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The Cut Out Girl

A Story of War and Family, Lost and Found: Winner of the Costa Book of the Year Award

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

WINNER OF THE COSTA BOOK OF THE YEAR 2018
WINNER OF THE SLIGHTLY FOXED BEST FIRST BIOGRAPHY PRIZE 2018

'A masterpiece of history and memoir' Evening Standard
'Superb. This is a necessary book - painful, harrowing, tragic, but also uplifting' The Times
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Little Lien wasn't taken from her Jewish parents in the Hague - she was given away in the hope that she might be saved. Hidden and raised by a foster family in the provinces during the Nazi occupation, she survived the war only to find that her real parents had not. Much later, she fell out with her foster family, and Bart van Es - the grandson of Lien's foster parents - knew he needed to find out why.
His account of tracing Lien and telling her story is a searing exploration of two lives and two families. It is a story about love and misunderstanding and about the ways that our most painful experiences - so crucial in defining us - can also be redefined.
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'Luminous, elegant, haunting - I read it straight through' Philippe Sands, author of East West Street

'Deeply moving. Writes with an almost Sebaldian simplicity and understatement'
Guardian

'Sensational and gripping . . . shedding light on some of the most urgent issues of our time' Judges of the Costa Book of the Year 2018

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      June 11, 2018
      Literature professor van Es (Shakespeare in Company) thoughtfully examines a dark chapter in the Netherlands’ past in this look at the life of Lien de Jong, a Dutch Jew who was hidden from the Nazis by van Es’s grandparents before a rift developed between Lien and them. Van Es’s account is based both on interviews with Lien, whom he met when she was in her 80s, and his reconstruction of events. A year after Holland was invaded by Germany in 1940, Jews were barred from using public places such as parks, libraries, and museums. In 1942, when Jews were required to wear a yellow star to identify themselves, and with the then-eight-year-old Lien the target of other children’s increasing anti-Semitism, her mother took the desperate step of putting her into an underground network of foster families, who placed her with van Es’s grandparents, Jan and Henk. Van Es makes Lien’s childhood palpable by including photographs, excerpts from a poetry scrapbook she’d kept, and the poignant letter her mother wrote to her protectors (“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”). He also uncovers long-buried secrets relating to the rift between Lien and his grandparents, which was still unhealed when Jan and Henk died. This is a nuanced, moving, and unusual “hidden child” account.

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  • OverDrive Read
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Languages

  • English

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