The True Story of How Curious George Escaped the Nazis

00:00:10
Speaker 1: And we continue with our American stories. The idea for Curious George began in the creators, Margaret and H. A. Rey’s, earlier book about a lonely giraffe named Raffi, who were friends nine monkeys, the youngest of which is called Fife. Eventually, the Reys decided to develop a story just about Fife. This was one of the stories they smuggled out of France just before the Nazi invasion during World War II, only to learn when they got to the U.S. that American publisher Houghton Mifflin had doubts about the name Fifi for a boy monkey, and so Fifi became George. Here is Louise Bordon with the story. Louise is the author of The Journey That Saved Curious George, The True Wartime Escape of Margaret and H. A. Rey. Let’s say a listen.

00:01:10
Speaker 2: Welcome to all who enjoy our American stories. I’m the author of many books for young readers, and my subjects range from kindergarten to the Holocaust. When I find a real event that inspires me, like the wartime escape of Margaret and H. A. Rey in nineteen forty, I begin a winding road of research. A few years ago, an Ohio kindergartener told his librarian before my visit to their school: “Louise Borden is a studier.” The librarian corrected him and said, “You mean Louise Borden is a student?” And the kindergartener stated again, “No, Jesus studier.” I love that term studier. A project may take five or even eight years until I hold a bound book in my hands, and I’m just the first person of a publishing team who will create that new book, whether it’s thirty-two pages or two hundred. Six of my books are set during World War II. I tell young readers that I didn’t live through World War II. My sisters and I were born after the war occurred, but our father served in the U.S. Army Air Forces in the Pacific and returned home, while his brother, a naval officer, did not when his submarine was lost in nineteen forty-four. I’ve honored my uncle by writing Across the Blue Pacific, illustrated by Robert Andrew Parker. When kids read our book and say they’re inspired by Ted Walker’s wartime story, it’s very moving to me. Some years ago, I was asked to speak at an event whose theme was telling the American story. Besides my uncle, I’ve written about other inspiring Americans: the Wright Brothers; Bessie Coleman, the first African American to earn a pilot’s license; the Children of Boston on the eve of the American Revolution. So I’m pleased to join in a podcast with the title Our American Stories and tell you the story behind what I think is my most important book, The Journey That Saved Curious George: The True Wartime Escape of Margaret and H. A. Rey, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Join me on two journeys. My own journey as a writer, an amateur detective, and the journey of the Reys, who brought the story of a monkey and his friend, the Man with the Yellow Hat, to the United States. The famous book Curious George, created by H. A. and Margaret Rey, is now eighty years old, but George is ever young. Whenever Americans watched tragic events on TV and see refugees around the world leaving their homes to avoid hurricanes or earthquakes or war, I’m struck by the parallels to June nineteen forty with an exodus from Paris and other French cities when almost ten million people were on the roads. What if you had to flee from your home or town right now? What would you take with you as you traveled into the unknown along unfamiliar roads? And what would you leave behind? When I was growing up, I knew those yellow Curious George books on the shelves of my school library, but I knew nothing about the author H. A. Rey, whose name appeared on the covers. I had no clue what the H and the A stood for. But I was a reader and I loved social studies. And later, on my sixth-grade report card, my teacher, Mrs. Reeser, wrote, “I think Louise will enjoy research all her life. Bon voyage!” When I see her words now, decades later, I know wise Mrs. Reeser would be pleased that her prediction came true. Here’s a bit of background for my journey: years ago, on a college study trip to Europe with fellow history students, my sister and I were on our own for several days, and we bicycled along country roads in Holland with just a few items in the baskets on her bikes. I never imagined then how this experience would help me when I wrote about Margaret and Hans Rey. Decades later, my senior research at Dennison University was the European response to Hitler, focusing on resistance movements and ordinary citizens set against the canvas of wartime events. Ever since, I’ve held a lifelong interest in World War II. My first book for young readers was published in nineteen eighty-nine, and at the time I was part owner of an independent bookstore and subscribed to a trade journal, Publishers Weekly, often called PW, to learn more about the industry of books. Later, I left my bookseller job to pursue the writing life, but continued to read PW. After publishing six or seven picture books, I began The Little Ships: The Heroic Rescue at Dunkirk. From my college studies, I knew about the exodus of refugees from Paris to escape from the German invasion and the plight of British and French soldiers trapped on the beaches at Dunkirk. One day, at my desk, surrounded by research for The Little Ships, I paged through that week’s Publishers Weekly and noticed a short autobiographical sketch of Margaret and H. A. Rey, and in this snippet, Margaret Rey said, “In June nineteen forty, on a rainy morning before dawn, a few hours before the Nazis entered, we left Paris on bicycles with nothing but warm coats and our manuscripts. Curious George among them, tied to the baggage racks, and started pedaling south. We finally made it to Lisbon by train, having sold our bicycles to customs officials at the French-Spanish border. Our migrations came to an end one clear, crisp October morning in nineteen forty when we saw the Statue of Liberty rise above the harbor of New York, and we landed in the U.S.A.” Wow! How amazing: bicycles! That’s quintessential Curious George. Instantly, I wanted to know more. I found a map of France and traced a line from Paris to the Spanish Order hundreds of miles. Where did they take a train? I had an image in my head of Margaret and Hans, unknown artists in a sea of refugees, an image I would carry with me over the next years of trying to find their story. I kept marveling to myself, “What an incredible journey!” I assumed there must be a book about this, a book I wanted to read. But there wasn’t. No one had dusted off the history until a seed of wonder and curiosity was planted that morning when I read Publishers Weekly. I labeled my first folder of notes June nineteen forty. This file would grow to dozens of folders and boxes of information, scattered across two rooms of our house in Cincinnati. I emailed Houghton Mifflin to ask if anyone there knew details about the Reys’ escape. No one did.

00:08:59
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Louise Borden, who a student — a young student, I think — aptly called her a studier, because that’s in the end what she was and is: a studier of other people, a researcher, a fancier word, but I like “studier,” and this story is as much about her as it is about Margaret and H. A. Rey’s story. In fact, they intersect. I had an image of Margaret and H. A. Rey as unknown artists in a sea of refugees. He tracked that bicycle trip. He looked at it. What was that like? What an adventure? He tracked that train ride. She was trying to walk in the shoes of another. And that’s what studiers do. When we come back, more with Louise Borden, studier, historian, and just straight-up great storyteller. Here on Our American Stories, and we continue with Our American Stories and with Louise Borden, author of The Journey That Saved Curious George. We last left off with this remarkable and young artistic couple landing at the shores of New York. Let’s continue with Louise Burden.

00:10:26
Speaker 2: I emailed Houghton Mifflin to ask if anyone there knew details about the Reys’ escape. No one did, but I was pointed to Lay Lee On, the executor of the Rey estate. Margaret Rey had died recently at the age of ninety. Oh, how I regretted never being able to meet her! And H. A. had passed away in the late 1970s. Lay Lee, living in Boston, would become an early and steady encourager of my vision for a book. She told me she’d just shipped dozens of boxes from the Reys’ long creative lives to the De Grummen Collection at the University of Southern Mississippi. So I called the D Grumman’s curator at the time and asked her to look for any envelopes with a return address in Paris, and she called me back the Terrasse Hotel: 12 Rue Joseph Dems Off. I went to Paris to find the Terrasse Hotel, but on my first visit there, yes, it still existed and was beautiful. The owner and the manager were away. No one could help me with any information. Back home in Ohio, I found some biographical facts about the Reys. I learned the H stood for Hans and the A stood for Augusto, and that Hans’s last name was ryer’s Bach. Hmmm, why did H. A. change his name Terray? And when I learned Margaret and Hans were both German Jews who’d grown up in Hamburg. I learned Hans was born in nineteen ninety-eight and Margaret was born in nineteen o-six, that their families knew each other in Hamburg, that Hans, who loved animals and could imitate the sounds of many, lived near the Hagenbeck Zoo and served in World War I in the German army and was a self-taught artist. That after the war, due to hard economic times, he loved Hamburg to live in Rio, Brazil. Soon I had folders labeled “Hamburg” and “Brazil.” I learned that Margaret Margaret Woldstein had attended art school and was a photographer and artist. And ten years later, in nineteen thirty-five, after Hitler came to power in Germany and began his Nazi laws against Jews, Margaret also left Hamburg and went to Rio. There she connected with her family friend Hans Ryersbach, who was to shorten his name to Rey, and the two artists were married in August of nineteen thirty-five. Very importantly, as German-born Jews, they became Brazilian citizens, and in nineteen thirty-six they sailed to Europe, taking pet marmosets with them aboard their ship and traveled on to Paris to spend their honeymoon. The images for a book for young readers were all there. Here was the larger story, beyond their escape on bicycles. Without a contract from any publisher, I headed to the De grumm And Collection early on a dark, rainy Ohio morning, leaving my house at 5:30 a.m. The same time I would learn the Reys left Paris. When I finally arrived in Gulfport, I rented a car and drove sixty miles north to Hattiesburg, where the De Grumman collection is located. Most of the documents were in black-and-white, but scattered across my worktable were the colors of the books created by Margaret and H. A. and their now iconic illustrations. I was instantly drawn to Hans’s first book, published in France and also in England, titled Raffy and the Nine Monkeys, with its bright green cover about a giraffe and nine little monkeys, including the youngest named Fifi. I spotted a telegram among some papers: “Have had a very narrow escape. Baggage all lost,” asking for money to be wired to the Reys. Signed Rey. Thankfully, the Reys were sabers and kept everything from their publishing lives, royalty statements, editorial letters, drafts, ideas, sketches, proofs, and black-and-white photos taken by Margaret in the 1930s and 1940s. I came home from this first trip to the De Grummen with hundreds of Xeroxed copies. I would later enlarge these tiny pages and translate them with the help of my sister Cindy, in Missouri, and in Cincinnati, my former high school French teacher, Renée Lowther, who’d lived through the German occupation of France. I recall the day Cindy and I, with pages strewn across her dining room table, read the June 12, 1940, entry in Hans’s calendar, written in French: “Left Paris at 5:30 a.m. by bicycle.” We realized then that H. A. was going to tell us where he and Margaret went on the two bicycles that he’d assembled from spare parts in a Paris bike shop the day before the Reys left the Turret Hotel. I soon had folders of maps of France, Spain, and Portugal. I made tracking calendars for the years 1936 to 1940, writing on various dates where they were, including a château in 1939 where the Reys visited friends for three months working on art for a book about a curious monkey named Fifi. And I added Hans’s diary entries onto my 1940 tracking calendar. Each day he’d scribbled a few words about their journey south from Paris. Then I began working on an early draft. When writing for children, I’m always thinking about the structure of the book. How can a long-ago time and complicated political era best be shown to young readers, and what will expand the text in meaningful ways. I was enchanted by a small watercolor painting at the D Grummen that Hans had made in Hamburg at the age of eight. “Bingo!” I said to myself. “That’s where all begin this story in Hamburg with Hans as a kid.” Here’s the opening text. In nineteen o-six, Hans Augusta Reyersbach was a boy growing up in Hamburg, Germany, a port city with canals and a thousand bridges and the River Elbe that ran to the North Sea. At the age of eight, Hans spent many hours in the cold breeze near Hamburg’s docks, watching foreign ships and barges move along the Elbe. For the rest of his life, Hans would love boats and rivers and the sea. I took more research trips, returning to Paris to stay in a balcony room at the Terrasse Hotel, just as the Reys had stayed in a balcony room where they spent their honeymoon in nineteen thirty-six, but instead of staying for a few weeks, the two artists ended up living at the Terrasse for four years. On that trip, I rented a car and drove out of Paris. Gripping the wheel, I headed south along country roads to a tomp tour and Orléans, using a 1940s map of France, following the bicycles’ footsteps that Hans had noted in his calendar diary. Then in Orléans, I veered off their escape journey’s route and took a train south to find the château near Lectoure. The owners, a British couple, who became as amazed by the Reys’ lives as I was when I explained Hans and Margaret’s years in France. There are months working on book projects in a tower room of this very château, and later their escape from Paris.

00:18:54
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Louise Bourdon, and indeed studier is becoming more and more — well, what she was: a tracker. I mean, imagine from Hattiesburg to Paris and then using a 1940s map, rechasing the steps of this remarkable couple. These artists. When we come back, more of Louise Borden’s trek, discover the real-life story and escape of Margaret and H. A. Rey from the Nazis. Here on Our American Stories, and we continue with Our American Stories and the story of Louise bordon in many ways, and her journey to find out about The Journey That Saved Curious George and that would be Margaret and H. A. Rey’s journey, and how these two journeys in the end intersect. Let’s pick up with Louise Borden where we last left off.

00:20:02
Speaker 2: I emailed Houghton Mifflin to ask if anyone there knew details about the Reys’ escape. No one did, but I was pointed to Lay Lee On, the executor of the Rey estate. Margaret Rey had died recently at the age of ninety. Oh, how I regretted never being able to meet her! And H. A. had passed away in the late 1970s. Lay Lee, living in Boston, would become an early and steady encourager of my vision for a book. She told me she’d just shipped dozens of boxes from the Reys’ long creative lives to the De Grummen Collection at the University of Southern Mississippi. So I called the D Grumman’s curator at the time and asked her to look for any envelopes with a return address in Paris, and she called me back the Terrasse Hotel: 12 Rue Joseph Dems Off. I went to Paris to find the Terrasse Hotel, but on my first visit there, yes, it still existed and was beautiful. The owner and the manager were away. No one could help me with any information. Back home in Ohio, I found some biographical facts about the Reys. I learned the H stood for Hans and the A stood for Augusto, and that Hans’s last name was ryer’s Bach. Hmmm, why did H. A. change his name Terray? And when I learned Margaret and Hans were both German Jews who’d grown up in Hamburg. I learned Hans was born in nineteen ninety-eight and Margaret was born in nineteen o-six, that their families knew each other in Hamburg, that Hans, who loved animals and could imitate the sounds of many, lived near the Hagenbeck Zoo and served in World War I in the German army and was a self-taught artist. That after the war, due to hard economic times, he loved Hamburg to live in Rio, Brazil. Soon I had folders labeled “Hamburg” and “Brazil.” I learned that Margaret Margaret Woldstein had attended art school and was a photographer and artist. And ten years later, in nineteen thirty-five, after Hitler came to power in Germany and began his Nazi laws against Jews, Margaret also left Hamburg and went to Rio. There she connected with her family friend Hans Ryersbach, who was to shorten his name to Rey, and the two artists were married in August of nineteen thirty-five. Very importantly, as German-born Jews, they became Brazilian citizens, and in nineteen thirty-six they sailed to Europe, taking pet marmosets with them aboard their ship and traveled on to Paris to spend their honeymoon. The images for a book for young readers were all there. Here was the larger story, beyond their escape on bicycles. Without a contract from any publisher, I headed to the De grumm And Collection early on a dark, rainy Ohio morning, leaving my house at 5:30 a.m. The same time I would learn the Reys left Paris. When I finally arrived in Gulfport, I rented a car and drove sixty miles north to Hattiesburg, where the De Grumman collection is located. Most of the documents were in black-and-white, but scattered across my worktable were the colors of the books created by Margaret and H. A. and their now iconic illustrations. I was instantly drawn to Hans’s first book, published in France and also in England, titled Raffy and the Nine Monkeys, with its bright green cover about a giraffe and nine little monkeys, including the youngest named Fifi. I spotted a telegram among some papers: “Have had a very narrow escape. Baggage all lost,” asking for money to be wired to the Reys. Signed Rey. Thankfully, the Reys were sabers and kept everything from their publishing lives, royalty statements, editorial letters, drafts, ideas, sketches, proofs, and black-and-white photos taken by Margaret in the 1930s and 1940s. I came home from this first trip to the De Grummen with hundreds of Xeroxed copies. I would later enlarge these tiny pages and translate them with the help of my sister Cindy, in Missouri, and in Cincinnati, my former high school French teacher, Renée Lowther, who’d lived through the German occupation of France. I recall the day Cindy and I, with pages strewn across her dining room table, read the June 12, 1940, entry in Hans’s calendar, written in French: “Left Paris at 5:30 a.m. by bicycle.” We realized then that H. A. was going to tell us where he and Margaret went on the two bicycles that he’d assembled from spare parts in a Paris bike shop the day before the Reys left the Turret Hotel. I soon had folders of maps of France, Spain, and Portugal. I made tracking calendars for the years 1936 to 1940, writing on various dates where they were, including a château in 1939 where the Reys visited friends for three months working on art for a book about a curious monkey named Fifi. And I added Hans’s diary entries onto my 1940 tracking calendar. Each day he’d scribbled a few words about their journey south from Paris. Then I began working on an early draft. When writing for children, I’m always thinking about the structure of the book. How can a long-ago time and complicated political era best be shown to young readers, and what will expand the text in meaningful ways. I was enchanted by a small watercolor painting at the D Grummen that Hans had made in Hamburg at the age of eight. “Bingo!” I said to myself. “That’s where all begin this story in Hamburg with Hans as a kid.” Here’s the opening text. In nineteen o-six, Hans Augusta Reyersbach was a boy growing up in Hamburg, Germany, a port city with canals and a thousand bridges and the River Elbe that ran to the North Sea. At the age of eight, Hans spent many hours in the cold breeze near Hamburg’s docks, watching foreign ships and barges move along the Elbe. For the rest of his life, Hans would love boats and rivers and the sea. I took more research trips, returning to Paris to stay in a balcony room at the Terrasse Hotel, just as the Reys had stayed in a balcony room where they spent their honeymoon in nineteen thirty-six, but instead of staying for a few weeks, the two artists ended up living at the Terrasse for four years. On that trip, I rented a car and drove out of Paris. Gripping the wheel, I headed south along country roads to a tomp tour and Orléans, using a 1940s map of France, following the bicycles’ footsteps that Hans had noted in his calendar diary. Then in Orléans, I veered off their escape journey’s route and took a train south to find the château near Lectoure. The owners, a British couple, who became as amazed by the Reys’ lives as I was when I explained Hans and Margaret’s years in France. There are months working on book projects in a tower room of this very château, and later their escape from Paris.

00:20:29
Speaker 3: We were living in France when we did the first curist. Judge George was really born in France. It’s a matter of fact, I tell you a little more precisely. We did a book about a giraffe, and the giraffe took nine little monkeys in and one of those little monkeys was George. And then a while leader we thought of a book about a monkey, and we did this first Curious Judge. Never thought of a series. And then over the years, we get so many letters from children saying, “What can George do next?” And, “Won’t you do another book?” So then we did another book. Tell us about Curious George in the Hospital. Did it start because you had a child who had to go to the hospital?

00:21:10
Speaker 4: No, we don’t really don’t have children, and you have Curious George started. Yes, it is sort of a child, and it’s one of the children who take care of their parents. You know, we are in the monkey business, you might say.

00:21:25
Speaker 3: Tell us about your background. It goes from Germany, but my husband left it in Germany nineteen twenty-five, where I left it much later, and we met again in Brazil in the 1930s. I mean, you knew each other? And we knew each other a little bit.

00:21:41
Speaker 4: And Ji I knew her when she was a child at her father’s house, and she doesn’t remember. She came sliding down the banisters and I was standing downstairs with her older sister, and there she came. That’s how I met her.

00:21:56
Speaker 2: Aren’t those voices so wonderful to listen to? After Journey was published, at his office in New York, I met André Schiffrin, the son of Jacques Schiffrin, Hans’s editor at Gallimard, and showed him his father’s letters to h André’s fifth birthday was the day the Germans marched into Paris. The Schiffrin family would also leave France due to the German invasion and because Jacques, who was Jewish, had lost his job. Jacques was the editor who’d first encouraged H. A. Rey to write for children and published Raffi and the Nine Monkeys. He would settle in New York City like his friends the Reys, and become a founder of the publishing house Pantheon Books. The seven original Curious George books have now been printed in the millions and are published in many languages. I signed two book contracts with Houghton.