The Reys were living in Paris when World War II began on September 1, 1939. In 1936, they took a honeymoon trip to France, where they stayed for the next four years.

The two were married not long after she arrived and began working together on children’s books. Margarete Waldstein, who, like her future husband, had grown up in Hamburg, made her own way to Brazil after Hitler’s rise to power. The couple’s extraordinary story begins in Rio de Janeiro, where Hans Reyersbach, a budding artist who served in the German army in WWI, had gone seeking adventure. Lining the walls of a large room in the Rey Center’s gallery in Waterville Valley are items from the collection: a series of photos of the Reys and reproductions of Hans’s diaries and sketches, along with framed prints of Drummond’s artwork for the book. That led her to the Reys’ papers at the de Grummond Collection of Children’s Literature at the University of Southern Mississippi. Rey.īorden, a children’s book author with a particular interest in World War II history, says she knew nothing about the Reys’ dramatic wartime escape until she read a brief mention of it in Publishers Weekly. The source of the exhibition is a 2005 children’s book by Louise Borden and illustrated by Allan Drummond entitled The Journey That Saved Curious George: The True Wartime Escape of Margret and H. The exhibit now heads to Naples, Florida, and then travels to Wichita, Kansas.

The suspenseful tale of how the Reys-German Jews who had been living and working in Paris when the Germans invaded in 1940-escaped from Europe and made their way to the United States was the subject of an exhibit this winter at the Rey Center in Waterville Valley, New Hampshire, funded by the New Hampshire Humanities Council.

Rey, and the monkey would be renamed Curious George. Nearly a year later, after a harrowing wartime escape and journey to the United States, the couple would become known as Margret and H.A. But when Hans Rey pulled out a manuscript for a children’s book entitled The Adventures of Fifi, about a mischievous and curious monkey who was always getting into trouble, the official smiled and passed them by.

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