Between 1941 and 1944, during the German occupation of the Netherlands, a collection of children's books and games published under the name The Painter eased the lives of thousands of Dutch children. With beautiful illustrations and fold-out pages, they achieved editions of 10,000 copies locally. In Germany, where they were also published in translation, there were print runs of up to 60,000. Behind The Painter there is a story of courage and personal commitment, since its leaders were the illustrator Galinka Ehrenfest, of Jewish father, and her husband, Jaap Kloot, of Jewish family. As they were prevented from working due to their origin, they used the Spanish pseudonym to publish and helped their hidden compatriots with the income earned. His experiences have been collected by the Dutch writer Linda Horn, and about twenty of those books have been acquired by a private individual at the International Old Book Fair in New York. The buyer intends to donate them to the Holocaust Museum, Amsterdam, which is being renovated.
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The war broke the magical universe created by The Painter. Jaap Kloot was murdered in 1943 in the Sobibor death camp. He was 26 years old. Galinka Ehrenfest survived, but lost their expected child. "It is very sad to think that the same person who contributed to illuminate the lives of children, and whose work was valued by the German occupiers themselves, who translated the books, perished at their hands," says Peter Kraus, owner of Ursus, the New York book store that has sold this collection.
Kraus has been exhibiting for years at TEFAF, the Art and Antiques Fair in the Dutch city of Maastricht, and a visitor there asked for his card. "I sell picture books, and a Dutch collector asked me if I would like to put up for sale the ones I had collected over three decades. I cataloged them and I think it's a one-of-a-kind compilation in the world," he explains. The buyer is also a Dutch citizen, who prefers to remain anonymous. "These books are surprising in their quality. The printing is very good and the fold-outs, extraordinary. And everything was done in the middle of the war with lack of materials and all kinds of obstacles. I don't know of a similar case," he says.
Fold-out edited by El Pintor.El Pintor
Galinka and Jaap met in 1934 at the New School of Art in Amsterdam. Her father, Paul Ehrenfest, was an Austrian-born physicist. The mother, Tatiana Afanassjeva, was a Russian mathematician. Galinka was born in 1910 in what is now Estonia, and moved to the Dutch city of Leiden when his father obtained a professorship there. Jaap Kloot was born in 1916, and his father was a merchant. The young men became friends, and in his circle of acquaintances there were artists who collaborated in the collection of El Pintor. He had founded a company called Corunda, and they took advantage of it to publish 17 color books, populated by wild animals, exotic landscapes and outdoor games that helped children not to faint in the middle of war. "I had written a book about two Jewish artists, and during my research I saw a painting by Galinka. I was interested, and as I went on in my search, I remembered that I also had volumes of The Painter at home when I was little," says Linda Horn, Dutch author of the book Galinka Ehrenfest in The Painter (Galinka Ehrenfest and The Painter, edited in Dutch by De Buitenkant).
Jaap Kloot and Galinka Ehrenfest.
The stories of the books and games created by Ehrenfest and Kloot were very successful, "and the commitment of this couple was commendable, because they found a way to move forward despite the fact that Nazi laws stripped them of their company," continues the writer. The Netherlands was occupied by German troops between 1940 and 1945, throughout World War II, and the struggle to find paper and overcome censorship was constant. "You had to pass many controls and only then, with the approval of the occupant, could they start. But they succeeded, and it was worth telling the phenomenon of children's book publishing in those conditions." Horn says that when he published his work many people called him, "not only from the guild of old books, saying that they still had copies in their home without knowing that they were so special." Quite a detail, because children's books do not usually arrive in good condition to adulthood.
Paul Ehrenfest (son), Albert Einstein and Galinka Ehrenfest.Emilio Segre Visual Archives
Galinka Ehrenfest's family had among her best friends Albert Einstein, who gave her a violin as a child. The relationship was so close that with his brothers – two boys and another girl – they called him by his last name, as if he were one of their uncles. One of Galinka's brothers had Down syndrome. The other two were gifted, and she, with great aptitude for art and music, sought her way there. She traveled alone in the United States and studied at a branch school in Los Angeles on a scholarship. "He also visited his father, who taught in California. Until one day he found what he was looking for, working with and for children. He also designed playgrounds and games where little ones could investigate and be naughty." Through the pages of El Pintor's stories, children fly attached to a balloon, frogs gather at the water's edge and rabbits snack in the park. There are cutouts of stately buildings on Amsterdam's canals, bridges, trees, trucks and horse-drawn carriages, with which to build a cardboard city. And gardens arise where the fairies are girls, and fold-outs that are a triumph given the hardships of the war.
In 1941, when the Nazis took his companies and businesses from the Jews, Jaap Kloot left Corunda in the hands of trusted people and went ahead with his work discreetly. Together with Galinka, he was also in charge of finding hiding places for persecuted Jews. Although they themselves spent the nights in different places so as not to be found, he was arrested in May 1943. He died in July of that same year. On June 19, she was also arrested. She was pregnant and interrogated in jail for a week. According to documents from the Resistance Museum in Amsterdam, "an SS captain named Benno Samel helped her, as he had done before with others, explaining how she should answer the interrogation." In this way, "she managed to make a false story credible and was released on June 26." To his despair, "the baby was stillborn soon after." She managed to get removed from the register of Jews, but her husband's parents and four of eight siblings died in the death camps.
Page of 'The book of colors', edited by El Pintor.El Pintor
Before the war, tragedy had already struck Galinka's family. "His father went through a bad professional moment in 1933. Even though it was an early date, he saw what was coming [Hitler came to power in Germany that same year] and got a gun. He went with her to the center where his son with Down syndrome was and shot him dead. Then he committed suicide," Linda Horn said. In her opinion, and although she is very careful with her words, "he could have felt defeated, and with the fear of the Nazis it must have seemed to him that there was no future for the boy."
Galinka Ehrenfest, who lived to be 69, published yet another book from The Painter's collection. After the war, she became an interior designer, with special attention to children's rooms. "During his life, he devised spaces to assemble and disassemble, and to transform fantasy into reality. Where they could learn without impositions on the part of the elderly." With the recovery of his biography and the sale of the collection, the magic of El Pintor appears again.
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