The Cut Out Girl

by Bart van Es

  That was not how Lien saw it, but because she missed Ma and her brothers and sisters, she accepted the offer, resuming the old pattern of weekend visits. The incident and her year of absence were never discussed.

  There was, though, a new sense of distance between Lien and her foster parents, and perhaps it was partly this that made her choose to join the Jewish Student Society rather than the Socialist Union when she began to study in Amsterdam for an additional qualification in social work. It was in Amsterdam that she met her future husband, Albert Gomes de Mesquita, a scientist completing his PhD. Physically frail and soft spoken, he nevertheless had a confidence about him.

  “He was someone,” as Lien puts it. “I remember that he told me it was easy to be happy. He knew how to live.”

  Happiness, for Albert, flowed from the rules and the rhythms of Judaism, the age-old patterns that brought with them a sense of peace. He was himself a descendant of those who had built the Great Synagogue. His maternal grandfather, a prosperous banker, had been chairman of the board of the Portuguese Jewish Council and his great-grandfather had been the author of celebrated Ashkenazi books of prayer. Although, in contrast, his father’s family were poor diamond cutters, they too were observant believers, their lives shaped by the Sabbath, the marking of feast days, and the keeping of dietary laws.

  Albert, of course, had his own story of survival. In August 1942, aged twelve, he had gone with his parents and sister to hide in a set of purpose-built safe rooms. Holed up in the hidden ground floor of an Amsterdam town house, they had a large store of provisions, a secret escape route, a set of reliable friends to supply them, and a routine of exercise and mental occupation to keep their spirits up. They played Monopoly, whist, chess, and bridge. Each week Albert completed the logic puzzles in a magazine supplied by their outside helper, who also brought in fresh food. Every Sabbath they performed the usual rituals and sang the usual prayers.

  Yet, in spite of all their preparations, before the year was over, they had been discovered. Very early in the morning there was banging on the blacked-out windows, and then a burly figure charged in through their escape route, shouting for them to move to the back room. One by one he interrogated the family members, including Albert and his little sister, all of whom fully expected that outside there must be a police van waiting, which would take them to a concentration camp. Weirdly, however, at the end of a morning of questioning, they were left alone and unguarded, free to leave. The raider, it turned out, was a robber and not a policeman. The family had lost their possessions and their safe house, but though friendless on the streets of Amsterdam in late December, they were still alive.

  After this narrow escape, they went through a dozen different hiding places across the Netherlands, crouching behind panels in attics and escaping several raids. At times they were starved and flea bitten, beyond hopelessness, but somehow they stayed together as a unit. They had stories to share and, come May 1945, their collective survival as mother, father, and two children to celebrate. So for Albert, the saddest moment came only after the liberation, when he discovered that of his large extended family of aunts, uncles, and grandparents, just three people were left alive.

  After the war, Albert’s family resumed its old patterns of living, which they had tried to keep going even during the occupation. They rejoined their community, kept kosher, observed the Sabbath, and celebrated the festival days. On May 9, the same day as the overall German surrender, a service of thanksgiving was held in the Portuguese Synagogue. Across the whole of the Netherlands, however, Albert’s family were now numbered among just eight hundred remaining Sephardic Jews.

  * * *

  —

  THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF LIEN’S wedding at the synagogue have a golden quality to them. She and Albert stand arm in arm in a doorway, her head tipped down shyly in a Lady Di pose.

  In another shot they are seated in the back of a gleaming motorcar, Lien looking as perfect as a 1950s film star with her Colgate smile framed by her veil and white dress.

  Then there are the pictures of the reception: my grandfather in a pin-striped suit with a spray of flowers in his buttonhole and Ma, in a hat, both caught midconversation as they stand in a line to accept the congratulations of well-wishers, beside a resplendent Lien. My father sits smiling at a table with his brother and sisters. Aged fourteen at the time, he remembers it vividly: the brilliantly funny speech from Jan Heroma (Took’s husband); the stage that collapsed as the rabbi was speaking; and his little brother, caught short, having to pee against a wall in the street. Everyone was joyous and united. Even Ben, Lien’s cousin (the baby who had sat beside her in those photos in the Pletterijstraat), was present. He had survived, also as a child in hiding, and Lien had found him only very recently by searching through the records of war orphans kept by Le-Ezrath Ha-Jeled.

  For Lien as well as for my father, the speech that Jan Heroma made toward the end of the evening was a highlight. The words that he spoke about her are the only element of her story that she has repeated to me more than once. Having given a brief and witty outline of her character, he turned to the subject of Albert and asked the audience, rhetorically, “Now, is this scrawny, ginger-haired gentleman really good enough for our Lien?” “Good enough for our Lien”—it was a revelation to her: that she should be presented as something special, and that she should be thought of as theirs. Happiness shot through her. She felt completely united with the friends and family who had gathered to send them on their way. She felt at one with the Van Esses and now a part of the Jewish community as well.

  If one were looking for a simple, happy conclusion to the cut out girl’s story then this would be the place to end it. Albert is proud of her, protective, and gentle, and he knows so many things. Ma also loves him: he is so interested, hardworking, and polite. In the morning, in the back of the shiny, black wedding car, the honeymooners drive to the airport, where a gleaming Dakota awaits them for Lien’s first-ever journey by plane. As the flat, regular fields of the Netherlands recede below them, Good Lientje rises toward the sunlight on silver wings.

  Twenty-three

  Leaving the Portuguese Synagogue behind us, Lien and I cross a busy road to get to the Jewish Historical Museum. Her hand, as it always is when we cross roads here, is there on my elbow, not because she needs my support as an eighty-two-year-old, but because she suspects I’m not to be trusted with the traffic. As was the case at the synagogue, it takes a little while to enter the building on account of the intense security. A white police box stands outside on stilts, presenting its blacked-out windows. Inside, we queue for airport-style searches before we can enter the museum itself. The people waiting around us are mainly American teenagers wearing headphones and carrying backpacks, part of organized tours. They sip from their water bottles, apply lip balm, and check their phones as they chat about topics like the quality of the breakfast at their hotel. Mixed in with this, though, there is also serious talk about history. Most have been or are going to the Anne Frank house and in their preppy New York accents the two girls who lean against the wall beside us are discussing the details of life here in the 1940s, specifically the idea of wearing a Jewish star. I wonder if Lien beside me is listening. If she is then she must feel almost like an exhibit. Her husband, Albert, had Anne Frank as a classmate, and once, in the playground, Anne offered to tell him about the facts of life.

  The museum, which is housed in the old Great Synagogue (one of the four ancient synagogues that are clustered in this area), is divided into two display spaces: the first covers Dutch Judaism, mainly in its religious practice, until the end of the nineteenth century; the second takes us through the twentieth century up to the present time.

  Lien sweeps through the first hall with all the focus of a ten-year-old. “We don’t have to worry about that,” she calls back as I lag behind and peer at an ancient Torah scroll that sits on a lectern behind protective glass. I point to a historical painting, but pre
-twentieth-century art does not especially interest her. “I suppose I don’t have the context to appreciate it,” she says as she trips up the steps to the higher gallery, clearly having no intention of picking up that context now. Lien has inherited my grandparents’ passion for the modern and will be reassured a year later when she visits my office and finds it (contrary to her expectations of Oxford) to consist of exposed concrete and walls of plate glass.

  The space devoted to more recent Jewish history in the Netherlands is also part of the ancient synagogue, but it feels contemporary thanks to its sleek aquarium-like display cases and the low blue light of its numerous screens. Subsections on topics such as “Amsterdam’s Jewish Quarter,” “The Diamond Industry,” and “Life in the Provinces” chart the gradual emancipation of poorer Jews as they joined unions and socialist parties, where many became prominent on a national scale. After this, a section on “The Elite” shows how a small tranche of Jewish society flourished through the growth of big businesses, like the department stores De Bijenkorf and Maison de Bonneterie. Then there was also cultural influence: theater, music, literature. As I stand looking at a display about famous music hall acts and jazz players, Lien calls me with excitement in her voice.

  “Look!” she says. “This is exactly the material I remember my mother cutting at the kitchen table!”

  And there it is—like some animal suspended by Damien Hirst in a tank of formaldehyde—a broad strip of yellow cloth on which stars are printed reading “Jew,” “Jew,” “Jew,” “Jew.”

  It is monstrous, yet also intimate. Lien stands beside it, half smiling, her face yellowed by the reflected light. Right behind her in another aquarium is a little girl’s dress with a star stitched upon it and also a wooden sign with the printed message FORBIDDEN FOR JEWS.

  * * *

  —

  AN HOUR LATER we are seated at a plastic table in the museum café. Lien wants me to try some of the kosher food that they serve here and especially recommends gefilte fish (chilled, salty fish cakes) and bolus (hot, syrupy, ginger-filled doughnuts straight from the oven). Amid the white simplicity of the café, Lien tells me about preparing meals in the 1960s, when she and Albert lived in Eindhoven, where he worked for Philips Electronics. Every Thursday evening a pack of kosher meat would arrive from Amsterdam, and given that they had no freezer, needed to be cooked and processed before the lighting of the Sabbath candles the following day. Albert’s mother, an imposing presence, was often there for the weekend with her husband, giving precise instructions on how to follow dietary laws. An enormity of single-purpose saucepans simmered with separate dishes in them, and all focus was on the coming evening with its white-clothed table, candles, and sung prayers.

  Lien had no experience of this kind of existence: her family in The Hague kept up a few Jewish traditions, but nothing with this kind of formal weight. She did find the mechanics quite troublesome. Albert insisted that all this was necessary if his parents were to be able to visit. For him, keeping kosher was partly a social requirement rather than an absolute religious belief. At the same time, following the old customs was what made him happy and for Lien too, in spite of the work it demanded, the Orthodox life gave a sense of assurance that she was part of a group. She was, she thinks, someone without much sense of her own identity, so it was easy for her to follow where others led.

  Lien and I talk about these customs. On the one hand they are a restriction, to me completely irrational, but there is also a magic to them, especially through the feeling of belonging that they confer. Nothing quite like this exists in Christianity and certainly not in my own atheist family, where even my parents are the children of nonbelievers who had no special rituals around mealtimes at all. Still, I can see their spiritual power. You can understand how Albert could say it is easy to be happy.

  For a decade, pretty much, the patterns of the old Jewish life also helped to make Lien happy. There was a community around her, there were weddings and Bar Mitzvahs, there was comfort in being part of a tribe. Albert was mild and clever. He did well at his job and their children did well at school. And Lien? She was a busy mother and wife.

  * * *

  —

  WE LEAVE THE CAFÉ and head back out into the sunshine. The ticket that we bought for the Portuguese Synagogue also covered the museum. In addition, the Hollandsche Schouwburg is part of the itinerary for the Jewish Cultural Quarter, although entry there is free, so Lien and I begin the half-mile walk toward it. She has never been.

  Until the war, the Schouwburg was a popular theater. In 1900, for example, it saw the premiere of Op Hoop van Zegen (In the Hope of Blessing), a play about the hard lives of North Sea fishermen written by the Jewish playwright Herman Heijermans, which still attracts large audiences today. The Nazis briefly made it an official Jewish playhouse. Then in August 1942 it became a kind of prison: the assembly point from which tens of thousands of Jews, who had first been concentrated in Amsterdam, were sent onward to the transit camp of Westerbork in the north of the Netherlands and from there to the death camps in the east. For a year it was full of frightened, intensely thirsty men and women, who were often so tightly packed together that they struggled to breathe. Its task completed, the place was sold in 1944 and converted into a venue for parties, dances, and weddings, which continued to be held there quite successfully even after the end of the war.

  Lien and I spot the Schouwburg long before we reach it because another white police box stands on stilts in the road guarding the entrance, its windows dull black in the bright sun. Since 1962 this has been a memorial. Beyond the templelike facade, which is all that remains of the original building, there is a courtyard with benches in it and a dark stone column that sits on a base in the shape of the Star of David. On the wall to the left as you enter, 6,700 family names look down on an eternal flame. They represent the 104,000 Dutch Jews who died.

  The contrast between this and the sunny street where a moment ago we were chatting quite happily is absolute. A few figures in heavy coats stand alone in silence. Two people are whispering as they scan the list of names. It is a good thing that this is now a place of remembrance instead of a party venue, but the wall (from which the names shine green, back-lit through darkened glass) has a clinical quality to it. The names of the dead run—long and then short and then long again—column after column, like a patient’s cardiogram:

  Jolis

  Jolles

  Jolofs

  Jonas

  Jong

  Jong, de

  Jong-van Lier, de

  Jonge

  Jonge, de

  From a plastic trough we are handed a device like a mobile phone to point at the names of our choosing, but there are so many de Jongs that we have to scroll through to select the ones who lived at number 31 in the Pletterijstraat (an address that pops up in a little “active map” in a square on the right):

  Charles de Jong

  Rotterdam, 10 December 1906—

  Auschwitz, 6 February 1943

  Catharina de Jong-Spiero

  The Hague, 28 October 1913—

  Auschwitz, 9 November 1942

  On the memory bar of the touch screen we are presented with various options, such as “Print family,” “Add a family member,” “FAQ,” and “Donate!”

  “I’m going home,” says Lien.

  After hugging her good-bye at the exit and agreeing on a time for dinner at her apartment, I head upstairs, where there are still some scruffy rooms that are attached to the original facade. For an hour I stand hunched over old display cases that contain some intensely moving objects (a bundle of farewell letters, for example, or an infant’s clog). Then I leave the old theater, cross the road, and head down a side street, with the gates of the city’s zoo to my right.

  Two minutes later I am at the doors of the Resistance Museum. The building, like the Hollandsche Schouwburg, was once a center o
f Jewish culture, having been built for a choral society whose Star of David is still there on the gable facing the street. There is a fixed route through the collection, a kind of tunnel with plasterboard walls that takes you from invasion to liberation, past a series of windows that show things like official call-up papers and false identity cards. Over time, as you follow the route, the national mood shifts from reluctant acceptance to mass opposition, with violent reprisals from the Nazis becoming more common. Occasionally, the tunnel opens out onto a mocked-up interior, such as one where an illegal newssheet is being produced.

  Secret printing played a big part in the story of Dutch resistance. As well as providing information to those who were directly fighting the Germans, it helped to build a new national identity, which became all important after the war. Even today, a substantial part of the national media (including newspapers such as Trouw, Vrij Nederland, and Het Parool and the publisher De Bezige Bij) has its origins in the underground press.

  Set against this, there was government propaganda. In an imitation town square I look up at billboards on walls and street hoardings. MUSSERT SPEAKS announces a poster bearing the face of the Dutch fascist leader, who became a powerless head of state in December 1942. Mussert, a clownish version of the already clownish Mussolini, never got much of a following, but the other images that I see around me undoubtedly had some effect. Many feature cartoons of attractively vulnerable women, cast down amid debris and blood. BOLSHEVISM IS MURDER and THIS IS THE SECOND FRONT they call out, while the women’s modest dresses, in spite of all their best efforts, ride up to reveal curvaceous thighs. Alongside these posters of women there are others with muscled blond men, whose chins stand resolute in the face of great blasts of cold air. TOUGH GUYS FOR THE WAFFEN SS, BE BRAVE, BE A STORMER, or A NEW NETHERLANDS IN A NEW EUROPE, JOIN THE BATTLE WITH THE NSB, these announce. On one occasion there is also a bearded, hooked-nosed villain who clasps a little dagger and flaunts a six-pointed star.