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Five Pounds: A Novel of Refuge, Defiance, and the Birth of Curious George
Paperback
Series: The Open Door Trilogy
General FictionHistorical Fiction
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Feb 24 2026
Pages: 296
Weight: 0.79
Height: 0.74 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
The true story behind the world's most beloved children's book is a story the world was never supposed to know.
A sweeping historical novel based on true events - for readers of All the Light We Cannot See, The Tattooist of Auschwitz, and The Librarian of Auschwitz.
In June 1940, as Hitler's armies closed on Paris, two German-Jewish refugees fled the city on makeshift bicycles assembled from junkyard scrap. Strapped to a luggage rack, wrapped in oilcloth, was a five-pound manuscript about a mischievous, tailless monkey - the book the world would come to know as Curious George.
Hans and Margret Rey's desperate escape across a collapsing France is one of the great untold dramas of World War II. They pedaled south through bombed villages and refugee columns, past strafed roads and burning farms, carrying almost nothing but the manuscript. They had no passports that worked. No country that wanted them. And one hundred and fifty miles of occupied territory between them and the border.
Their survival hinged on something more extraordinary than luck: the conscience of a single man.
Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the Portuguese Consul-General in Bordeaux, defied a direct order from dictator António de Oliveira Salazar and hand-stamped an estimated thirty thousand visas in ten days - the largest rescue action by any individual during the Holocaust. Two of those visas belonged to Hans and Margret Rey.
Five Pounds braids the Reys' flight with Mendes's defiance into a riveting work of Holocaust historical fiction that moves from Montmartre to the Spanish border, from a Bordeaux consulate besieged by thousands of desperate refugees to a quiet ship crossing the Atlantic with a manuscript in its hold. It is a novel about the terrible arithmetic of survival - what you carry, what you leave behind, and the five pounds of dead weight that turned out to be worth more than everything else combined.
Drawing on archival research, family testimony, and the Reys' own travel diaries, Five Pounds reconstructs a ten-day escape that has been hinted at in footnotes and children's afterwords for eighty years but never fully told.
This is the first book in The Open Door Trilogy, a sweeping series of Holocaust historical fiction based on true stories of courage, exile, and moral conscience in the darkest chapter of the twentieth century. Each novel stands alone.
A story that will fundamentally change the way you read Curious George to your children.
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