Now in her 80s, the protagonist opens up to the sympathetic writer about the horrors of the Holocaust in the Netherlands.
By WENDY BLUMFIELDAuthor Bart van Es, winner of the Costa Book of the Year award, with Lien de Jong, subject of his winning biography, ‘The Cut Out Girl’(photo credit: PUBLISHING PERSPECTIVES)Bart Van Es’s book, The Cut-Out Girl, was the winner of the 2018 UK Costa Prize. Telling the story of a young girl named Lien, it starts in tranquility, even though it is located in a small Dutch town in the late 1930s. There is little hint of the days ahead, of German tanks rumbling through town and village, of the rounding up and deportation of the Jewish population.At this stage, Lien is part of a large happy extended family, the only child of Charles and Catherine de-Jong-Spiero. She attends a mixed school, has many friends, and the names in her autograph book – a sort of poetry scrapbook, or poesie as it is called – are mostly Gentile.Obviously affected by her parents’ divorce and remarriage, Lien has a delicate stomach and poor appetite. However living in a street next to numerous aunts and uncles and cousins she feels loved and protected. Her poesie goes with her everywhere. On the flyleaf are paper cut-outs; the little girl with the pursed lips is herself, she says. She later describes displacement as being cut out from life.But times change. In 1940, age seven, she changes to a Jewish school and eventually it is obvious that she must take refuge elsewhere, the heart-rending decision of her parents. A network of resistance fighters ensure that Lien goes to a warm loving family, and she is pragmatic about the move. She blends in well with her foster family, and is loved by all the siblings from the baby to the 11-year-old son as well as the many neighboring relatives of the Van Es family. Food is plentiful and served with a casual attitude, perhaps the reason that her stomach is no longer delicate.However, on her birthday, after reading letters and opening gifts from her parents, she experiences several days of intense grief and uncontrollable crying. Her foster-mother Jannigje takes her for a walk in the park, where they sit on a bench weeping together. Lien is wrapped in love.While interviewing Lien, now in her 80s and living in Amsterdam, the author, grandson of Jannigje and Henk van Es, simultaneously follows his own research path, investigating archives and visiting museums and Jewish communities. He uncovers the treacherous betrayal of Jews by Dutch collaborators who are greedy for the money offered by the Nazis. This together with the flat open lowlands of the countryside with few places of refuge perhaps explains the low survival rate of Dutch Jews during the Holocaust.Unbeknown to Lien, many Jewish children were sheltered by neighbors of the Van Es family, and eventually the area comes under inspection by the SS. Lien is then moved from one place to another, truly in hiding, unable to go to school until she is given a home with the Lars family.There is not the warmth and spontaneity that she enjoyed with the Van Es family, but she is well looked after. She appreciates the clean home, good routine, return to school, and finds comfort in going to the Dutch Reformed Church. However she is treated more like a housemaid than a daughter, and her frequent bed-wetting is a sign of her resentment, grieving and fear.As she advances into her teens, she becomes the favorite of the Lars jolly uncle, who tickles and cuddles all the little girls in the family. This takes a sinister turn when he insists on taking Lien on a weekly trip into the forest, where he rapes her and threatens that if she talks about it he will say that she wanted him.The war is over but the chaos continues. The Dutch had a poor record in rehabilitating their Jewish survivors. There were agencies for reuniting families, but by this time Lien knew that her parents and grandparents and closest family had been murdered at Auschwitz.Lien begs to return to the Van Es family. She is received again with warmth and love, but something has changed in the dynamic.Eventually Lien marries an Orthodox Jew and gives birth to three children. The Van Es family are fond of Lien and her children, but the relationship is cooling and eventually a chain of bitter correspondence between Lien and her foster mother severs connection between the two families. The author, grandson of Henk and Jannigje van Es, is determined to find out the contents of those letters and the end of the story.In middle age as a wife and mother, living in comfort in Amsterdam, Lien begins to suffer the effects of her childhood, specifically survivor guilt.But now in her 80s, she is prepared to open up to the sympathetic Bart Van Es, who listens to her stories, welcomes her direction to locations and people who still remember the war, and follows up with his research.His writing style is truly beautiful and unexaggerated, and flows easily between the interviews. The Holocaust is always there, and how it affected the lives of the Jewish population. The sheer horror of deportation, separation of children from parents and displacement of families is clear without explicit graphic descriptions. On one hand there were many Dutch citizens who happily collaborated with the Nazis, not because they were pro-German but because of their antisemitism. But it also highlights the bravery of those ordinary Dutch people who sheltered Jewish children, gave them love and food and education in the most terrible of times, at great risk to themselves and their families.
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