I just finished reading Tomi: A Childhood Under the Nazis last night.
I've been kind of on a Tomi Ungerer kick the last couple months, ever since one of the teachers requested his book The Three Robbers. We didn't have it in the collection (or any of his others) so I made it a point to order several of them, and I've been promoting them to the students.
I'm not sure if I knew any of his stories when I was a child; Moon Man kind of looked familiar when I read the book in graduate school (seems like forever ago) but most of them were new to me.
Not only did I fall in love with his illustrations, but I made a point of reading the books first to my niece when she was little, and then to my son when he was little.
What is it about his pictures? Is it the bold colors?
Is it the expressive faces on the characters?
Is it the emotional depth?
(I have always loved this illustration of the lady feeding baby Crictor with a bottle)
Whatever it is, his memoir of his childhood in Alsace (a region of France) clarifies the impact his childhood during the Nazu regime had on his artisitic style and skill. Of course, it also fueled his anti-censorship views (which I was lucky enough to hear him speak about at the Eric Carle museum, many years ago), as well as his picturebook Otto. Otto is a teddy bear that is separated from his Jewish owner; he survives the war and is miraculously reuinted with his owner decades later.
In Ungerer's memoir, he recounts two incidents of book banning. First, when the Germans moved into Alsace, the kids were given wagons and they were supposed to go from house to house, collecting books that were in French.
After the war, books that were German were rounded up and taken away, as the region struggled to recover and reclaim their heritage, which just proves the point that more than one group of people can be trying to ban books, and the struggle librarians are facing right now is often coming at us from at least two sides, if not more.
The book is a valuable resource for anyone interested in children's literature, or art, or history. It contains an impressive number of original illustrations from young Tomi, including his early attempts to copy well-known characters like Mickey Mouse, some of his school assignments which document the Nazis' indoctrination of children (one assignment was "Draw a Jew" and another has an inscription from a teacher telling him the swastikas are not big enough) as well as his own cartoons which depict scenes of war, and his own mocking portraits of German soldiers.
Aside from being a study of a time during which people were at their worst, a sense of optimism pervades the text because many people refused to give in and showed their resistance in subtle ways. It inspires some hope that during our current time, when many people are in fear, that the darkness cannot last forever.
