The Cut Out Girl

by Bart van Es

  Then, as I drive the little car through the night air toward Bennekom, I am suddenly struck by a perplexing and nonsensical moment of recognition. It hits me as a tremor, exactly like the shock I once felt when I lost my young son in a crowded space. I see my own stepdaughter (though I’ve never called her that), Josie, at the age of twelve, from the inside—fractious, cut out, and difficult—at the same instant that I see the badly damaged twelve-year-old Lien.

  This is not rational, their situations were quite different, but flashes of the past—in which Josie was free-falling, furious, desperate, and without boundaries—come at me like blows to the head.

  * * *

  —

  AS I HOLD MY COURSE on the motorway I see Josie, aged sixteen, on the gravel of our driveway, leaving the house, it seemed for good. Then I remember the series of dismal rooms that she lived in, with dirty communal kitchens and windows that looked out onto brick walls.

  Self-justification rises inside me: she wanted to leave, said she hated the family, was impossible to control. Surely I was not unreasonable? I was not unkind. Each time at a new address, I constructed the same bits of shelving for her and watched as the same few photos (one of her best friend from childhood in Cambridge) came out of a cardboard box. We transferred money monthly. We met in restaurants. I left the occasional unanswered phone message or text.

  But the truth is that I did not want her home and did not understand her. The truth is that there were moments when I wanted her out of my life.

  In those terrible days when our daughter seemed lost to us, my wife, Anne Marie, would sleep fitfully with a phone beside her pillow. Sometimes she would head out in the dead of night. Every day she would ring our daughter, even if the call went unanswered. It was important, Anne Marie said, that Josie knew she was loved. I, on the other hand, rarely called her myself and often did not see or hear from her for months on end.

  And then I think of the fact that my grandmother sent Lien a letter that cut her out of the family and that after this the two of them never set eyes on each other again. Could I have sent Josie such a letter? When I think of how we sat together in a car on this same motorway only weeks ago, that seems impossible to imagine. We felt so close then, the family enclosed together, soothed by the buzz of the road. I remember that on that journey I tried to tell Josie the beginning of Lien’s story and that my throat froze and I could not speak. Is it possible that the two of us could have lost each other? I have to admit that it is.

  * * *

  —

  THE HOUSE IN BENNEKOM is silent when I reach it. The dogs pad over softly, touching their tongues to my outstretched hand. In bed I lie awake for several hours and at 3:00 A.M. I reach for my phone. I send Josie a text message. “I love you” is all that it says.

  Twenty

  On the train to Dordrecht early the next morning I study a dossier that describes Lien’s life with my grandparents from the time of her return to Dordrecht in late September 1945 to the time when the report was completed on November 25, 1947. It was put together by an organization called Le-Ezrath Ha-Jeled, which promoted the welfare of Jewish orphans after the war. Lien gave me the bundle as I left last night. In the quiet railway carriage I spread its loose sheets, about thirty in all, on the speckled blue plastic table and place them in order. There are reports of meetings, accounts of correspondence, descriptions of the rooms in the household, and summaries of the people involved. There are also various letters in an appendix, including one from Mr. van Laar, who believes that Lien is now living in England or Palestine. He is asking to be reimbursed for some dental expenses that he incurred on her behalf.

  * * *

  —

  LE-EZRATH HA-JELED (Hebrew for “for the help of the child”) was formed in response to the situation facing child Holocaust survivors in the Netherlands in 1945. After the war had ended, Jewish children who had been rescued by the resistance were being stopped from returning to their families, not simply through personal action but through policies supported by the Dutch state. As early as September 1944, Gesina van der Molen, a Calvinist resistance leader, had begun printing leaflets that instructed members of her network, which had saved around eighty children, to keep hold of their charges in the event that a mother or father should return to reclaim their child. By handing their children to the resistance, she argued, Jewish parents had renounced their parental rights. Then, on August 13, 1945, when the government established a Commission for War Foster Children (known as the OPK), Gesina van der Molen was appointed as its chair.

  The OPK, which had only a minority of Jewish members, pursued what it called a child-centered policy. This meant that the cases of around four thousand Jewish children who had survived the war in hiding would be dealt with on an individual basis. If in the view of the commission their best interests would be served by remaining with their foster parents, this should happen, even when family members, potentially including parents, were still alive.

  Seventeen days after the commission was established, Abraham de Jong, who had himself survived the war in hiding, founded Le-Ezrath Ha-Jeled. Its aim was to combat the OPK’s power.

  Thanks to funding from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, de Jong’s Le-Ezrath Ha-Jeled quickly established itself as a serious and professional organization. By April 1946 it had thirty staff members and by September fifty-two. These included social workers, investigators, caregivers, and campaigners. In spite of fierce opposition from Gesina van der Molen’s OPK, the staff of Le-Ezrath Ha-Jeled soon began to conduct research into the circumstances of Jewish children. The report on Lien was one product of its work.

  In contrast to the OPK, Le-Ezrath Ha-Jeled wanted, if possible (and even against an orphan’s wishes), to return a child to the culture into which it had been born. To do this they would track down surviving relatives or, where this failed, suggest Jewish couples who might be willing to adopt. In Lien’s case both options were considered. She had been part of a large extended family, but, as the dossier tells us, only two adult members of that family were left alive in 1945.

  It is perhaps natural to assume that there would be a specific moment at which Lien discovered that her parents had been murdered. The realization, however, had been more gradual, and it stretched back a very long time. Already in December 1942, when she rolled her two rings between her hands until they fell under the floorboards of the house in the Bilderdijkstraat, Lien had said a kind of farewell to her mother and father. After this, she shut off her mind to their memory. In a way, for the nine-year-old girl they ceased to exist as real people, either in the present or in the past. When after the war ended her parents continued not to be mentioned, this confirmed that they must have been murdered, but this fact remained somehow distant and abstract, too awful to contemplate as an actual event. It was impossible to visualize that horror. It would be decades before Lien could even see them in her imagination as they had been. When, eventually, she was again able to picture her parents, the shock to her psyche would prove profound.

  The person who last saw Lien’s mother alive (at the moment before she stepped with Lien’s grandmother onto the cattle truck that was bound for Poland) was Aunt Roza, who was featured in the report by Le-Ezrath Ha-Jeled. Aunt Roza was the widow of a maternal uncle. She came to see her niece almost immediately after Lien returned to Dordrecht, and, during a day trip to The Hague, contributed a poem to Lien’s poesie album, which is dated November 24, 1945. It is the first entry in over two and a half years:

  Dear Lientje,

  I hope that in your life you’ll meet

  Health, prosperity, and all that’s sweet,

  And of all the people that there are

  I wish this most for you, by far.

  And if you’re always dear and true

  I know these things will come to you

  For she who’s good is sure to find

  That others in ret
urn are kind.

  So always trust in your good luck

  Then from yourself you cannot be unstuck.

  With much love,

  Aunt Roza

  The handwriting is a little blotted and uneven, but other than this I wonder whether there is much that is personal in this poem. It is hard to think so. The wishes for her niece are heartwarming, but surely, for Aunt Roza, there had been nothing in the last five years to back up the view that “others in return are kind.” It had been Roza’s “luck” to survive Auschwitz, but only at the cost of years of medical experimentation at the hands of Josef Mengele, which had left her infertile, among many other terrible things. In the group photo of Lien’s family that was taken on the beach in Scheveningen in the 1930s, it is Aunt Roza who stands there at the center in a white bathing costume, holding a volleyball. A decade later, of the twenty-three healthy young men and women in the picture, she is the only one left alive.

  By 1947, when the dossier was completed, Roza Spiero had already left the country, first for Indonesia and then later for the United States. Lien remembers her as a force of nature, full of glamour and strong opinions. When they first met again, Aunt Roza disapproved of the Socialist Youth Club uniform that her niece was wearing and took her shopping for something that had what she called allure. Lien followed meekly. In the almost empty department store, she remembers how her aunt knocked over a display stand, scattering and smashing little bottles all over the floor. The scent was overwhelming. But rather than being embarrassed, as Lien was, Aunt Roza rounded on the serving staff, raging that they ought to be more careful when setting out their wares. The Le-Ezrath Ha-Jeled report is heartless in its verdict on this traumatized woman, who is labeled a shallow bohemian. Still, their conclusion that she was unsuited to the care of children was probably right.

  There was no more optimism from the committee about Lien’s other adult relative, Uncle Eddie. He is missing from the photo of the beach party in Scheveningen because even then he was regarded as the family’s black sheep. Aunt Roza had once lent him an expensive camera that was not returned, and there was also the matter of some missing suitcases that resulted in inquiries from the police. By the time the war broke out, Eddie was abroad, in irregular contact. Unsurprisingly, he was not considered a suitable guardian for a teenage girl.

  He was charming, though. Lien remembers his sudden arrival in the summer of 1946 at the door in the Frederikstraat, a man in his late twenties in a sergeant’s uniform, full of stories about his travels. He had brought a pair of shoes for her, high-heeled and pretty but too small to wear. There is a photo of the two of them together: he in his military formals; she bright-eyed, her whole face transformed by a triangular smile.

  Of course Uncle Eddie wanted to write something in her album. Sadly, there were no more empty pages, so he used a separate sheet of paper, which she tucked, next to Aunt Roza’s, into the back of the book. It is dated Dordrecht, July 10, 1946.

  Uncle Eddie worked hard on his entry and he no doubt meant what he wrote about “meeting together again as friends before long,” just as he meant to send her the promised sweets and bicycle from England, but promises, for Uncle Eddie, were always difficult to keep. She waited in for him once, on a day when he said he would visit, but there was a problem with transport. He would send some photographs of his new wife and daughter in London, but she never saw him again.

  With neither Aunt Roza nor Uncle Eddie an option, Le-Ezrath Ha-Jeled did consider whether a Jewish family might be able to adopt her. A couple from Gouda came over to the Frederikstraat to visit. All went well, and they invited Lien to their house to stay for a weekend. She was collected by a chauffeur in a Bentley, which smelled of wood and polish, as did the great house with its tennis court and marble floors. But Lien did not like it. All she had ever wanted was to stay with the Van Esses, and in the end even Le-Ezrath Ha-Jeled agreed.

  Though they were, in general, very far from easy to persuade on these matters, the committee agreed that family relations at the Frederikstraat were exceptionally good:

  Mrs. van Es makes no distinction between the children. There is great harmony. The ideals of humanism are put into practice here. The children get on delightfully. Have always had many Jewish friends. During the occupation had other Jews in hiding. . . . The foster parents are warm and kind. They bring Lien up with care and good sense and regard her as their own daughter. . . . The Van Esses are truly very remarkable people. The whole family bears their stamp.

  “She is with us now,” my grandmother is quoted as saying, intending this to be the final word. As for Lien, she already feels part of the family. The interviewer reports as follows:

  She dearly loves her foster sisters and brothers. Her dearest friend is her six-year-old foster sister and when asked “who else are your friends?” she answered “this little brother” (a boy of one and a half).

  That boy is my own father, who was born just two weeks after Lien returned.

  * * *

  —

  IN THE END, Le-Ezrath Ha-Jeled defeated Gesina van der Molen, whose OPK was abolished on September 1, 1949. This meant that, by and large, child hideaways went back to a Jewish environment, especially where it could be shown that their home background had been religious. Around half were reunited with one or both parents. Others who were not so lucky were sent out for adoption or were transferred to orphanages, in quite a few cases forced to leave a caring rescue family with whom they had wanted to stay. The large-scale rescue of children separate from their parents had been a phenomenon unique to the Netherlands. Many thousands had been saved, but the emotional repercussions of survival would play out over the decades to come. Lien, in staying with the Van Esses, was an exception. Out of more than 4,000 children nationally, she was one of only 358 who remained, at the end of the process, with non-Jews.

  * * *

  —

  MY TRAIN PULLS INTO Dordrecht station. From there I take the short walk to the city library, which sits at the center of the old town. Here I hope to learn more about the public life of my grandfather, who is heralded as such a remarkable person in the report by Le-Ezrath Ha-Jeled. The picture they paint of him is of a serious, intensely hardworking man of principle. His large bookcase, which they describe, is filled with socialist literature, with history books, and with journals on the latest developments in technology and science. Largely self-taught, he had a prodigious appetite for learning and a faith in the potential for human progress. During the war he had risked everything for the resistance, and afterward, to my grandmother’s concern, he took a big drop in salary to run for political office. Things continued to be financially precarious for him each time elections came around.

  In Dordrecht’s central library, upstairs on a steel mezzanine among sections on travel and teenage fiction, there are some shelves devoted to local government. Here I read about my grandfather’s role in the city’s development after the war. It does not take long before I come across a photo of him. Resting his chin on his fist, he sits as one of the five burgesses on a raised table addressing a meeting of the council, a clerk taking shorthand at a desk directly in front. Behind him on the wall huge maps show plans for the city’s transformation. He looks lean, businesslike, confident, and a little bored by the questioning, which, according to the record, kept on for fourteen hours.

  The picture was taken in January 1962, a high point of optimism, both for my grandfather and for the town. Like almost all of the country, Dordrecht saw spectacular growth in the postwar decades. Once Marshall Plan aid came onstream in 1948, the bridges, ferries, rail lines, power stations, and factories that had been destroyed or stolen were quickly rebuilt. The city stands as a model for the national effort of reconstruction (the so-called wederopbouw) that was driven by investment in infrastructure. My grandfather, who also spoke at national conferences about what was called gas-and-water socialism (aimed at improving living standards through prac
tical interventions), played a big part in that.

  By the mid-1950s, the city, which had been a relative economic backwater, was a booming industrial center. It assembled ships and aircraft, turned coal into coal gas, and manufactured biscuits, leather goods, and cigarettes. The Electrical Motors Factory, where my grandfather had worked, was expanded. Meanwhile, the ironworking company Tomado launched a range of iconic products that were inspired by the abstract art of Piet Mondrian. They made shelving units, bookcases, draining racks, bottle scrapers, and later mixers, coffee grinders, and kettles, all in a range of primary colors. From the early 1960s, new factories came to make vacuum cleaners, paint, and ovens. Then DuPont chose the city to manufacture its miraculous substances: Orlon, Lycra, and Teflon, each on a separate site. To meet demand, workers were bused in from as far as Belgium, more than two hours away.

  For my grandfather, the new prosperity would be the engine for a socialist future. New housing was needed: clean high-rise flats with fitted bathrooms and kitchens and elevators that carried you almost soundlessly into the sky. He pushed through the development of new estates of affordable public housing: thousands of reprints of the same sensible design. There were new parks, libraries, and leisure centers; new health clinics and new schools. The invention of grain concrete, in which cement was made from the crushed stone and brick of demolished buildings, sped the process further still. With this magic, the dust of history was transformed into the clean, the bright, and the new. Some complained when the old neo-Renaissance post office, with its fairy-tale turrets and towers, was knocked down and replaced with concrete shop fronts, but my grandfather’s faith in progress was boundless. For him and his fellow burgesses, fourteen hours of debate at a council meeting was a waste of precious rebuilding time.