“I can be carried away freely into my childhood fantasies,” Tomi Ungerer once said, “but I also lived through a war as a child, and saw a lot of terrible things.”

These days we hear often that books created for children should help acquaint them with the darker circumstances of life, as fairy tales did in earlier times. Ungerer, who died Feb. 8 at 87, showed the world how to do that amid the particular darkness of the 20th century.