The Cut Out Girl: A Story of War and Family, Lost and Found: The Costa Book of the Year 2018

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The Netherlands has been a place of refuge for Jews since at least the 15th century when Sephardic Jews fleeing from Portugal found freedom and prosperity there. In 1677, the sceptical Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza was buried with honours in the Protestant New Church in The Hague, which Bart van Es describes as “an astonishing gesture of acceptance”. When the Nazis came to power in Germany, some 35,000 refugees fled to the Netherlands. By 1940, when Germany invaded Holland, there were some 18,000 Jews in The Hague, which portrayed itself as an open and idealistic “city for the world”. Only 2,000 of them would survive the war and the concentration camps. I have read stories set around the Holocaust before. I have cried over them. But I have also struggled with how writers have tried to structure their story around some form of redemption. In Schindler's List, the list is life. Anne Frank's diary is shared and known around the world, giving her a kind of immortality. Even Irene Nemirovsky's daughter's comment that their mother's posthumous success has been a victory over the Nazis. The Cut Out Girl is more muted. We can see how these people who sheltered Lien and others like her may have shown courage, but they were not angels. Indeed, the wider Dutch nation does not come out of van Es' book looking particularly rosy. He charts how they were the most 'cooperative' nation in how they obeyed the Nazis in rounding up their Jews. There are horror stories around Dutch collaborators. Even post-war, the Dutch government hardly covered themselves in glory. Many Jewish survivors of the concentration camps found themselves hit with tax demands for their time in activity. Lien's mother wrote a letter as she gave her up, asking her foster parents to be as a mother and father to her. The Cut Out Girl spells out how Lien and those other lost children like her, given up by their loving parents in the hope of saving their lives, were not loved as they ought to have been. All they did was survive. Throughout the book the author has pointed out Lientje's existence during this lengthy period of concealment. It is true that the families who chose to participate in sheltering were often unselfish and kind, but clearly many traumatic events occurred along the way. I will not introduce the reason for the title- “The Cut Out Girl”, but one can view how appropriate and moving this is. As an adult Lien said as a result of her isolation she had stopped seeing the world. Memory slips away from us like sand and as Lien's trauma grew more intense, so too did her recollections grow cloudier. The Cut Out Girl poses the question of how we can ever clearly know our own story. Lien reads the letter written by the boy who helped her flee from the van Eses and has little memory of him. Despite the note's obvious strong feeling, she never replied. There is an added tragedy in how she tries to resolve her own pain at the circumstances of her second 'hiding family' by making excuses for them. Reading the book, I got a powerful sense of a child alone without a protector. Lien observes to van Es that 'without families, you don't get stories' and for me, this quotation was key. The memories that I have held on to most have been the ones that have been affirmed and retold through family discussions. It is striking to me that I can remember events from my aunt's wedding when I was three years old far more than I do my primary school years. But then, I left my primary school when I was ten years old and I never saw those people again. About ten years ago, I was on a train that sped through my old primary school playing field and past the house we lived in at the time. The memories blasted out. It made me realise that those years of my life are not so faded as I thought,, they are simply inaccessible because in my daily life, I have no connection to those events. There is something so utterly bleak in the realisation that nobody cared enough about Lien to talk to her, to listen to her, to help her form connections. They kept her alive but that was all. Is it any wonder that her memories shrivelled on the vine?

Finally reunited with the van Es family at the end of the war, Lien's life should have run on happily but, years later, an event that leads to her being cut out of the family brings new pain and isolation. I knew the 2020 good read vibes wouldn't last, and The Cut Out Girl: A Story of War and Family, Lost and Found is the culprit that has potentially crushed those vibes. I bought this book some time ago, not long after it was released, and after a Waterstones employee told me this book was absolutely wonderful, I thought I was on to something. And, most pressingly as far as The Cut Out Girl story is concerned, how could my grandmother (who rescued Lien and brought her up as her own daughter after the war) have ended up quarrelling with the person she saved from the Holocaust? How could she have sent her a letter, in July 1988, that cut Lien out of her life? The book described how she was taken from her family in late summer of 1942 by Mrs Heroma, known as Took (she and her husband were central to Nazi resistance) to live with Jans and Henk van Es who were the authors grandparents. A lot of Dutch families sheltered children as it was relatively easy to absorb them into their families. The van Esses were very kind to her and she felt happy there. There are some lovely letters she received from her family on her 9th birthday before they were put on the trains to the death camps. Sadly Lien had to be moved several times and not all of them happy such as the final place she stayed in Gelderland. Although they were not especially kind they did at least protect her and they didn’t give her up. It was at this time aged 11/12 she was repeated raped by the seemingly jolly uncle of the family. After the war Lien returned to the van Es family although in later years they became estranged. One of the most profound sections was where Lien had the courage to go to Auschwitz and there she had the bravery to read out a letter in English detailing what happened to her family members. Los capítulos se van alternando, unos en presente, donde se narran las conversaciones del autor con Lien, donde vamos averiguando su historia, y otros capítulos en los que reconstruye la historia, y que los va narrando Lien. Ademas, durante la historia veremos fotos del álbum familiar, algo que me ha gustado mucho. Es una historia dura, como todas estas historias, pero a la vez es una historia muy bonita, donde el autor cambia su vida y construye una relación de amistad, con una persona que en cierto modo puede considerarse de su familia.The author ‘as’ the Audio-narrator didn’t have a talent for the job. It was very hard to stay interested when he had no other skill than simply reading the words he wrote.

I am thankful for the Goodreads giveaway that put this book in my hands and even more grateful for Bart van Es for telling this story. A big takeaway from this book for me was that even thought human beings are capable of such horror - there are always those who are willing to fight, to help and to try make a difference. My heart is grateful for the many hero's in this book who helped Jewish people escape, hide and survive the war. My heart aches for those who didn't survive, for those who lost family members and friends and for those who were left with the horrifying emotional scars that come from such events. It’s also possible- bless the author’s heart- that he was ‘too close’ to this story to have been objective. I don’t think it was necessary to have his opinions on how he feels society is today.... comparing ‘today’ with the devastations of the Holocaust. The last time Hesseline - known as Lien - saw her parents was in The Hague as she was collected at the door by a stranger and taken to a city far away to be hidden from the Nazis. She was raised by her foster family as one of their own but, some years after the war, she became estranged from the family who took her in. What was her side of the story? Bart van Es - a grandson of the couple who looked after Lien - was determined to find out. Why was the Netherlands so compliant with the Nazis, so that 80% of the country’s Jews were killed, a far higher percentage than elsewhere in the West?Historia que está ambientada en Países Bajos, algo nuevo para mi, ya que la mayoría de las novelas de la Segunda Guerra Mundial están ambientadas en otros países que quizá fueron mas conflictivos. She said she was surprised the story of her life had won the Costa award, which was judged by a panel made up of Raworth, Prue Leith, Kate Humble and Simon Williams. “I loved the book but I didn’t expect it,” said De Jong. “We were in hiding, but after the war, nobody spoke about it. It was not an issue, it was not a subject. So nobody spoke about it during the war or after the war. I once said that I’d been born after the war. My feeling is, I just started after the war. The time before that, I had no words ... I never thought I had a story, but Bart wrote it down and it was a story.” Lo que este libro nos transmite es la generosidad de esas familias y el amor que les dieron a esos niños a los que escondieron. The two are now good friends. “We are both quite straight people. We like to say things as they are,” said Van Es. “I feel I have never known anyone as well as I know Lien ... Lien just had that total trust of saying, I will give you my life.” This book is about a Jewish Dutch girl Lien and the various families who saved her following the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands, in particular the van Es family. The ‘the cut out girl’ represents Lien but the title comes from a picture in a ‘poesie’ album she kept which was a scrapbook of poetry that people wrote in for her and about her - these were popular with girls at that time. Lien’s family were not especially religious and the author pointed out that it is really Hitler who made Lien Jewish following the invasion in May 1940. From 1941 similar rules to those implemented in Germany from 1935 (Nuremberg Laws) were enforced such as wearing the yellow star and Lien had to go to Jewish school. Prior to this her childhood had consisted of mixing happily with other children surrounded by a happy extended family and caring neighbours. There are some lovely pictures to illustrate this life that was to end so disastrously.