The Cut Out Girl

by Bart van Es

  From the autumn of 1941 onward the names in Lien’s poesie album become different. Or rather, they become more the same. Roosje Sanders, Judith Hirch, Ali Rosenthal, Jema Abrahams: those who write their names from September ’41 to March ’42 are all unmistakably Jewish, and this is because Lien now has to go to a Jewish school. The poems they write are still about friendship, angels, and flowers, but the pastel cut outs of bouquets and girls in crinolines, which were stuck all over the early pages, are now rare. On September 15, 1941, new signs appear outside libraries, markets, parks, museums, and swimming pools: FORBIDDEN FOR JEWS.

  Two

  It is January 2015. Having met with Lien for one day in December, I have come back to the Netherlands for a few weeks to continue our interviews. We have also decided that it would be good for me to visit the places where she lived. This is to spark her memory with photos and also to get a sense of the locations myself. So I am on my way to The Hague.

  Historically speaking, The Hague was always considered a village and not a city. The quiz question, What is the capital of the Netherlands? is difficult to answer because the Dutch talk of a “head city” rather than of a “capital,” and the head city of the Netherlands is indisputably Amsterdam. The Hague is merely the seat of government. Though chosen as the meeting place of the States General of the new republic at the end of the sixteenth century, it was not granted the dignity of a university or even a town wall. The Protestant representatives of the seven provinces who broke away from the Spanish Empire met there precisely because it was neutral and unthreatening. They held their meetings in a moated fortress, which is today still the home of the Dutch parliament. In The Hague there is no great port or tradition of trading, but all the same, its status as the birthplace of the Low Countries is apt. The city sits on sand dunes and the remains of a boggy shoreline that was first drained by subsistence farmers in the ninth century. Like so much of Holland, it was raised by human labor from the North Sea.

  Heading for The Hague I drive along motorways that slice through the old seafloor, a monochrome carpet of identical squares. When compared to England, where I have lived since I was a teenager, the Dutch countryside feels seamlessly modern in its flat, perfectly organized uniformity. Every few minutes I pass a neat farmhouse of dark reddish-brown brick with a sharply pitched roof. In the yards of these farmhouses there are spotless tractors and feed silos and none of the agricultural lumber that is found on the other side of the North Sea. Even the livestock looks standardized: rectangular cows all stamped with variations of the same black and white. Straight, silvery ditches cut up the land into even portions that stretch into the morning mist.

  As I reach the edge of the city, the farms are replaced by a succession of sleek steel-and-glass structures: car showrooms, distribution centers, noise barriers, and greenhouses inside which there is a controlled environment of carbon dioxide and light. These buildings, just as much as the farms, feel almost artificial. Holland, when seen through a car window, looks devoid of history of any kind.

  Having turned off the motorway, I soon find myself in a district of tired redbrick terraced housing. I park on the Pletterijstraat, the street on which Lien used to live. At the start of the last century, when these houses were built, the city was booming. Posters with Art Nouveau illustrations promoted its virtues as a residential haven to farming folk from the overcrowded countryside and to immigrants from the colonies and the Near East. The Hague, suddenly, was not just a city but a city for the world. In 1900 it became the home of what would soon be called the International Court of Justice, housed in splendor at the newly constructed Peace Palace. As it had been at its origin, it was, once again, a neutral meeting place for great powers. The Pletterijstraat, completed in 1912, held its place in this city of hope.

  Today the street is still mainly residential, with a corner shop and a couple of independent garages that sell secondhand cars. The ground-floor flat at number 31 is now a small therapeutic gymnasium with the logo FYSIO FITNESS splashed in yellow on its frosted glass. I press the buzzer and wait until a tall young man in a tracksuit opens the door. He is one of the gym instructors. Behind him in the lobby are two older gentlemen in exercise clothing: bunched-up shorts, faded cotton jumpers, bright sneakers, and socks that are a bit too long.

  I am left on my own in the little entrance hall, with the class getting going in what used to be Mrs. Andriessen’s room. I can hear the exercise class in progress, with the instructor saying encouraging things.

  To the right there is the cupboard where Lien hid when she discovered that St. Nicholas was not real. In front of me is her old bedroom, now an office with health-care qualifications pinned up on the walls. The windows let in some pale January light.

  It does not take long to see the three-room apartment. Everything is decent, ordinary, and of a reasonable size. Behind the office is the bedroom of Lien’s parents, which now contains a massage table and an anatomical skeleton wearing a red knit hat with a pom-pom. Connected to this is a galley kitchen with a kettle and some fitness leaflets on the worktop. The scrubby backyard has become a storage place for random objects: a metal bin, a snow scoop, a bicycle, some cinder blocks, a stack of plates, and some broken chairs. Looking over the fence I try to work out where Charles de Jong’s little factory would have stood.

  Having been in the flat for less than ten minutes, I make my way out, waving politely to the gym instructor and the old men.

  * * *

  —

  BACK IN THE STREET and with nothing obvious to do next, I suddenly ask myself what I’m up to. Although I work as an academic, I am no expert on Dutch history or on Nazi persecution. Is visiting the addresses where Lien’s story takes me really research? Slightly on edge, with that question hanging over me, I begin to walk down the street.

  Toward the end of the interwar period this area was becoming increasingly Jewish. In 1920, when the houses were new, there were just seven Jewish families on the Pletterijstraat. By 1940 there were thirty-nine. Almost directly opposite Lien’s house stood the Jewish orphanage, which moved into its specially commissioned premises in 1929 and soon afterward began accepting German refugees. Thirty-five thousand moved to the Netherlands after the Nazis took power in Germany.

  Those coming to these terraces in the twenties and thirties were not the old Sephardic Jewish families who had escaped to the Netherlands from Portugal in the late fifteenth century. The newer arrivals were German and Polish, but they too were following an established route. Since the eighteenth century, many eastern Ashkenazi Jews, whose first language was Yiddish rather than Hebrew, had migrated to Holland. The first German or Hoogduitsch synagogue was built in The Hague in the 1720s. Over the years, tens of thousands would make their journey across the Continent. Here there were no pogroms, and it was possible to join guilds, to become a freeman of the city, and even to pass the status of freeman down the family line. Although there were areas of the city that were more Jewish than others, there were no lines of division. From generation to generation, the immigrants took on the tastes and the habits of their compatriots and became straightforwardly Dutch. So when Napoleon took direct control of the Netherlands in 1811 and ordered the registration of surnames, many Jews took the opportunity to naturalize theirs. Joseph Izak, for example, as a long-standing citizen, opted for the plain, native-sounding “Joseph de Jong.”

  The Portuguese, as the first settlers, remained distinct from these newer, more working-class arrivals. They were a kind of aristocracy, closely integrated with political power and trade. These Sephardic Jews, who had emerged as moneylenders after 1179 when the Third Lateran Council forbade the charging of interest among Christians, had escaped southern persecution and prospered in the seventeenth century in the great ports of Europe’s northern coast. Though less than 0.01 percent of the population, Dutch Sephardic Jews owned a quarter of the sugar plantations in Surinam, and they were crucial to the financial structures of the new r
epublic. It was the Portuguese-Jewish banker Isaac Lopez Suasso, for example, who advanced the necessary two million guilders and arranged the hire of six thousand Swedish mercenaries when William III of Orange set out to claim the British Crown in 1688.

  If anything, the Sephardic community in The Hague was even more accepted than that in Amsterdam. It was here, in 1677, that the skeptical Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza was buried in great splendor in the Protestant New Church. This was an astonishing gesture of acceptance, even if the church authorities broke up the grave soon after for nonpayment of fees.

  Village status, combined with its function as a royal residence, made The Hague an easy place for special pleading. Thus when, in 1690, there was a little local difficulty over some passages in the Talmud, a solution was not hard to arrange. The problem involved the carrying of objects in public on the Sabbath, which was clearly forbidden. The question, though, was what counted as “in public”? In Amsterdam it had been decided that the whole city, as a walled unit, could reasonably be defined as “a home.” The Hague, unfortunately, did not have town walls. Learned rabbis had determined, however, that if the two stone bridges over its canals were to be replaced by drawbridges, then The Hague too would, logically, be a home. In consequence, a Jewish delegation approached the governing magistrate. Might the bridges be modified at their cost? Two years later, in the true spirit of political accommodation, they were demolished and replaced.

  German and Polish immigrants living in the Pletterijstraat in the 1920s and ’30s were hardly in a position to incur such expenses, even supposing they had the commitment to that degree of ingenuity in interpreting God’s laws. Yet although not rich, the River District was perfectly pleasant. Then as now, it was a place of diversity, where different races and religions lived neighborly lives. There was, it is true, some resentment among non-Jews at the level of migration, and in response the government had put a cap on numbers. Depending on what circle you moved in, Jews could be feared as socialists, as capitalists, as Zionists, as poor and low skilled, or as rich and overqualified, taking the best jobs. In the 1930s it could be hard for Jews to get a restaurant booking. Still, even in 1937 there was only a 4 percent vote for the Dutch fascist party, the NSB.

  * * *

  —

  LEAVING THE OLD ORPHANAGE behind me, I take a turn off the Pletterijstraat onto a side street, hoping to find a café. I pass a primary school with neat Jugendstil lettering over its doors announcing its year of completion: 1923. Since that time a mural has been added that shows a giraffe looking out of a painted window with a smiling girl seated on its back. At ground level there are other figures of children on the brickwork and a Plexiglas sign that tells me this is a Protestant Christian school. Farther up the street I can see a kind of shopping precinct so I head up in that direction in search of a coffee.

  When I get there, I see that the precinct is something different from what I expected. It is as neat and tidy as it looked from a distance, with attractively lit shop fronts, but the rows of windows show only women in lingerie perched on barstools with dark red, dimly lit cubicles to the rear. Some of the windows have closed curtains; others display messages such as SENSUAL MASSAGE, TWO WOMEN, or KINKY SEX. Across the street from me there is a steel outdoor urinal where two men are urinating while they survey the scene.

  As I walk through, feeling intrusive, it is difficult not to make eye contact with the women. My gaze moves quickly from one window to another and I am conscious of my presence as a time waster as well as a representative of the general crowd of men. Behind the glass in the warm light and with their thick layers of makeup, the women look almost ageless, like bored but desperate sales assistants hovering at the front of a shop. A blond young woman looks across at me, smiling, and then, as I pass, goes back to checking her phone.

  * * *

  —

  IN THREE OR FOUR MINUTES I have passed through the precinct and am back on the main road that leads to the station. From here I can loop back to the Pletterijstraat and get to my car.

  Once again I am struck by the strangeness of this familiar country, which I left as a three-year-old forty years ago, returning only for the holidays every summer. I am now probably more English than anything, which is why the neat precinct for prostitutes is so foreign to me. The Dutch are pragmatic about these matters: it is logical to have sex or drugs or euthanasia out in the open, honest and regulated, and if it ends up less than a hundred yards from a primary school, that cannot be helped.

  This last hour, I feel, has been an immersion into the Low Countries: perfect motorways, a Protestant primary school, a red-light district, and the former home of a Jewish family, now converted into a physiotherapy gym. This is a country of tolerance: letting people get on with things, not minding others’ business if it does not interfere with your own. This makes the Netherlands progressive. But might it also explain why the Germans were so often allowed to act as they did? The Netherlands of the 1930s was still what was called a society of “pillars”: separate strands, such as the Protestants, the Catholics, and the liberals, who brushed shoulders and exchanged polite greetings, but who rarely went further than that. One followed the law and kept things tidy. Everything else was another’s business, no need to interfere.

  * * *

  —

  OF THE EIGHTEEN THOUSAND JEWS in The Hague in 1940, two thousand survived. Of the four hundred old Portuguese Jews, so deeply embedded in the fabric of the state and the city, just eight returned. The entire Jewish orphanage, which stands across the road from me, was liquidated without survivors on March 13, 1943.

  Three

  Jew.” In May 1942 Lien sees her mother at the dining table in the kitchen with a large sheet of yellow cloth. There is a pattern of stars upon it with black outlines, each with a word printed at its center: “Jew.” Around every star there is a thin dotted line to make it easier to cut out. They must now wear these stars on each item of outside clothing, so Mamma carefully stitches a star reading “Jew” onto the silk of the Bonneterie dress.

  The children on the street, whom she knows, are the same as ever, but those on the way to school are not so kind. Sometimes they throw stones. Then one day a group of children runs up and grabs her, pushing her into a side street, chanting “We have caught a Jew.” When she does not come home, her father goes out to find her. The gang backs away when it sees him, but once he takes her hand a bold lad edges closer. “Dirty Jew,” he mumbles, half embarrassed, poised and ready to run off. Pappa ignores him but not with his normal calmness; there is a tremor to his fingers as he leads her away from the alley and back to the flat.

  As they reach number 31 they see Mrs. Andriessen standing in the stairwell of the apartment block, half out on the pavement, looking out for them. There is a worried, searching expression on her face and then a tense half smile of relief when she sees Lien. This feels odd because Mrs. Andriessen is almost always to be found in her soap-scented room. The old lady turns and calls something into the open door of their flat, her cheeks shiny and red. She seems to be telling Mamma that everything is all right. Lien suddenly thinks that because Mrs. Andriessen is allowed to stay with them at the Pletterijstraat she must also be Jewish, like they are, though she is not sure about that.

  Aunt Ellie, on the other hand, is not Jewish, because she is not really an auntie, just a good friend of Mamma’s who visits all the time even though she doesn’t have to wear a star.

  When the summer holidays come, Lien often stays in the yard or the kitchen or on the outside stairs at the front of the house. She gets to know Lilly, who lives at number 29 upstairs. Lilly draws four evenly spaced pencil lines into the album and copies a poem perfectly onto the middle of the page:

  Roses big and roses small

  Soft as velvet on a wall

  But the softest petal part

  Is the rose of Lientje’s heart.

  Lilly draws some extra lines crosswise o
n the left-hand corner of the page: “I lay in bed and mucked about / so mum got cross and started to shout.” Every time they read it aloud to themselves they start to giggle.

  * * *

  —

  THEN ONE EVENING IN EARLY AUGUST, still in the holidays, Mamma comes into her bedroom, just as always, to tuck her in and kiss her good night. She sits down on the chair beside her, rests one hand on top of the covers, and uses the other to stroke Lien’s hair. “I must tell you a secret,” she tells her. “You are going to stay somewhere else for a while.”

  There is a silence. Whatever comes after this becomes hazy, but this sentence, spoken in her mother’s voice, stays fixed. Lien remembers that her mother was very lovely, and kind, and that she felt loved.

  The excitement of the secret presses heavily the next morning when Lien sits outside on the high stairway with Lilly and a few other children beside her, wanting very much to tell. It feels special to have a secret, but it is not fun to have to keep it for so long. When Mamma comes home Lien runs down the steps and catches up with her. “Can’t I tell?” she whispers. “I think it’s a really nice secret.” But Mamma won’t let her; it is very important that nobody else knows.

  That evening there is a gathering of aunts and uncles. They squeeze themselves into the kitchen, and then, as its gets ever fuller, find a place to look into it from the doorway of her parents’ room. It is not a birthday party because there are no children (except for her and baby Robbie), but still Lien is the center of attention: she has the gooey taste of chocolate in her mouth, which is almost unfamiliar, and is asked to sit on nearly everyone’s lap. For some reason she decides to behave badly, laughing in the high-pitched squeal that Mamma doesn’t like as she points to a spot on Aunt Ellie’s nose, but, no matter how much she squeals and points at people, she is not told off. Her shrieks cut through the murmur of the other voices; the adults speak low to one another and have eyes only for Lien. Everything goes so quickly. There is no time for talking or even for thinking about the questions that emerge and then edge away, just out of sight, in her mind. It all feels rushed, but still the evening runs on for hours as a succession of hugs and whispers; she is only half conscious of being carried slumbering to her bedroom in her father’s arms.