The Cut Out Girl

by Bart van Es

  The two of them are in the thick of the streets now and as Lien looks upward she sees the outline of housefronts against the lighter gray of the sky. The houses flick by as Jo runs with her. One has a squared top with curved edges. Another is like two staircases coming together with a tower in the middle on top. Then, at the end of the street, she sees what must be a square and beyond that a church steeple. And across the darkness in the distance there are two lights moving about.

  The lights mean danger, and when Jo spots them he crashes over a low wall into a garden, where they lie still for a long time next to a shed.

  They hear nothing except the sounds of the night.

  Eventually they dare to move again and go back over the wall and then left down a cobbled street with smaller buildings, where Jo’s foot catches a pebble that goes bouncing across the stones. As they stand for a moment in the absolute stillness she watches the steam of his breath.

  Then, as quickly as it started, it is over. Jo knocks on a door and they wait for agonizing seconds. It opens. There is a quick exchange of whispers and they tumble inside.

  * * *

  —

  WHERE EXACTLY THEY GO AFTER THIS is confusing. Everything is dark and constricted. A man she can barely see leads them first upstairs and then downstairs, through a corridor, and then up a ladder. There is a movement of hinges, a heavy carpet rolled across the floor. Twists and turns lead them down a narrow passageway to a cupboard, which somehow moves forward to form the entrance to a room.

  It is the dirtiest place that Lien has ever been in. The large central area makes her think of a tavern, although she has never been in a tavern and certainly not in one like this. There are a couple of chairs and sofas against the walls and she can see people moving about. In the center, half a dozen men sit at a table around an oil lamp, playing cards. A few sets of eyes turn toward them as they enter. She walks by herself now, her bare feet picking up grease from the carpeted floor. The smell of the place is incredible. She wonders if there is enough air to breathe. But still Lien is without fear and keeps everything at a distance; the heightened awareness and wakefulness of the night excursion is starting to fade. The man who showed the way did not come into the room and has shut up the cupboard behind them. Jo is now the only leader and she waits, without impatience, to be told what to do.

  Even with Jo, Lien feels no deep connection. As he moves to talk to the men at the card table she remains staring into the middle distance, aware of the dirt in the room around her and of the bodies shifting position from time to time on the furniture around the walls.

  Her one thought is “I ought not to be here,” but this is not a cry of rebellion, just an observation that keeps running through her head.

  After a bit, Jo returns and says that she should sleep upstairs where there are bunk beds. He hunkers down and nervously puts his hand on her shoulder, so that she feels its weight and its warmth. They were pressed together all the while that he carried her, but now for the first time he is reaching out with affection, tentative, as if fearful to hurt. He talks, in an embarrassed mumble, about how she should “do her business” in the two buckets in the adjoining room. Lien nods as she listens. When she stands beside the buckets a moment later, her bare feet on the yellow wet of the tiles, she is nearly sick with the stench.

  Then, having followed Jo up a ladder, she finds herself in the bedroom, in which all of the bunks are already occupied. Jo tells her to join the bottom one on the far left. The bedclothes feel damp as she lifts them to step under the covers. An old woman’s face blinks up at her momentarily, says something in a dry-mouthed whisper, then rolls over to face another sleeper who lies against the far wall. Lien has never shared a bed with anyone before and it feels strange to sense the weight of the others pulling her to the center of the mattress as she lies down beside them, fully clothed. She holds one hand to the cold metal of the bed frame and lies as straight as possible, facing outward into the room. Below, where she can still hear him, Jo has joined the circle of card players and is telling them about the adventure of the raid and their escape. It must now be long past midnight and she has no idea what kind of place it is that she is in. As she lies there, sleep closes in upon her. When she shuts her eyes it feels like the room is swaying and as she listens to Jo telling their story she can see herself again on his back looking up at the outlines of the housefronts, black against the moonlit clouds. She loosens her grip on the bed frame and one foot moves under the blanket toward the old woman, but when it touches she instinctively snaps it back. Nothing here is familiar except the regular throb of the sores on her legs.

  * * *

  —

  THE DIRTY DARK HOUSE in IJsselmonde is Lien’s home for just a few days. By the time she leaves, Jo has gone off in some other direction.

  Eleven

  The afternoon has passed almost without our noticing it and as we get to questions about the hideout in IJsselmonde it is already 6:30 P.M. Although the events themselves are traumatic, the process of reassembling them has a positive side to it. Lien has long since worked through her experiences, in part with a counselor, and as I sit listening I find myself taken up with the practicalities, so that emotion takes a backseat. It is only as I think back that I am haunted by what has occurred.

  Lien herself is almost euphoric. “I didn’t think I could talk for so long about all of it,” she says as she stands up and begins to clear the tea things from the table. Only now, as an afterthought, she mentions that she may have a letter from Jo. I tell her that I would very much like to see it and a few minutes later Lien returns from the adjoining room with a single sheet of lined A4 paper, folded to a sixth of its size. The enclosed photos, which Lien kept for a long time, are now lost.

  While back in Oxford over Christmas I bought a digital recorder to use alongside my notes for our interviews. It is still running, so every word of our conversation is logged for me to listen to afterward as I write.

  Lien unfolds the letter, pointing first to her own handwriting at the top. In neat individually printed letters, Lien, by that point aged twelve, has written:

  a letter that Lien must keep

  '' '' from Jo.

  As she reads this out loud, Lien laughs at herself for having given this firm order to posterity. She continues on to the letter itself, occasionally stumbling as she tries to make sense of Jo’s diction and spelling errors. It is dated March 4, 1946, from Singapore:

  Dear Lien,

  What a long time ago it is that we heard from each other. At about this time two years ago I had to leave unexpectedly and I didn’t get to see you and we haven’t written. When I heard from Mieneke that you were in good health and living in Dordrecht, I thought now really I must write to Lien. Lien, what a lot has happened in this time. Dear Lien, you have never been out of my thoughts. Not when I was in Amersfoort and not when I was in Germany and also not now when I am so far away from Holland. Lien, if you have one you must send a photo of yourself. I will enclose a few of myself with this letter. Lien, now a few questions. How are you? Are you still at school, and in what sort of class? Lien, if I can do anything for you then you must write to me about it, if I can do it I will do anything to help you. You will have heard from Mieneke . . .

  When she gets to the name Mieneke for the second time Lien stops.

  “I don’t know who Mieneke is. Maybe the woman in IJsselmonde? I think it is the woman in IJsselmonde, but I don’t know.”

  The certainty only gradually grows. Then Lien continues:

  You will have heard from Mieneke that I am serving in the Marines now, which is working out well. I was in England for three weeks, in America for six months, for the last two months now I’ve been in Malacca, and right at this moment I’m on the ship New Amsterdam. And the ship is currently in the harbor in Singapore—you’ll have to look it up in an atlas! Any moment now we may depart for Java. Lien, I don’t know what other news to give y
ou. Pass on my warmest wishes to all our old friends, and also to your adoptive parents, and if you are writing to Mieneke, then do give her my best. Lien, take from me the uttermost heartfelt wishes. From your friend who will never forget you,

  Jo Kleijne

  P. S. Dear Lien, I don’t know your address exactly. Now I will enclose this letter in a letter to Mieneke, I think hope that Mieneke will quickly send this letter on to you and that you will very soon write back to me. Once again, all the very best from your friend. Jo.

  At the bottom of the page, he writes his military ID number in block capitals:

  CORPORAL OF THE MARINES, J. W. L. KLEIJNE. NL 4502759.

  “He has written his address at the bottom,” Lien says in a voice that is full of cheerful reminiscence.

  “And do you still know if you wrote back, and what you wrote?” I ask.

  All at once the mood of the conversation changes. Lien’s reply is thoughtful but not filled with any deep sense of regret.

  “I have never . . . I have never done anything,” she says. “I never wrote, I have never . . . I have never looked into anything. I never kept contact. No.”

  She sighs.

  “It’s . . .”

  There is a pause.

  “And, for the rest, you never heard anything of him?”

  “No, no. It stops then, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s, you know . . . I was in a different phase of my life then. The connection wasn’t there.”

  There is a long silence. Then the recording picks up the clicks from my camera as I take images of the letter from Jo.

  “It’s rather beautiful, the way he underlines his words for emphasis,” I say, as I begin reading it for the first time myself.

  “Jo Kleijne,” she says, and smiles, still reminiscing. “I do still have a letter written by a friend of my mother, but that is . . . I don’t know if you want that?”

  “I want everything, I mean, if it can . . .”

  Lien is smiling broadly now—“You want everything!” she laughs.

  And after a bit more searching, she is holding the letter sent by Aunt Ellie for her birthday in September 1942.

  “Aunt Ellie—I don’t have much of a picture of her. Shall I read it out loud?”

  Lien reads the letter to me, which we had missed before—the one about wanting to come and visit and about how Lien will now have a whole new set of uncles and aunts—and then, as Lien ponders, a few more details of the resistance hideout in IJsselmonde come to the fore. But of the journey onward from there she still remembers nothing.

  “I believe it was with Took,” she says, “but I do not know.” Her emphasis is on the word “believe,” making this an act of faith rather than remembrance. So while the trip from The Hague to Dordrecht remains so vivid, this one, nearly a year and a half later, is a blank.

  I am again reminded of what Lien said when we first talked together about her wartime memories. Without families you don’t get stories. After all those months in the half-light, Lien did not really see other people, even if they were there, because she had no connection with them. As a result of her isolation, she stopped seeing the world.

  “It was being that was just being,” she tells me, “and where, and how, and with whom, that was all uncertain. Not concerning yourself with the past or the future, it brings a perspective with it. The involvement [Lien uses the English word] . . . the involvement was on a very low heat, if that makes sense to you. I believe, when I say it like that, I have got it right. Can you understand?”

  The metaphor of low heat strikes home to me and I will use it more than once as I describe this phase of Lien’s life. As I hear her speak about her feelings, both in IJsselmonde and afterward, I begin to understand her better. I have never felt so strongly how a person is the product of the life they have led.

  Twelve

  In the next few days I travel across Holland to visit archives and the other places of Lien’s youth. At the NIOD (the National Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies), amid the studious murmur of academics and doctoral students, in the gray light of the courtyard garden I hold in my hand an index card that records my grandfather’s imprisonment at Vught. He was sent there after the raid that Lien remembers. It is an innocuous piece of yellow paper, with his name (which, like his birthday, is the same as my father’s) typed in uneven letters at the top.

  Vught was the only SS concentration camp to be built in the Netherlands, constructed by the forced labor of its own prisoners in 1943. Behind its moat and barbed-wire fences stood the prison gallows, used for random executions in which at least five hundred died. Others, packed too tightly in their cells, died simply of suffocation; there were constant dog attacks on the inmates; and there were clogs with spikes inside to cut the prisoners’ feet. The camp was also used for the transit of over a thousand Jewish children. With the yellow index card between my fingers I wonder if my grandfather watched them and if he thought of Lien.

  Other documents at the NIOD also connect with Lien’s story, such as a printed letter on office stationery sent by a Dordrecht physician in 1941. In it Dr. Cahen explains to his patients that his medical diploma, hard-earned nearly thirty years ago, is now invalid and that he must ask them to switch their loyalty to another practitioner who is not a Jew. He suggests Jan Heroma, Took’s husband, whom he calls “a man with a golden heart.” If they join his practice, he explains, then Jan Heroma will transfer any earnings back to Dr. Cahen, so as to help him through this difficult time. The patients may know him already, the letter tells us, this man with a golden heart, because he is famous as the hero who tended the wounded under fire in the battle for Dordrecht, which raged a year ago when the Germans first came.

  Finally, in the archives there is also confirmation of the fate of Lien’s parents, something of which, of course, she already knew. A brief police report documents their arrest on October 9, 1942, at ten in the evening. The note of their capture, written out neatly in longhand, is dwarfed by the account of a minor bicycle collision, which takes up the bulk of the same page. It is striking to see how the police reporter, who went to the trouble of visiting the hospital to check on the condition of an injured bicyclist, could record the capture and deportation of a Jewish couple without apparent concern.

  Having left their registered address, Charles and Catharine traveled to Leiden to go into hiding, where it seems they were betrayed. I imagine them—he at thirty-five, she just twenty-eight—hand in hand, facing their captors, who were led by a Dutch policeman, Ulrich Koenrad Hoffman, who was the same age as Charles.

  Koenrad Hoffman was in some ways the opposite of the Dordrecht policeman Harry Evers. A committed NSB man, Hoffman made no denials when he faced his trial in 1949. As is clear from the files put together for his prosecution, he was a sickly and nervous fascist, endlessly busy over details like reporting on schoolteachers who expressed anti-German views. Koenrad collected the anonymous letters that were sent to him, addressed to “Stinky Hoffman, Gestapo,” and forwarded these, demanding action, to the chief of police. His correspondence was always headed with the logo of the sword and swastika and signed with the Dutch fascist salute, “HOU SEE!” Prone to attacks of anxiety, he fussed over ineffective measures, like the installation of bugging devices in cells. But he was punctilious in carrying out his duties, which included the “clearing” of a Jewish orphanage that housed 150 boys and girls. After the verdict at his postwar trial he complained about his “very harsh” five-and-a-quarter-year sentence, telling the judge that, as an empowered officer, he was guilty “in no legal sense.” Hoffman told the court that, in retrospect, he had a few moral scruples about his actions, but these were “on very minor points.”

  Lien’s mother, Catharine, was murdered at Auschwitz exactly a month after her arrest by Hoffman. She died alongside her own mother, which is of some comfort to Lien. Charles w
as killed a few months later, on February 6, 1943.

  * * *

  —

  ON JANUARY 7, 2015, after several days of working in libraries and archives, I am on my way to IJsselmonde, the place where Lien lay hidden with Mieneke and her family for around eight months. I am going because I hope to locate the house that she stayed in and also to retrace the route that she and Jo Kleijne took from there to get to the resistance hideout after the raid.

  Once remote, IJsselmonde is today held in a knot of motorways and train lines running to Rotterdam and its enormous harbor, which stretches out along the Maas estuary to the sea. The scale of the development that has swallowed the village since the war is difficult to imagine. By 1962, the Europort, which lies to its west, had become the world’s largest harbor, a position that it held until 2004. It is still by far the biggest port in Europe, well over twice the size of its nearest rival, and it delivers around a ton of material for every citizen of the European Union each year.

  I have borrowed a little white Peugeot 108 from my aunt and uncle, with whom I have been staying. By midafternoon I am driving alongside the Waalhaven, stunned by the expanse of docks, storage depots, and processing plants that stretches to my left. For twenty miles there has been a regular succession of container stacks and oil tanks. I have passed a string of refineries, each a mangrove of metal tubing, and between them have glimpsed the dull iron walls of the ships. With its constant flow of containers, which sit around me on trucks, the port of Rotterdam feeds the Continent like some enormous mouth.