ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

This book came to my attention because the author is a guest at the forthcoming Adelaide Writers’ Week and I came across it when browsing the program.

The Cut Out Girl was the Costa Book of the Year in 2018,  taking out the prize in the Biography category as well as the overall prize for the work, worth £30,000 to the author.  According to the BBC, this is the first winner from the biography category since Helen Macdonald won it in 2014 for H is for Hawk and is only the fourth biographer to take the prize this century.  This is the BBC description of the book:

The Cut Out Girl tells the story of a young Jewish girl, Lien, who was taken in by strangers during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Her family were all killed but, like 4,000 other Dutch Jewish children, she escaped the Holocaust by being hidden from the Nazis by a non-Jewish family.

Bart van Es, a Professor of English Literature at Oxford University, has a personal connection to the story – his own grandparents were the couple who fostered little Lien in the Hague during the occupation. The Cut Out Girl interweaves the story of Lien in the 1940s with his own experience of uncovering it, a burgeoning friendship with the elderly Lien and some uncomfortable truths about Dutch collaboration during the occupation.

What intrigued me about the book was that there was a falling out between the adult Lien and her foster family, and I could not imagine how that could be.  I have always admired the astonishing courage of people who saved Jews during WW2, and the stories of children who were fostered by complete strangers seemed like a miracle of bravery and kindness.  What The Cut Out Girl reveals, however, is that rescuing these children was much more complex than just avoiding detection and the terrible risk of Nazi reprisals, and that while some people were open-hearted and generous, others did it because they felt they ought to for religious reasons, when they were not really the kind of people who should have the care of damaged young children.  And inevitably, some of those who had access to these vulnerable children took advantage of them in the worst possible way.

(It’s an entirely different scenario, of course, but there are awful stories about children evacuated from the Blitz who were placed with people who had no idea how to care for traumatised children and some who exploited them as domestic help or worse.)

By making contact with Lien who was by then in her 80s, Bart Van Es was able to discover her childhood journey from loving home to the insecurities of not really belonging anywhere.  The memoir is not really a story of the Holocaust though Lien lost her entire family to Auschwitz.  It is the story of how with research, documents and mementoes and sensitively conducted interviews, Van Es was able to retrace Lien’s movements from one family to another, across a network of safe houses.  As you might expect, because she was only a little girl, she had blanked out the memories of being taken from place to place, of running and hiding, and — like many a fostered child — longing to be returned to one family where (under the circumstances) she had been quite happy when she had been removed to somewhere else.  But also, because she was only a little girl, she was also not aware that even the kindliest of her foster parents found the strain of caring for extra children, especially during The Hunger Winter of 1944-5, was a burden that was sometimes hard to bear.

Along the way, Van Es confronts some disquieting truths not just about anti-Semitic Dutch collaboration with the Nazis, but also how they failed to care for the orphaned children after the war, and did not adequately acknowledge the bravery of their saviours.  As elsewhere in Europe, there were many who, postwar, appropriated houses and property and refused to give them back.  These people perhaps did not have the genocidal intent of the Nazis, but they were only too enthusiastic about deporting Jews out of their country and reaping the proceeds afterwards.

Nevertheless, The Cut Out Girl is not a bitter book.  It concludes on a note of reconciliation and hope, and it was lovely to read that Lien was ultimately able to build a satisfying life — as a social worker, helping troubled children…

For more scholarly thoughts than mine, visit this review and this one.

Author: Bart Van Es
Title: The Cut Out Girl, a story of war and family, lost and found
Cover design: designer not acknowledged but images are from the author’s own collection and from Shutterstock
Publisher: Penguin Random House UK, 2018
ISBN: 9780241978726, pbk, 281 pages
Source: Kingston Library