious or even worse－false. Lots of people would like to think it never happened." she says.

"It's important to bring history to life. One of the ways is to fictionalize it, to make novels out of it and write stories about it, to draw people to something that they might either ignore or don't want to hear about, because they think it's too sad, too horrible."

Telling children about violence in history through stories is probably a good idea because they are within the comfort of storytelling, according to Desarthe.