The Cut Out Girl: A Story of War and Family, Lost and Found by Bart van Es
JOANNA KAVENNA
The Cut Out Girl: A Story of War and Family, Lost and Found By Bart van Es Fig Tree £16.99 Oldie price £13.60 inc p&p
Time passes in its ineluctable way and those who survived the genocidal violence of the Second World War are now fading into silence. Aware of these finite reserves of living memory, their descendants craft poignant works of family history. Notable examples of recent years include Philippe Sands’s East West Street: part biography of his maternal grandfather, part legal disquisition on the Nuremberg trials. Or there’s Ian Buruma’s Their Promised Land, which combines scholarly excavation and autobiography. These are often hybrid works, revealing the influence of authors such as W G Sebald, in which history, memoir and travelogue are merged.
The Cut Out Girl is a fascinating addition to this genre. Dutch by birth, Bart van Es is a professor of English at Oxford University and the author of academic works including Shakespeare in Company (2015) and Spenser’s Forms of History (2002). He ‘had always known’ that his grandparents sheltered Jewish children during the German occupation of the Netherlands. But his grandfather, Hendrick van Es, died when van Es was a boy and, though his grandmother, Jannigje van Es-de Jong, lived for almost two more decades, she seldom talked about the war. Van Es was left with ‘just the faint mental image of pale faces looking up from beneath the floorboards, too cartoonish to feel
real.’ To break the silence, van Es traces a woman called Hesseline de Jong, known as Lien, who was sheltered by the van Es family at their home in Dordrecht. Lien spent her early years in The Hague, the only child of non-observant Jews – ‘It is really Hitler who makes Lien Jewish.’ In August 1942, when Lien was nine, her mother told her that she must ‘stay somewhere else for a while’. Lien was escorted by a humanist called Took Heroma to the van Es household, and concealed among their children.
She never saw her parents again; they were deported in 1942 to Auschwitz, where they died. The Jewish wartime death rate in the Netherlands – at 80 per cent – was more than double that of any other Western country and higher even than in Germany. Van Es writes, ‘For me, vaguely brought up on a myth of Dutch resistance, this comes as a shock.’
When van Es begins his research, Lien is in her early eighties and living in Amsterdam, ‘brisk in manner but somehow bohemian, dressed in a long, dark grey cardigan with a flowing claret paisley scarf’.
At their awkward initial meeting, Lien asks, ‘So what is your motivation?’
Van Es replies, ‘Recording these things is important, especially now, given the state of the world, with extremism again on the rise. There’s an untold story here that I don’t want to lose.’
Lien hands over a personal archive of letters and photographs, which van Es supplements with his own copious research. The title of the book derives from Lien’s poesy album, salvaged from years in hiding, which contains little inscriptions from friends and cut-out pictures from before the occupation. Her story is also ‘cut out’ and told as two intertwined narratives: a present-day first person account of van Es’s conversations with Lien, his feelings about her story, and his travels around the Netherlands; and a reconstruction of Lien’s experiences during the war, told in a novelistic third person. Both are beautifully written.
Lien was forced to flee from the van Es household, taken to many other cramped and dangerous lodgings. In one house, she was bullied, treated as a servant and repeatedly raped. At the end of the war, Lien asked to return to the van Es family and spent the rest of her childhood with them. In the 1980s, there was an argument and Lien mysteriously severed all ties with the family. The story van Es uncovers is less flattering to his family than he might have hoped, yet he remains faithful to Lien’s account. She was one of an estimated 25,000-30,000 Jews who were forced into hiding in the Netherlands during the war. More than a third did not survive. Others, Lien among them, passed from quotidian terror to unbearable loss.
Van Es carefully salvages Lien’s story, and creates a deeply moving and complex book about war, atrocity and human suffering.