The Cut Out Girl

by Bart van Es

  * * *

  —

  IN THE MORNING, soon after she has had her bread and cheese, there is a lady at the door, even grander than Mrs. Andriessen and not so old. She has a firm, jolly manner, just like the nurse at the doctor’s surgery, saying nice things about her and asking questions about her schoolwork and about what books she enjoys. Lien is embarrassed that she does not do much reading, though she remembers to say that she likes Jan Klaassen and Katrijn. The lady is quite young, but not at all like a mother. It is a real adventure to be going with her, the kind of adventure that gives you a little feeling of sickness in your mouth. On the outside she is excited, but on the inside she feels calm. They are unstitching the stars from her dresses, the two women’s fingers moving very fast.

  Lien can keep her own name and her surname, de Jong, but she must not say anything about Mamma or Pappa or family. She is not to be Jewish now, just a normal girl from Rotterdam whose parents have been killed in the bombing. If anyone asks, she must say that the lady is Mrs. Heroma and that she is taking her to her aunt who lives in Dordrecht, which is a different town. It is important to stay very close to the lady, hugged tight into her body so that nobody who knows her can see that Lien is not wearing her star. Mamma says exactly the same things as the lady and gets her to repeat them, even though Lien feels she knows them already. Then, a kiss with a hug that hurts a little and she is outside in the Pletterijstraat, walking fast in step with the lady, trying hard to keep herself pressed into her coat. The bag of her things, including her poesie album and Pappa’s puzzle, is over Mrs. Heroma’s shoulder and bangs its edge against her with every stride.

  * * *

  —

  IT IS NOT FAR FROM LIEN’S HOUSE to the station, so their walk through the streets and then through the park (where Jews are forbidden) to the Hollands Spoor railway station is over almost as soon as it starts. The station front looks like a palace, but there is no time to look at it because their train is about to depart. Lien thinks for a moment about her bedroom, close enough for her to run back.

  Mrs. Heroma talks to her about funny place-names. There are lots in Holland, she says. For example, the Double Sausage Street in Amsterdam, the Mustache in Groningen, or Ducksick Road in Zeeland. There is also a road called Behind the Wild Pig. Lien thinks these names are funny. She likes Mrs. Heroma and giggles as they watch the houses of The Hague pass faster and faster through the window of the train compartment, the kchunk-kchunk of the wheels on the railway growing louder and closer together. The smoke from the locomotive is dirty but it smells clean. “Does Lien know any funny place-names?” After a lot of thinking, she remembers Cow Thief Street, which Mrs. Heroma had not known about. “Cow Thief Street, that’s a good one!” Mrs. Heroma says. Lien is about to say, “It’s not far from our house” when she stops herself just in time.

  * * *

  —

  UNLIKE THE HAGUE, Dordrecht has only one railway station. It is also like a palace, only a bit smaller, without the princess towers of the station they left behind. They walk through another park—bigger than theirs at home and sleepy in the afternoon sunlight—then through streets with little houses, nothing at all like the three-story apartment blocks of The Hague. Her legs are tired now and it takes a bit longer each time to get to a new corner, but at each one Mrs. Heroma tells her the street name and then a funny one from somewhere else in Holland, so Lien presses on. Mauritsweg (Trousers Street), Krispijnseweg (Buttermountain Street), and finally Bilderdijkstraat (Rabbitpipe Street), and they have arrived. All the houses that Lien has passed seemed little compared to the city, but these ones in the Bilderdijkstraat are the littlest of all. In fact, the street doesn’t really look like it has houses; it has just two long, low, redbrick walls with doors and windows set in it, stretching as far as Lien can see.

  In the road a group of boys is running and shouting. Mrs. Heroma, ignoring the commotion, walks straight to the door of number 10 and knocks hard on the little round windowpane. In her coat pocket, unbeknown to Lien, there is a letter. It is written in the same steady hand that her mother used on the second page of the little girl’s album. The letter, which still survives in Lien’s apartment in Amsterdam, is dated August 1942. It reads as follows:

  Most Honored Sir and Madam

  Although you are unknown to me, I imagine you for myself as a man and a woman who will, as a father and mother, care for my only child. She has been taken from me by circumstance. May you, with the best will and wisdom, look after her.

  Imagine for yourself the parting between us. When shall we ever see her again? On 7 September she will be nine. I hope it will be a joyful day for her.

  I want to say to you that it is my wish that she will think only of you as her mother and father and that, in the moments of sadness that will come to her, you will comfort her as such.

  If God wills it, we will all, after the war, shake one another by the hand in joyous reunion. Directed to you as the father and mother of:

  Lientje

  Four

  I am on a train approaching Dordrecht (colloquially known as Dordt), the city to which Lien was brought in the late summer of 1942. Seen from the railway bridge before we pull into the station, its Great Church rises up between pretty gabled houses, beyond which lie harbors and a heavy industrial zone. Though small by today’s standards, with a population of around 120,000, this was once the biggest city in Holland. Built on an island that was created by a confluence of rivers, Dordt saw its heyday back in the fifteenth century, when it became a natural center for the handling of agricultural goods. For a while it was a merchant city. The silt-filled rivers, however, proved unsuitable for the larger ships that soon became necessary for ocean trading, which meant that, over time, Dordt was overtaken by its larger westerly neighbor, Rotterdam.

  It was here rather than in The Hague that Dutch independence really started. In 1572 the city hosted the First Assembly of the Free States, at which William of Nassau, Prince of Orange, announced his open rebellion against the Spanish king. It was also here, at the Synod of Dordt, that the new republic, having proved victorious, decided on its state religion. From 1618 to 1619 the Protestant churches of Europe gathered to debate the great theological questions. On the one side stood the followers of Arminius, who felt that some kind of accommodation with Catholicism might be possible: perhaps grace (that great act of divine forgiveness for man’s innate sinfulness) could indeed be fostered by human action, such as penitence or good deeds? Opposing them were the Calvinists, who insisted on what they termed the total depravity of human beings. According to Calvin, only a small band of individuals, already chosen by God before the beginning of time, would be saved from damnation, no matter how fervently the others might try to join that “elect.” The synod ended in a Calvinist triumph and only four days after its conclusion the main protector of the Arminians, Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, was led to execution on the block. Total depravity was thus confirmed.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER LEAVING THE FUNCTIONAL INTERIOR of the station, I look back over my shoulder at its classical facade and then head down the main street into town. My plan is to begin by visiting the small local war museum. It is only a short walk, first through an area of modern office blocks and then through a set of pretty medieval streets that are full of cyclists and shoppers. At this hour of the morning these are mostly retired couples wearing practical clothing such as jogging bottoms and zip-up raincoats in bright artificial colors, like purple, lime green, and pink.

  The museum, which is located in a town house across from the old harbor, is like hundreds of others: a little faded and cramped, with overbright lighting so that nothing looks real. In the entrance hall, pride of place is given to an army jeep that stands in the middle of the foyer on a dais of artificial grass. Stiff mannequins sit inside it. Their clean helmets have tightly fitting chinstraps and they smile, eyes forward, like Lego men. Behind, there are
maps showing the German landings and then the Allied liberation. Bold arrows show troop movements accompanied by numbers and dates. Elsewhere there are photographs and display cases full of weapons, documents, and medals.

  Dordrecht was one of the towns that saw real fighting when the Germans invaded. Paratroopers were dropped at first light on May 10, 1940, to seize the bridges. The city had a garrison of fifteen hundred soldiers, but the Dutch army, which had not fought a real war for more than two centuries, was spectacularly ill prepared. Few of the men had received full combat training and much of their ammunition was locked in a central depot for safekeeping, so they had only a minimal supply of rounds. In the early hours, many of the defenders simply looked up to the sky in awe of the Junkers bombers. Others wasted their supply of bullets trying to shoot them down.

  All the same, once the shock of the landing abated, there were pitched battles. On day one, dozens of German assault troops were killed or wounded and around eighty were taken prisoner and shipped to England just in time. Then on May 13, around twenty Panzers rolled into the city, of which fifteen were disabled at the cost of twenty-four Dutch lives. After just four days of fighting, however, Dordt, like the rest of the Netherlands, surrendered and the troops spent the last of their energy destroying their own equipment to prevent it from falling into enemy hands.

  * * *

  —

  AS THE SOLE VISITOR TO THE MUSEUM, I feel a little intrusive. Around me the men who work here (I should imagine on a voluntary basis) are checking stock lists, cleaning objects from the display cases, and reorganizing the small library of books about the war. As I stand scanning the battered spines, I turn to a man in a blue shirt with white hair who is sorting piles of volumes at a desk. He looks up, pleased at my interest in history and still more so when I tell him about Lien and her journey here from The Hague. At the mention of Mrs. Heroma, who brought Lien to Dordrecht, a look of recognition crosses his face. He asks what information I have.

  On my laptop, which I take from my suitcase, there is a photograph of a document: a yellow sheet of lined A4 paper covered in jottings, some crossed out. It is headed “What should play a role in the construction of a new law?” The document is in the hand of Mrs. Heroma, and I took the photo of it in Amsterdam. It came to Lien after Mrs. Heroma’s death. By the time these jottings were made, long after the war, Dieuke Heroma-Meilink (known as “Took” to her friends) was a Labor politician, first in parliament and then at the UN. The annotations on the paper are practical, with Lien cited only briefly as a case of an only child who had to join a larger family. A detail makes the situation human: as Lien’s mother pulled the front door shut at the Pletterijstraat, Mrs. Heroma heard her beginning to sob.

  The man calls others toward him and soon a small group is looking over my shoulder at the document on the screen. As I scroll through the images on my computer—the poesie album, the letters, and the photographs—a strong feeling of shared interest fills the room. The one who really knows about this, I am told, is Gert van Engelen, a local journalist who also works for the museum. E-mails are sent and messages are left on answerphones and meanwhile the group checks indexes and databases, giving suggestions as to where I might go to find out more. They feel almost like friends. By midafternoon I have a list of Web sites and publications and am watching a video recorded by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum twenty-five years ago in which Mrs. Heroma, somewhat reluctantly, reveals the things that she and her husband did during the war.

  * * *

  —

  IN THE 1930S the Heromas lived in Amsterdam, where Jan Heroma, having first completed a degree in psychology, was studying at medical school. The two of them were politically progressive, deciding to live together rather than get married, sharing a flat with the future socialist health minister Irene Vorrink (who was to become famous for decriminalizing recreational drugs in 1976). Having trained as a social worker, Took was employed by a trade union to provide political education for working-class women. At night in the flat, at a small desk with a typewriter, she translated German academic literature written by Jews into Dutch. This was necessary because, without these translations, German Jewish academics, persecuted at home by the Nazis, would find it difficult to find jobs in the Netherlands. To the Heromas, liberal, politically neutral Holland seemed a natural place of refuge.

  By the time of the invasion, Jan Heroma had his own medical practice in Dordrecht, in an elegant white terraced house at 14 Dubbeldamseweg. An extra door had been fitted to allow patients direct access to the waiting room at ground level, and from there they could cross straight to the doctor’s study. The couple themselves lived in an apartment upstairs.

  At first, the German invaders did little to disturb ordinary life in the Netherlands. They took over the reins of power (appointing Arthur Seyss-Inquart as Reichskommissar in charge of the civil administration), but the structure of government and the operation of services such as the police, the school system, shops, churches, and businesses remained more or less the same. Anti-Jewish measures ramped up over time almost imperceptibly: exclusion from air-raid shelters, an “Aryan Declaration” for members of the civil service, a requirement for the registration of all Jews. Then, from February 1941, mass arrests began, slowly at first. Those whom the Heromas had brought to apparent safety in their own country were now under threat, and the translations and new posts in the universities they had once provided were no longer of use.

  From November 1941 onward, regular ads were placed in the bottom left-hand corner of the classifieds page of the local paper. Next to announcements from the dentist, the fashion boutique, and the concert hall, there were notices such as this:

  J. F. HEROMA

  PHYSICIAN

  change of

  consultation hours

  On Krispijn at 11 o’clock

  daily, apart from Saturdays;

  PRIVATE CONSULTATION

  daily from 1.30 to 2 o’clock

  Where it mattered, people knew what these messages meant.

  Across Holland, as the occupation gained in intensity, networks were being constructed to resist the Nazis: delicate lines of trust that connected couples like the Heromas in Dordrecht to distant others whom they had never met. These webs often clung to the holdfasts of prewar society, such as medical associations, student fraternities, churches, and political groups. Jan Heroma was a doctor and a member of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party and also the friend of many Jews in the academic world. This made the house at 14 Dubbeldamseweg a point of intersection. The little car that the Heromas owned made them unusually mobile, so that journeys between the houses of patients, sometimes far out into the countryside, traced fragile, invisible strands.

  As Jan Heroma and his wife ferried people across the country and kept them hidden in their basement, others too were beginning to take action as part of networks in different towns. Jooske de Neve, for example, part of a resistance group called the Unnamed Entity, sat on trains from Amsterdam accompanying groups of children, herself shaking with a feverish headache of fear. Speaking long afterward, she recalled that she could always detect the moment at which other passengers recognized the quiet cluster of boys and girls as Jewish. She just had to hope that they would not tell. Once, a set of train guards began moving through the carriage, checking IDs and tickets. A wave of panic overcame her, and she ran to the toilet and flushed a pack of false identity cards (which she was ferrying in addition to the children) onto the tracks below. It haunted her conscience forever afterward that these false papers were found.

  In Utrecht, Hetty Voûte, a biology student, joined a group that called itself the Children’s Committee. Searching for addresses to hide young boys and girls now separated from their parents, she cycled around the countryside calling at random on farmers for help.

  As she stood at the gate of one farmhouse the owner told her, “If it is God’s wish that those children
are taken, then that is God’s wish.”

  Hetty looked straight at him. “And if your farm burns down tonight, then that is also God’s wish,” she replied.

  Back home in the bookcase in her room she had a leather-bound volume with the title The Assembled Tales of John Galsworthy stamped on the spine. Within, there lay hidden a system of index cards that recorded the names and addresses of the 171 Jewish children she had saved.

  Around the same time, in Limburg, at the southern tip of the country, another farmer was being presented with children to shelter, starting with a three-year-old girl who was left at his door. Looking back, one can see that it was hard for this man, Harmen Bockma, to keep his head above water. He already had a milk round early each morning and worked shifts at the local mine to make ends meet. To hide children he would need special spaces in his farmhouse, which would take money as well as time. And so, in order to get the paid leave from the mine that would be necessary for the work to be completed, Harmen Bockma cut off part of a finger from his own hand.