The Cut Out Girl

by Bart van Es

  ALSO BY BART VAN ES

  Shakespeare’s Comedies

  Shakespeare in Company

  A Critical Companion to Spenser Studies

  Spenser’s Forms of History

  PENGUIN PRESS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  penguin.com

  Copyright © 2018 by Bart van Es

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Photographs courtesy of Hesseline de Jong

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Van Es, Bart, author.

  Title: The cut out girl : a story of war and family, lost and found / Bart van Es.

  Description: New York, New York : Penguin Press, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018006209 (print) | LCCN 2018007268 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735222250 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735222243 (hardback)

  Subjects: LCSH: De Jong, Hesseline—Childhood and youth. | Jewish children in the Holocaust—Netherlands—Biography. | Jews—Netherlands—Biography. | Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)—Netherlands—Biography. | Van Es, Bart. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. | HISTORY / Jewish. | HISTORY / Holocaust.

  Classification: LCC DS135.N6 (ebook) | LCC DS135.N6 D428 2018 (print) | DDC 940.53/18092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018006209

  Version_1

  for

  Charles de Jong and Catharine de Jong-Spiero

  and

  Henk van Es and Jannigje van Es-de Jong

  CONTENTS

  Also by Bart van Es

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  December 2014

  Without families you don’t get stories.”

  The woman who tells me this stands making coffee in her apartment in Amsterdam. Her name is Hesseline, Lien for short. She is over eighty and there is still a simple beauty about her: a clear complexion without noticeable makeup; a little silver watch but no other jewelry; and shiny, unpainted nails. She is brisk in manner but also somehow bohemian, dressed in a long dark gray cardigan with a flowing claret paisley scarf. Before today I have no memory of ever having met her. All the same, I know that this woman grew up with my father, who was born in the Netherlands immediately after the war. She was once part of my family, but this is no longer the case. A letter was sent and a connection was broken. Even now, nearly thirty years later, it still hurts Lien to speak of these things.

  From her white open-plan kitchen we move to the seating area, which is full of winter sunlight, filtered partly through stained glass artworks that are fitted against the panes. There are books, museum catalogs, and cultural supplements spread beneath a low glass coffee table. The furniture is modern, as are the pictures on the walls.

  We speak in Dutch.

  “You wrote in your e-mail about being interested in the family history and about maybe writing a book,” she says. “Well, the family thing doesn’t really play for me. The Van Esses were important in my life for a long time, but not now. So what kind of writing do you do?”

  Her tone is friendly but also businesslike. I tell her a little about my work as a professor of English Literature at Oxford University—writing scholarly books and articles on Shakespeare and Renaissance poetry—but she knows most of this already from the Internet.

  “So what is your motivation?” she asks.

  My motivation? I’m not sure. I think hers could be a complex and interesting story. 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.

  On this bright December morning we talk of world affairs, of Israel, of Dutch politics, and about the situation in Britain, where David Cameron’s coalition government is nearing the end of its five-year term. We move quickly from subject to subject, almost as in an interview for a job.

  After perhaps an hour she pushes away her empty cup and speaks definitively:

  “Yes, I have faith in this. Shall we sit at the table? Do you have a notebook and pen?”

  I had not wanted to arrive like a reporter, so I need to ask her for paper and something to write with, but we are soon seated at the dining table, which is made of pale laminate wood. I can ask anything I want about what she remembers: what people said and did; what she wore and what she ate; the houses she lived in; and what she dreamed.

  We sit in the bright, warm modernity of the apartment and our first meeting stretches on for hours. The documents—photographs, letters, various objects—appear only gradually as she thinks of them, but by midafternoon, with the light outside already fading, the table is covered in mementos. These include a children’s novel with a bright yellow cover featuring a steamboat, and a ceramic tile with a cartoon on it of a drowning man. There is also a photo album of red imitation leather that has a well-worn spine. On the first page of the album there is a picture of a handsome couple with the words “Mamma” and “Pappa” written beneath in blue pen.

  The woman on the left in the photograph is Lien’s mother, whose name is Catharine de Jong-Spiero. She is perched on the edge of a rattan chair, the curved back of which envelops her. The sun is full in her face and she is smiling a little shyly. Her husband, Charles, Lien’s father, sits on the ground in front of her in his shirtsleeves, his large hands resting comfortably on his knees. He leans back against his wife, who has one of her hands on his shoulder, and he looks up with a confident, ironical gaze. There is an air of nonchalance about him, laughing at the idea of a posed photograph in a way that his wife, with her fixed smile, finds harder to do.

  The man’s confidence is also there in a few more photographs pasted on the first page of the album. One shows him in the back of a motorcar, surrounded by a group of dapper young men. In secret he holds his fingers, like bunny ears, behind the head of the friend who poses in front of him with a pair of gloves and a cane.

  In another he stands, hat in hand, in front of a large black doorway, his leg with its polished shoe thrust to the fore. There are about a dozen of these early pictures. The most crumpled of them—torn, folded, and restuck with yellowing glue—is of a beach party of twenty-three young m
en and women in bathing suits, smiling and embracing. A woman in white at the center holds up what looks like a volleyball. “Mamma, Pappa, Auntie Ro, Auntie Riek, and Uncle Manie” reads the handwritten text beneath.

  Although I am unpracticed at interviewing, a rhythm soon develops to our conversation. I ask countless questions, probing away at some detail, scribbling down notes.

  “What was the room like?”

  “Where did the light come from?”

  “What sounds could you hear?”

  It is only when all the details of an episode are exhausted and she can tell me nothing further that we move on.

  Darkness has fallen by the time that Lien mentions her poesie album: a kind of poetry scrapbook that nearly all girls in the Netherlands used to keep. At first she cannot find it, but then, after looking around in a side room, she suggests I stand on a chair and look on top of the bookshelf, where it lies wedged, kept safe from dust in a small, transparent plastic bag. It is a gray cloth album of around three by four inches with a faded pattern of flowers on the cover. Inside on the first of its facing pages there is a set of rhymes that are signed “your father” and dated “The Hague, 15 September, 1940.”

  They begin as follows:

  This is a little book where friends can write

  Who wish for you a future bright

  To keep you safe throughout the years

  With many smiles and never tears.

  I stand for a moment reading the sloping hand. Opposite, on the left, there are three old-fashioned paper cut outs in pastel colors: at the top, a wicker basket of flowers; and below, two girls in straw hats. The one on the right smiles and looks happy, like Lien’s mother in the photo, but the cut out girl on the left purses her lips as she clutches her posy. She glances sideways, as if unable to meet the viewer’s eyes.

  One

  It is really Hitler who makes Lien Jewish. Her parents are members of a Jewish sports club (there is a team photo that shows her father dressed in thick socks and an open-necked shirt), but other than that, they are not observant.

  They eat matzo at Passover and, under family influence, got married at a synagogue. Lien, aged seven, however, thinks more about the Dutch equivalent of Father Christmas, St. Nicholas, and still remembers her fury at being told that he does not really exist. She feels a trick has been played upon her by the adults and hides herself in rage and embarrassment in the cupboard beneath the stairs that lead to the apartment above.

  That cupboard at 31 Pletterijstraat, The Hague, is just across the hall from her bedroom, which faces you as you come in through the front door. As you enter her room there is a line of four little windows right up against the ceiling, too high to look out of, that give a rather dim light. These windows connect to the back bedroom, where her parents sleep. The other bedroom, which looks out onto the road and connects to the kitchen, is sublet by Mrs. Andriessen. She is elderly and rather a great lady, and, like everyone else, writes in Lien’s poesie album. “Dear little Lien, remain obedient and good, / and all shall love you, as they should,” she instructs the child. Lien pays more attention to the flower pictures that are stuck in by Mrs. Andriessen than she does to this wise advice.

  By April 20, 1941, when Mrs. Andriessen writes her entry, it is not easy for Jews to be obedient in occupied Holland. Jews must carry identity papers stamped with a J; they are banned from the civil service, from cinemas, cafés, and universities; Jewish ownership of a radio is a criminal offense. But for Lien things are still just about normal. She goes to a mixed school and the children’s names written in her album with careful fountain pens are, for the most part, not Jewish:

  “Let’s remain friends forever, dear Lientje, what do you think of that?” writes Ria.

  “A sunny, happy life, may it remain yours forever” from “your girlfriend, Mary van Stelsen.”

  “Will you still remember me, even without this album page?” asks Harrie Klerks.

  This last entry causes Lien some upset because, in spite of promising to work tidily, Harrie blots and spoils a page of the album so that it needs to be cut out with a paper knife. Still, Lien generously gives him a second try.

  Lien’s real worries, if she could formulate them, are not about the war but about her parents’ marriage. When she was very young, just two and a half, she had to leave the flat above a shop that they then rented to go to live with Aunt Fie and Uncle Jo and their two children in another part of town. Her parents got divorced. Mamma came to visit her, but she did not see Pappa for a very long time. After two years Mamma and Pappa got remarried and set up home in the Pletterijstraat, turning over a new leaf.

  Pappa has stopped traveling as much as he did when he worked as a salesman for Grandpa and he makes an effort to stay home at night, making children’s puzzles out of wood at the table under the big light in the kitchen. For Lien he makes a little painting of Jan Klaassen and Katrijn, the Dutch Punch and Judy, which is her most treasured possession. Jan Klaassen and Katrijn are sitting in the sunshine on top of a gray cloud that is raining down beneath them, holding umbrellas in their hands as they smile. Perhaps Jan Klaassen and Katrijn are a bit like Mamma and Pappa, who are happy now that they are out of the rain?

  Lien gets terrible stomachaches and does not like eating anything except desserts. She has medicines from the doctor, and one time when she got really thin she had to go and stay for six weeks in an infirmary, where you have to drink a lot of milk and eat porridge. It would be horrible to go back there, so she tries to eat as much as she can of the farmer’s kale-and-potato mash that Mamma makes her, but it always takes a very long time.

  For his new job Pappa has a little factory like Grandpa’s, which is really no more than a shed and can be reached through the yard at the back of the flat. He makes jams and pickles using vats of fruits and vegetables and various sizes of glass jars. Lien watches while Pappa works, but she is not allowed to help because this is a very clean job that children’s fingers might spoil. Instead, she is mainly to be found on the street singing nursery rhymes and playing games like “Where shall I lay my handkerchief?” with children huddled in a circle and one child going round and round until she finds someone to give the handkerchief to, who must then chase her to try to give it back. Lien loves this kind of playing; she is almost always outside when there is sunshine and will even put up with a bit of rain if there is fun to be had.

  She also goes to ballet, which is very ladylike, and sometimes they have shows. In Mamma and Pappa’s bedroom there is a picture of her in front of the stage scenery.

  It was taken after a performance: she is wearing her costume of black skirt and white blouse and she holds up a glove puppet on her right arm. The puppet is rather lumpy and bumpy and looks owlish, but it is supposed to be Mickey Mouse. Apart from the ballet costume, she loves her two best dresses. One is blue-gray silk, which she bought with Mamma on a shopping trip to the Bonneterie, the enormous department store with glass doors and a high ceiling that swallowed them up when they stepped inside. Its floors are so shiny you can see your face in them, and when you look down from the inside balcony onto the entrance hall the people below you look like ants. The other favorite is a little bell-shaped dress (known as a clock dress) of satin, with petticoats underneath that her mother made by hand.

  Lien’s world is a world of school, street games, and of grannies and grandpas, aunts and uncles and cousins. There is family all around them: at the end of short walks from the Pletterijstraat or at the end of short rides on the tram. In the summer they take the tram to Scheveningen, where they play on the beach. Pretty, the family dog, loves it there—running as fast as she can on the wet sand, just touching the water, leaving a long line of four-toed impressions for the sea to wash away. When Lien throws a tennis ball for Pretty she gets it back, moments later, all soggy and sticky and covered in sand.

  Her favorite cousins are Rini and Daafje. They are almost like a brother
and sister because Lien stayed with them for such a long time when Mamma and Pappa could not be friends. On one of the many days they spend together, Rini writes a short moral verse in the poesie album about “taking people as they come.”

  The poem is not particularly appropriate as Lien does very little judging of anything or anyone, but sometimes it’s easier just to write something standard, and that’s fine if the handwriting and the stuck-in pictures are beautiful, so Lien writes something moral and approving in Rini’s album as well.

  And then there is Auntie Riek, with cousin Bennie and the two little ones, Nico and baby Robbie, for whom Lien sometimes helps to care. There is a photo of Auntie Riek and Mamma squeezed onto a wooden chair, with Bennie (thumb in mouth) and Lien (with a white bow in her hair) perched precariously on their laps.

  Mamma sits on one arm of the seat, holding Lien with her left hand and Riek with her right. The chair looks terribly unsteady, the whole gang likely to topple over any minute, and though Mamma maintains her serious camera smile you can see that her sister-in-law is starting to laugh.

  A favorite place is Uncle Manie’s ironware shop nearer the center of the city, filled to the ceiling with racks of screws, door knockers, hammers, and bicycle bells. One time Lien is given a beautiful pair of skates there, with white leather tops and long, sharp, silvery blades. When it is winter Lien will be able to try them. She can already see herself gliding without effort past other children, racing ahead in the sunshine, turning a pirouette on the ice.

  * * *

  —

  WAR IN MAY 1940, when Holland is invaded, comes out of a blue sky, in Lien’s memory. Standing with her parents she sees planes up above and they tell her, “This is the war.” Apart from this, not much happens. There are German soldiers who sit at tables outside cafés and sometimes walk the streets. They are friendly. It is only slowly that things start to change.