Five Pounds

The true story behind the world's most beloved children's book is a story the world was never supposed to know.

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. But their survival hinged on something even more extraordinary: 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 30,000 visas in ten days — the largest rescue action by an individual during the Holocaust. For this, the regime destroyed him. They stripped his title, his pension, his right to practice law. They watched as he sold his estate piece by piece to feed his children. He died in poverty, buried in a borrowed robe.

The dictator commanded armies. But the dictator could not unstamp the paper.

Five Pounds braids the Reys' flight with Mendes's defiance into a riveting narrative that moves from Montmartre to the Spanish border, from a Bordeaux consulate besieged by thousands to the charity ward where a hero died forgotten. 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.

For listeners of All the Light We Cannot See, The Tattooist of Auschwitz, and The Librarian of Auschwitz — a story that will fundamentally change the way you read Curious George to your children.