The Cut Out Girl: A Story of War and Family, Lost and Found Kindle Edition

Millions worldwide have read the Diary of Anne Frank who went into hiding with her family in Amsterdam, while this book describes the story of a Jewish girl, Lientje De Jong, whose selfless parents sacrificed and sent their only child to live with unknown foster parents during the Holocaust. While an estimated 80% of Jews in the Netherlands died, there was an underground of foster families in Holland who sheltered some of these Jewish children.This book written by Bart van Es, is the story of his grandparents who acted as Lientje de Jong's foster parents during the Holocaust, and continued after her parents and extended family are all killed during the war. Bart only meets Lien in December 2014 when he starts to develop a rewarding and warm relationship with her. Prior to this there had been a falling-out between his grandparents and their foster daughter, so he had never got to learn about this hidden story growing up. He goes on a journey to trace his own family history during the war and to tell Lien's extraordinary life story until today.This book is poignantly written and despite the harrowing story, one wants to read to the end. One can understand why it won the 2018 COSTA Biography Award, and the Biographers' Best First Biography prize.As most of the holocaust survivors are dying out, and no longer able to tell their stories, it is important for us to read, and learn from our past, especially as there has been an increase of anti-semitism in Europe today.

I heard the author, Bart van Es, interviewed on the radio about his coming late to the realisation that there was another member of his father's family that he knew nothing about. Having found out basic information, he sought out this woman, Lien, now in her 80s. He introduced himself to her and after some reluctance she accepted him into her home and gradually told her the entire story of her life. Born into a non-observant Jewish family in the Netherlands in the 1930s, she and her parents became caught up in the Final Solution when the Nazi Party invaded. Realising that the times were extremely dangerous, her parents asked a local family to take her and protect her, a not unusual event in the Netherlands at the time when the general reaction among the Dutch was nowhere near so caring. From 1942 until the end of the war, she moved several times to different families who were committed to keeping her out of the hands of the German and Dutch police but not always as caring as one might have hoped. When her life with the van Es family became threatened, she was moved again to a strict Protestant family who certainly kept her alive but treated her as a servant and ignored the fact that she was being sexually assaulted by a relative. At the end of the war she was back with Bart van Es' family and having lost her parents at Auschwitz elected to stay with the van Eses, but in the years that followed the relationship broke down.Her story is deeply sad and reduced me to tears more than once. Van Es tells her story with compassion and combines it with a disturbing history of the treatment of the several hundred Dutch Jewish children, protected from the Death camps but traumatised by belonging nowhere because they never stayed anywhere long enough to feel loved and valued. This was an account of a piece of history I knew little about, not only the less than perfect Dutch response to the rounding up of their own citizens but also the courage of some ordinary people to hide and protect children they did not know, mixed though that experience was. The adult Lien is a woman I should like to have met, and this book is well-deserving of the plaudits it has received.

Bart van Es began research on this biography in 2014. He knew that his grandparents hid Dutch-Jewish children during WWII, but they had never discussed it. His father considered one of the children, Lien de Jung, as his sister. After his father's death, van Es set out to find Lien, learn about her life and his grandparents' relationship to her. When the Nazi occupation began in 1942, Lien's parents saw, "the handwriting on the wall" for Jews in the Netherlands. They contacted the underground and made arrangements for their 8 year old daughter to be placed in hiding with a Christian family. "Although you are unknown to me, " wrote Lien's mother in a note to her daughter's future protectors, "I imagine you for myself as a man and woman who will, as father and mother, care for my only child." It was not just one family, but multiple families who sheltered her for differing periods. Sometimes, she went to school with other children, but other times she was forced to serve as a maid, childcare provider or hidden phantom in a room or cupboard. Lien felt most at home with the van Es family, but even there she was victimized and at times marginalized.The author uses photos, letters, manuscripts from the Dutch national archives and lengthy recorded interviews with Lien to flesh out the fragments of her memory of the war years. He describes the origins of the Jewish community in Holland and the collaboration of the Dutch police and citizens to round up Jews for the Nazis. From an internment camp in northern Holland, most were deported to Auschwitz where they died. About 80% of the Dutch-Jews were killed, the highest percentage of any western European country. The government's efforts to re-unite Jewish orphans post WWII, with parents or any remaining family were haphazard, until a Jewish organization stepped in. Lien shares the many years after the war that she tried to regain a sense of who she was and what purpose she served. Part of the healing process included telling her history and a visit to Auschwitz where both of her parents perished. Winner of the 2018 Costa Award, this work of non-fiction is a testimony to the resilience of the human spirit and a valuable record of a dark time In Dutch history.

Avant d'avoir lu le livre, je ne savais pas que le traitement des juifs en Hollande durant la deuxième Guerre mondiale avait été si mauvais. C'est l'histoire d'une femme qui a vécu les évènements, de ceux qui l'ont aidé et de ceux qui l'ont abusé. Intéressant récit.

Found it at the Resistance Museum in Amsterdam. Beautifully written. All levels of narration are intriguing: from the remote dramatic past up to the present. Great book to understand how too many non Jew people in Holland (like in other European countries) accepted nazis’ crimes until they began involving them directly. Lien is a fantastic person. I know I can rely on the absolute credibility of all the author’s descriptions. Thanks.

Bart Van Es’, account of what happened in the Netherlands, during the Second World War, is both a history of Holland which sits rather uneasily with most of our perceptions (certainly mine) of a country which is liberal, tolerant, and moved by notions of fairness, and a personal history of his own family, during that time.Most of all, it is the history of Hesseline (Lien) de Jong. Lien, a young Jewish girl, was part of a generation of more fortunate Jewish children who were secretly fostered by those involved in the Resistance and otherwise opposed to the occupying Nazi forces.Lien and others ‘more fortunate’ because, of course, many were swept up and became part of the monstrous death toll of the Holocaust.I was extremely shocked to discover that, the percentage of Holland’s Jews, who ended their days in the extermination camps, was particularly high, compared to those from other occupied countries. The Netherlands had certainly been a liberal haven, compared to many other European nations, in its attitudes towards its Jewish citizens at a much earlier time in history.“The Jewish wartime death rate in the Netherlands, at 80%, was almost double that of any other Western country, far higher than that in France, Belgium, Italy or even Germany and Austria themselves. For me, vaguely brought up on a myth of Dutch resistance, this comes as a shock”.Although the reasons for this high percentage was complex, Van Es does not flinch from concluding that ‘ the active participation of Dutch citizens – who also did the work of informing on neighbours, arrest, imprisonment and transportation – also played a significant part’Van Es’ own family, his grandfather and grandmother, politically active on the left, were part of the network which fostered Jewish children, either hidden in plain sight as part of their own family, or hidden more literally. It was to this family that young Lien, not quite 9, is initially fostered after her own family send her away for safety via the well-organised network organising this secret fostering. All of her closest relatives, and most of her extended family will not survive.Lien regarded her first foster family as the golden ones, of those years. Again and again she was moved on to other, less happy fosterings, because discovery was imminent. Some of the places were horrific, and though children were being fostered by those who wanted to keep these children safe, human psychology being the complex thing it is, not everyone was altruistic, compassionate and caring. And the severely traumatised have their own challenges, as traumatic events make ‘normal socialisation’ challenging. Over a succession of foster homes, some, frankly with people who should not have been in care of vulnerable children at all, Lien is clearly dissociating, and blocking out experiences too painful to engage with.After the war, she eventually returns to her first foster family, with whom she had a fairly close relationship, - though challenges are certainly present – until she completes her education, and begins to make her own way and vocation – working with vulnerable children. Later she marries and has children of her own. At some point, - and this is no spoiler, as it is part of the journey Van Es is exploring, a terrible, unhealable rift develops between Lien and her foster mother and father (Van Es’s grandparents)In essence, the journey of Van Es’ book, though painful, is a journey towards some kind of redemption and understanding, as he seeks to understand the history of his family, and his country, through historical research – and through conversations with Lien, now in her eighties. There is a slow growing of a sense of ‘family’ between Van Es, and Lien. Van Es’ father Henk, had been born just after Lien’s return to the van Esses, after the war, aged 12.Bart van Es writes engagingly, simply, clearly. Although this is Lien’s story it is also the writer’s; change and transformation happens for each.And, as Lien says, in the opening sentence of the book ‘Without families you don’t get stories’ The conversations between the two, Lien’s personal memories, the artefacts, letters and photographs which stimulate them, and the geographical research which Bart vas Es undertakes, visiting places from Lien’s story, fleshes out a story which is both personal, and of time and place. In visiting places in our times, Bart van Es also reminds us of parallels we may not particularly wish to engage with, on the lessons of history which unfortunately seem not to have been fully learned

I am a Brit, born Jewish, spent my childhood in The Hague in the 1950s and 1960s and heard a podcast in which this book was reviewed. The fact that it has many sub-stories that rang bells in my own history, piqued my interest. Excellently written, Bart van Es deserves huge compliments for investigating and publishing his own family’s history. Well done! Have bought another copy for my parents.

Past and present combine in this reconstruction of a life..that of a Jewish girl, hidden during the Nazi occupation. A tribute indeed. Highly recommended reading.