Reading: The Cut Out Girl
Jun. 17th, 2019 07:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartI probably wouldn't have read this year's Costa Book of the Year, The Cut Out Girl, if its author, Bart van Es, wasn't a colleague of mine. It had brilliant reviews, but I don't tend to read biographies, am mostly avoiding serious books in favour of comfort and escapism given the state of the world and my mental health, and as a child growing up in the 80s I read so many children's books, mainly based on true stories, about the experience of Jewish children in World War 2 (Anne Frank's diary, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, Mischling, Second Degree, Twenty and Ten, The Endless Steppe...), that I wasn't entirely sure it would tell me anything new.
Not unlike the books I read in the 80s, The Cut Out Girl is an imaginative reconstruction of real events; in this case, the story of Lien de Jong, a Jewish girl whose parents took the decision to send her away from their home in The Hague in 1942 in the hope that, if she was hidden in the home of a non-Jewish family, she might be overlooked when the Jews of the Netherlands were rounded up and transported to Auschwitz en masse. Lien was initially sent to live with van Es's grandparents, and although she had to leave them to avoid detection during the war she returned to them afterwards, growing up alongside van Es's father and his siblings until a falling-out with her foster mother in 1988 led to a break with the family which lasted until van Es sought her out in late 2014. It's true that there Lien's wartime experience was in many ways very similar to the other wartime experiences I'd read about, but van Es supplements Lien's memories, often incomplete or missing due to time, trauma or both, with the stories of others both within the van Es family and outside it and information pieced together from the records of the time, as well as the difficult history of the occupied Netherlands. The narrative is interestingly structured, alternating between the story of Lien's life and the story of van Es's project and growing friendship with the now 80-year-old Lien, and also, unlike the children's books which tended to end immediately post-war or shortly thereafter on a high note of survival, van Es follows Lien through her whole adult life, showing the lasting effects of the trauma and dislocation she experienced during the war. (Actually, it's not true to say that all the books I read as a child ended on that post-war high note; Judith Kerr does something a bit similar in A Small Person Far Away, although there the trauma is not Anna's but her mother's.)
The Cut Out Girl isn't an easy read, but it's interesting, well-written and thought-provoking and I think I'm glad I did read it (though also definitely looking forward to something lighter next).
Not unlike the books I read in the 80s, The Cut Out Girl is an imaginative reconstruction of real events; in this case, the story of Lien de Jong, a Jewish girl whose parents took the decision to send her away from their home in The Hague in 1942 in the hope that, if she was hidden in the home of a non-Jewish family, she might be overlooked when the Jews of the Netherlands were rounded up and transported to Auschwitz en masse. Lien was initially sent to live with van Es's grandparents, and although she had to leave them to avoid detection during the war she returned to them afterwards, growing up alongside van Es's father and his siblings until a falling-out with her foster mother in 1988 led to a break with the family which lasted until van Es sought her out in late 2014. It's true that there Lien's wartime experience was in many ways very similar to the other wartime experiences I'd read about, but van Es supplements Lien's memories, often incomplete or missing due to time, trauma or both, with the stories of others both within the van Es family and outside it and information pieced together from the records of the time, as well as the difficult history of the occupied Netherlands. The narrative is interestingly structured, alternating between the story of Lien's life and the story of van Es's project and growing friendship with the now 80-year-old Lien, and also, unlike the children's books which tended to end immediately post-war or shortly thereafter on a high note of survival, van Es follows Lien through her whole adult life, showing the lasting effects of the trauma and dislocation she experienced during the war. (Actually, it's not true to say that all the books I read as a child ended on that post-war high note; Judith Kerr does something a bit similar in A Small Person Far Away, although there the trauma is not Anna's but her mother's.)
The Cut Out Girl isn't an easy read, but it's interesting, well-written and thought-provoking and I think I'm glad I did read it (though also definitely looking forward to something lighter next).
