AMSTERDAM — During World War II, a series of playful children’s books were published in the Netherlands under the pseudonym El Pintor. One book shows children flying on the backs of sparrows. In another, they float, attached to balloons. There’s a pop-up book with people and animals nestled in trees and an activity book with paper cutouts.
The books sold thousands of copies and were popular not only in the Netherlands, which was invaded and occupied by Nazi Germany in 1940, but also in Germany.
The books did more than entertain children during the grim war days. Behind the pseudonym El Pintor was a Jewish couple, Galinka Ehrenfest and Jacob Kloot. They used the name El Pintor to obscure their heritage and channeled the proceeds of their picture books to fund the Dutch resistance and help Jews in hiding from the Nazi regime.
They did so at great risk, said Linda Horn, who wrote a book published in the Netherlands about Ehrenfest’s life.
“Secrecy was very important, people could not write down what they did,” says Horn of resistance people. “There are hardly any sources.”
El Pintor, which also included the work of other artists and writers who collaborated with Ehrenfest and Kloot, produced about two dozen children’s books and games in the early 1940s. Now, 23 of the books — including copies of all titles published in Dutch, one published only in German, and several translations — will go on sale this week at the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair.
Peter Kraus, the owner of Ursus Rare Books, which sells the collection, said a Dutch collector acquired it bit by bit over 30 years.
Kloot came from a large Jewish working-class family in Amsterdam, while Ehrenfest was born in what is now Estonia. Her father, Paul Ehrenfest, moved the family to Leiden, Netherlands in 1912. He was a prominent physicist and was friends with Albert Einstein. According to an article that appeared on the front page of DailyExpertNews in 1923, Paul received Einstein when he fled from Berlin to Leiden, planning to stay “until general conditions improve and anti-Semitic hatred in Berlin abates.”
Ehrenfest spent a few years in the United States in the early 1930s, where she attended art school in California and began drawing regularly. She then returned to the Netherlands and enrolled at the New Art Academy in Amsterdam, founded by an artist who had fled Germany. The school was later forced to close by the Nazi regime, which remained in parts of the Netherlands until the German surrender in 1945.
She met Kloot at the New Art Academy. They moved in together in 1936 and were married five years later.
In 1940, Kloot founded a small publishing house in Amsterdam called Corunda, through which El Pintor began publishing children’s books. Ehrenfest became the creative powerhouse, drawing and writing stories, while Kloot ran the company.
Publishing books was difficult during the Nazi occupation. Paper was scarce and expensive, and official permission was required to print books. Approved books were given a serial number that allowed them to be published, sold in bookstores and, in the case of El Pintor, exported to Germany.
In 1941, the Nazi regime forced Jewish businesses to be transferred to non-Jews. Kloot did so and handed it over to an acquaintance, but remained involved in the operations.
Kraus, who sells the El Pintor collection, said part of what makes the books unique — beyond the powerful story behind them — is their variety. There are picture books, activity books, and early chapter books. Some are about the size of an adult’s hand, while others are much larger, like a flimsy coffee table book. Horn said they were all designed to get kids to think and play differently than other more traditional books of the era.
“The books encourage kids to make a mess, to draw on white walls, funny things like that,” Horn said.
Although thousands of copies were printed, Kraus said very few are left — perhaps because they are children’s books. “Children’s books are usually rare,” he said, “because kids ruin them.”
As the war continued, Kloot and Ehrenfest became deeply involved in the resistance and helped people escape Nazi persecution. Kloot often traveled across the country helping people in danger find shelter.
In 1943 Nazi officers arrested Kloot and his business partner in Leiden. They let the partner go, but Kloot, who was 26, was deported and sent to Westerbork, a transit camp in the Netherlands, and from there to Sobibor, an extermination camp, where he was murdered.
At the time of Kloot’s arrest, Ehrenfest was pregnant with their first child. Soon after, she gave birth to a stillborn baby. She tried to keep producing books as El Pintor, Horn said, but in the end it proved too difficult without Kloot and with the increasing dangers and challenges of the war years.
Ehrenfest survived and published one last book as El Pintor after the end of the war. She remained in the Netherlands, where she died in 1979. She was 69 years old.
“It’s a horrible moment in history and it’s a paradox that this horrible thing should have such an aesthetic monument,” Kraus said, staring at El Pintor’s books, whose colors are still vibrant after 80 years. “At least this man, this couple, is remembered.”
