A light blue covers the cover of Peter Sís’ new picture book “Nicky & Vera” – like a curtain of delicate fog behind which the silhouette of Big Ben can easily be seen. Perhaps the girl walking towards the horizon feels something like fear and a faint hope.
Little Vera isn’t just carrying a suitcase on her way into the unknown. As is so often the case in the highly symbolic pictorial art of the Czech-American illustrator, the viewer sees the child’s memories projected in friendly, warm colors on its back, which it always carries with them: the parental home, mum and dad, the little horse in the pasture, the Duck in the village pond, the cat.
Peter Sís tells – translated by Brigitte Jakobeit – a story of escape and rescue, of totalitarian state power, arbitrariness and persecution, and of the attempts of individual people to counter the impotence of the victims with what is in their power. Just like he did in the picture story about life behind the Iron Curtain, in “The Wall”. In fact, in most of Peter Sís’ true stories, individual people set out courageously and keen to discover, against all odds, to explore unknown territory. “Nicky & Vera” tells the story of the Jewish girl Vera Diamantová and the young Englishman Nicholas Winton, who travels to Prague in December 1938 and organizes transports for Jewish children to London. One of these children is Vera.
Eleven-year-old Vera was one of 669 rescued children
She lives happily in a village near the capital. Until German troops invaded, first in the Sudetenland and in March 1939 in the rest of the young Czechoslovak Republic. The Jewish population fears for their lives. Since England is willing to take in refugees under the age of seventeen, Nicholas decides to look for foster families and organize the emigration of Jewish children. In the spring and summer, eight trains leave Prague for London. On the day the war began, a ninth train with 250 refugees was to set off. He never left. Eleven-year-old Vera was one of 669 rescued children. Her older sister Eva also survived. The father was shot by the Nazis, and the mother died after years of imprisonment shortly after the end of the war. Since a Stalinist regime was established in Czechoslovakia in 1948, Vera decided to live in England. It was only decades later that the news of the rescue of the children reached the public. During a surprise TV show, Nicholas Winton met people who owed their rescue to him.
Of course, the story would open your eyes and touch your heart as a literary text. The unique art of the illustrator, however, consists in creating a fantastic cosmos of images in an almost unbelievable composition of filigree ink drawings, watercolours, chalk paintings and handwriting. In doing so, he links the microcosm of a human child with the macrocosm of the social forces that affect the individual. The mythological symbol of circles of life appears again and again in the most varied of variations, alternating with scenes that resemble film image sequences. Kept in every circle, in every picture: a memory. A familiar, secure living space. Parents. Animals. Village. Houses. Flow. The refuges of childhood. Dream images and fantasies – both those of the Jewish girl and the young man from England. Vera wrote several books based on her diary entries.
Nicholas Winton died in 2015 at the age of 106. He never saw himself as a hero. “I just saw what needed to be done.” (from 10 years)
Peter Sis: Nicky & Vera. An unsung hero of the Holocaust and the children he saved. Translated from the English by Brigitte Jakobeit. Gerstenberg 2022. 64 pages, 18 euros.