I have always been fascinated by stories of the Second World War and as my father served with the Canadian Army in Netherlands for quite some time, I have a particular interest in stories of that time. I have also been fortunate enough to visit the Netherlands and see places like the Annex where Anne Frank and her family hid or the hidden cupboard in the home of Corrie Ten Boom where many people would hide for shorter periods of time. In spite of all that, I did not find this book a particularly easy one to read. The author Bart van Es had a very personal reason for writing this book. His family had been involved in helping to hide a young Jewish girl, Lientje during the war and had even fostered her for some years after the war but ultimately there had been a break n the family relationship that vanEs wanted to understand. La protagonista Lien y su evolución ha sido para mi lo mejor del libro. Ella fue una de las niñas que tuvo que buscar refugio y gracias a ella conoceremos lo que vivió durante esos años.

The book includes many wonderful photographs that really helped me to visualize who was who in the story and it was rewarding to see the relationship develop between the author and his subject, to the point where once again "family" connections were established. Even more satisfying was the knowledge that revisiting her past and learning more of things she had not understood as she was living these experiences helped to bring about a healing and wholeness for her. The period of stability and happiness with the van Es family came to an abrupt end when the special police charged with hunting down all 'hidden' Jewish children appeared about to catch Lien. Moved by the underground resistance movement from home to home in an effort to keep her safe, Lien's story evolves as a series of traumatic events in which her whole being is undermined and she becomes the hollowed out cut out girl of the title. The Netherlands has been a place of refuge for Jews since at least the 15th century when Sephardic Jews fleeing from Portugal found freedom and prosperity there. In 1677, the sceptical Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza was buried with honours in the Protestant New Church in The Hague, which Bart van Es describes as “an astonishing gesture of acceptance”. When the Nazis came to power in Germany, some 35,000 refugees fled to the Netherlands. By 1940, when Germany invaded Holland, there were some 18,000 Jews in The Hague, which portrayed itself as an open and idealistic “city for the world”. Only 2,000 of them would survive the war and the concentration camps. Finally reunited with the van Es family at the end of the war, Lien's life should have run on happily but, years later, an event that leads to her being cut out of the family brings new pain and isolation.

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De Jong, it turned out, had kept a great deal of documentation about her life, including the letter her mother had sent to the family who would raise her daughter. “She has been taken from me by circumstance. May you, with the best will and wisdom, look after her,” she wrote in August 1942. This book is about a Jewish Dutch girl Lien and the various families who saved her following the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands, in particular the van Es family. The ‘the cut out girl’ represents Lien but the title comes from a picture in a ‘poesie’ album she kept which was a scrapbook of poetry that people wrote in for her and about her - these were popular with girls at that time. Lien’s family were not especially religious and the author pointed out that it is really Hitler who made Lien Jewish following the invasion in May 1940. From 1941 similar rules to those implemented in Germany from 1935 (Nuremberg Laws) were enforced such as wearing the yellow star and Lien had to go to Jewish school. Prior to this her childhood had consisted of mixing happily with other children surrounded by a happy extended family and caring neighbours. There are some lovely pictures to illustrate this life that was to end so disastrously.

One day her mother sat beside her on the bed. “I must tell you a secret,” she said. “You are going to stay somewhere else for a while.” A woman took Lien to a family in Dordrecht. Unknown to Lien, they were arrested within months and sent to their deaths in Auschwitz. The family she stayed with are the author’s grandparents, Jans and Henk van Es. But just as shestarted to feel at home, the police arrived and she had to run. Lien spent the rest of the war with a strict Protestant family in the village of Bennekom. There she was treated as a servant rather than one of the family, and sexually abused by one of their relations: “The rapes are a secret, hard and poisonous, that she swaddles within.” Writing with simplicity, Van Es weaves together history and Lien’s recollections to capture the trauma of her childhood In the first episode, Bart goes to Amsterdam to meet Lien and ask if she might be willing to tell him her story. Memory slips away from us like sand and as Lien's trauma grew more intense, so too did her recollections grow cloudier. The Cut Out Girl poses the question of how we can ever clearly know our own story. Lien reads the letter written by the boy who helped her flee from the van Eses and has little memory of him. Despite the note's obvious strong feeling, she never replied. There is an added tragedy in how she tries to resolve her own pain at the circumstances of her second 'hiding family' by making excuses for them. Reading the book, I got a powerful sense of a child alone without a protector. Lien observes to van Es that 'without families, you don't get stories' and for me, this quotation was key. The memories that I have held on to most have been the ones that have been affirmed and retold through family discussions. It is striking to me that I can remember events from my aunt's wedding when I was three years old far more than I do my primary school years. But then, I left my primary school when I was ten years old and I never saw those people again. About ten years ago, I was on a train that sped through my old primary school playing field and past the house we lived in at the time. The memories blasted out. It made me realise that those years of my life are not so faded as I thought,, they are simply inaccessible because in my daily life, I have no connection to those events. There is something so utterly bleak in the realisation that nobody cared enough about Lien to talk to her, to listen to her, to help her form connections. They kept her alive but that was all. Is it any wonder that her memories shrivelled on the vine?Bart van Es' detailed, painstaking and thorough investigation of the life of his 'aunt' Lien is a truly moving, often heart-breaking account of a Jewish child's struggle for survival in wartime Holland and her life after the war. From start to finish this was an interesting read about war, about growing up, about a family. It is non fiction, the author (a nephew of Lien, the girl) also tells about his conversations with Lien, his spending time in the Netherlands visiting all the places she mentions and his visits to various libraries to do research. Bart van Es treats this story with the respect and care it deserves even when he discovers things that I am sure would have been easier to hide and or/ignore. I absolutely loved the way he wove Lientjie's story in with the story of his research as well. I enjoyed seeing their friendship grow as the story progressed. The switching between present and past and Bart van Es trips to see many of the location Lientjie tells him about - really made the story come alive for me. I am not ashamed to say that I shed tears reading this book - the subject matter was not always easy to get though.

The Cut Out Girl by Oxford English professor Bart van Es has been named Costa Book of the Year, after previously winning the biography category of the awards. Professor van Es triumphed ahead of literary figures including novelist Sally Rooney. Read our Q&A below with Professor van Es, whose book tells the story of Lien de Jong, a young Dutch girl hidden from the Nazis during World War II. La novela esta contada por el autor en la mayoría, este sabía que en la época de la Guerra, sus abuelos habían sido parte de esas personas que ayudaron a muchas personas judías, ofreciendo sitio en sus casas y arriesgando mucho por ayudar a muchísima gente, algo que se le da muy poco valor en este tipo de historias. Por ello, el autor empieza a investigar y conoce en persona a quien va a ser la protagonista de este libro. Bart van Es tells the story of a young Jewish girl named Lientjie who was taken in during the War by his grandparents. He doesn't know too much about the story but is aware that at one point there was a falling out and they lost touch with her. This book tells the story of him first reaching out to Lientjie and then the process of discovering what had happened to her, his family, and why the falling out happened.The author ‘as’ the Audio-narrator didn’t have a talent for the job. It was very hard to stay interested when he had no other skill than simply reading the words he wrote.

I think about how until I had my son, I too have had my moments of feeling an island. As a child, I felt intensely jealous of classmates with siblings, or even of those who had cousins who lived close enough to attend the same school. I never liked being a de facto only child. I tried to form proto-sibling connections throughout my childhood and indeed all the way into my early adulthood but nothing ever really took. Being the only person in my family with my last name reinforced my sense of being set apart. It is a hard thing to feel on the outside, to sense your presence as an unwanted extra. There is also the conundrum of my paternal line. My biological father stepped out of my life before I was born and reconnection has been cordial rather than warm. But I was startled when I first heard tories about his wider clan. A whole cluster of relatives of whom I know nothing. In truth, that branch of my family tree had always seemed a frizzled stump, yet suddenly I recognised it as a loss. Without families, you don't get stories. It is a story rich with contradictions. There is great bravery and generosity--first Lientje's parents, giving up their beloved daughter, and then the Dutch families who face great danger from the Nazi occupation for taking Lientje and other Jewish children in. And there are more mundane sacrifices a family under brutal occupation must make to provide for even the family they already have. But tidy Holland also must face a darker truth, namely that it was more cooperative in rounding up its Jews for the Nazis than any other Western European country; that is part of Lientje's story too. Her time in hiding was made much more terrifying by the energetic efforts of the local Dutch authorities, zealous accomplices in the mission of sending every Jew, man, woman and child, East to their extermination. And Lientje was not always particularly well treated, and sometimes, Bart learned, she was very badly treated indeed. Lien, una niña judía que con ocho años es separada de sus padres, una de esas niñas que con su historia sacara a la luz todo aquello que vivió, tanto con su familia antes de la Guerra como durante esos años. Many thanks to #NetGalley and Penguin Press for allowing me to read a copy of this book in exchange for an honest opinion. Recibí este libro y desde entonces no he podido dejar de leerlo, pese a ser una de las muchas historias sobre la segunda guerra mundial, está contada de una manera diferente y nos amplia la información hasta el presente por lo que me ha parecido una forma de narrarlo muy original y especial.

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It was being that was just being , and where, and how, and with whom that was all uncertain. "( p. 119)