The Cut Out Girl
A STORY OF WAR AND FAMILY, LOST AND FOUND BART VAN ES Fig Tree, 288 pages, £16.99
The author, a Dutch-born professor of English literature at Oxford University, offers a moving account of hidden Jewish children in the Netherlands during the Second World War, and the families who risked everything to conceal them. He tells the remarkable story of Lien, describing her traumatic wartime childhood, her survival and post-war life.
Her story intertwines closely with the author’s own family history as his grandparents took her into their family as an eightyear-old, raising her as their own daughter. Lien’s parents both perished in the Holocaust.
As he describes Lien’s life, the author paints a vivid picture of how non-Jewish Dutch families
survived the wartime atrocities, and seeks to disentangle their stories to better understand them. The author’s research was clearly painstaking, both in his interactions with Lien, and in the pursuit of rich detail with which he clearly articulates her experiences. He thoughtfully parallels Lien’s story with his own background, dwelling particularly on complex relationships within his own family. Lien is the only Survivor in her family, and her story features precious photos from her own collection. Van Es’s conversations with Lien helped him to explore his family’s fractured relationship with her, and to reconcile them.