‘Curious George’ helps his creators avoid Nazi persecution

America’s favorite storybook monkey, Curious George, had a most adventuresome early life.

He became a hero in 1940, saving the lives of his creators. A new documentary film, “Monkey Business: The Adventures of Curious George’s Creators,” has received favorable reviews.

Writer and illustrator Hans Reyersbach and Margret Waldstein were neighbors and grew up in Jewish homes in Hamburg, Germany.

He moved to Brazil after World War I and took a job selling bathtubs. Sometime later, she followed him to Brazil. Together, they started the first advertising agency in Rio de Janeiro, and they were married in 1935.

Hans and Margret took a vacation to Paris the following year. “What was supposed to be a four-week trip turned into four years,” said film director Ema Ryan Yamazaki. At some point, their surname was shortened to Rey, believed to be an attempt to mask their Jewish heritage.

While in Paris, Hans and Margret completed the first manuscript for what would become Curious George.

Michael Miller of People magazine wrote: “Like so many other Parisians at the time, the Nazi invasion in 1940 caught the Reys off-guard. As Jews, their lives were at stake and they resolved to escape. But by the time Hans went looking for a pair of bicycles to flee Paris, everything was sold out.”

“The only bike available was a tandem, a two-seater,” Yamazaki explained in an interview with Miller. “But Hans was able to build two separate bikes by incorporating spare parts.”

They left Paris just a few hours before the Nazi occupation. Margret told the story that they shoved off and pedaled south “in June 1940, on a rainy morning before dawn, with nothing but warm coats and our manuscripts – Curious George among them – tied to the baggage racks.”

The Reys were abruptly stopped at a checkpoint by two German guards.

Sarah Pearson of the Concord (N.H.) Monitor interviewed David Foster, a friend of Hans and Margret, who said: “They were accused of being spies. As they were being searched, one of the guards saw the Curious George illustrations and said, ‘they aren’t spies, they’re artists,’ and they were released.”

Dagnabbit. What a relief. The Reys rode their bikes for four days. Their 415-mile journey took them to Bayonne, France, where they were issued life-saving visas signed by the Portuguese consul-general. They crossed the Spanish border where they bought train tickets to Lisbon, Portugal.

From there they returned to Brazil where they attained American visas to allow them to continue their odyssey and move to New York City.

In 1941, Margret said: “We took a small apartment in New York’s Greenwich Village, rolled up our sleeves, and were ready to start from scratch. We did not know a single publisher, but before the week was over we had found a home for Curious George at Houghton Mifflin.”

Curious George was an instant success, and the Reys were commissioned to write more adventures of the mischievous monkey. They wrote seven stories in all. Eventually, they bought a home near Harvard Square in Cambridge, Mass.

From the mid-1950s forward, the Reys would spend their summers in Waterville, N.H. Hans would work on his books around the hotel swimming pool.

“The children just flocked to him – I was one of them,” David Foster told Pearson. He was about 5 years old when he met the couple.

Virginia J. Johnson, a librarian at the Central Rappahannock Regional Library in Fredericksburg, Va., wrote that Hans and Margret Rey “had no children themselves, but kids across the world have made friends with their little monkey, Curious George.”

Margret Rey told Johnson: “Among children, we seem to be known as the parents of Curious George. ‘I thought you were monkeys, too,’ said a little boy who had been eager to meet us, disappointment written all over his face.’”

A review of the “Monkey Business” documentary by film critic Renee Schonfeld of Common Sense Media noted: “Charming animation by artist Jacob Kafka is superimposed on the newsreel film, so that young audiences see Hans and Margret as cartoon heroes amid the crowds. In spite of the horrors of European wartime and occupation…there are no frightening or graphic scenes, no atrocities shown or referenced.”

Schonfeld said. “For middle grades and up, the film is recommended for family viewing and should provide ample opportunity for discussion of a critical historical era, as well as a celebration of two unique people whose life journey left an indelible mark on children’s literature.”

A father who commented on the documentary offered praise to the Reys for “their gift to the free world…about the adventures of a small, curious monkey. These stories have settled in the minds of millions of children and their children’s children.”

Hans died in 1977, leaving Margret to handle the Curious George franchise until her death in 1996. One of her greatest individual accomplishments was the establishment in 1989 of The Curious George Foundation to “fund programs for children that share Curious George’s irresistible qualities: curiosity in learning, exploring, ingenuity, opportunity and determination.”