12-02-2019
The Cut Out Girl: A Story of War and Family, Lost and Found
de Bart van Es
|
NOTA DE LEITURA
Ora, aqui está
um livro muito bem escrito, mas que deixa ao leitor muitas e muitas dúvidas. Um académico de Oxford, de 42
anos, natural da Holanda, mas residente na Inglaterra desde a infância,
escreve a história de Lien de Jong, de 85 anos, judia, que fugindo aos
nazis esteve escondida em casa dos avós dele em Dordrecht, até para além
do final da guerra. O pai do Autor, Henk, nasceu em 1945 quando ela
estava a perfazer 12 anos.
A primeira dificuldade do Autor foi que nem todos os
personagens ainda vivos gostaram que ele contasse a história de Lien de Jong.
A segunda dificuldade, bem mais grave, foi
que, a certa altura (carta de 7-4-1988), a avó do
autor Jannigje cortou relações com a protagonista Lien de Jong e nunca
mais as reatou, até
à sua morte em Junho de 1995.
Quem tinha razão? O Autor é muito diplomata,
não dá uma simples resposta: esta ou aquela, a avó ou a biografada
principal. Não pode optar porque tem muita consideração pela memória da
avó, mas também a tem pela sua companheira permanente na elaboração do
livro. Por tudo isso, fica-se nas meias tintas.
Mas um episódio revelador é que, no final da
guerra, quando Lien estava refugiada em casa dos Van Laar, ela queria a
todo o custo regressar para Dordrecht para casa dos Van Es. Mas estes não a
queriam de volta e só perante a insistência de Mrs. Heroma
é que
nisso consentiram. De facto, uma boa parte dos judeus refugiados
nesta zona tinham sido escondidos por iniciativa do Dr. Jan Heroma e de
sua esposa.
No final da
guerra, Lien regressa a casa dos avós do Autor quando tem já 12 anos. Fora já violada e
iniciada sexualmente em Bennekom por Evert, irmão do dono da casa. Viera para casa
dos Van Es aos 9 anos, já não era bebé. As relações com Ali (uma menina), a filha mais velha do dono da
casa são cordiais,
mas não já com Kees, irmão desta. Tanto
este como seu pai, Hendrik van Es, olham-na como uma estranha, uma
mulher desejável.
Os seus
estudos e adolescência são vividos com
muita independência e ela
volta ao judaísmo sobretudo
através de seu
ex-marido Albert Gomes de Mesquita.
Por todas
estas razões, não
é muito de
admirar o corte de relações da avó do Autor,
apesar de ele tratar o assunto com muita delicadeza.
-------------+-------------
A leitura do
livro
é algo difícil. A acção passa-se em
dois planos distintos: a investigação do Autor em convivência com a protagonista Lien de Jong
na actualidade e a vida desta
última, os estudos, o casamento, os filhos, a
tentativa de suicídio.
Reconheço, no entanto, que está muito bem escrito, nem outra coisa seria de esperar de um
académico de Oxford.
Só me faz
alguma impressão a confusão de nomes holandeses, com estranhos diminutivos. Os tios
do autor Ali e Kees (ela e ele) não têm nunca mais nome nenhum. Nos
agradecimentos, aparece uma tia Greta que ficamos sem saber quem
é;
será outro nome de Ali? O pai e o avô do Autor têm o mesmo nome, mas um vem indicado como Henk e o outro
como Hendrik!... e assim por diante! |
Autobiography and memoir
PD Smith
Last modified
on Tue 8 Jan 2019 14.00 GMT
The author embarks on a personal journey in this account of a Jewish girl’s
experiences of growing up in the Netherlands during the second world war
The Netherlands has been a place of refuge
for Jews since at least the 15th century when Sephardic Jews fleeing from
Portugal found freedom and prosperity there. In 1677, the sceptical Jewish
philosopher Baruch Spinoza was buried with honours in the Protestant New Church
in The Hague, which Bart van Es describes as “an astonishing gesture of
acceptance”. When the Nazis came to power in Germany, some 35,000 refugees fled
to the Netherlands. By 1940, when Germany invaded Holland, there were some
18,000 Jews in The Hague, which portrayed itself as an open and idealistic “city
for the world”. Only 2,000 of them would survive the war and the concentration
camps.
Hesseline, known as Lien, lived there, at 31 Pletterijstraat, with her parents,
Charles and Catharine de Jong-Spiero. Although they were married at a synagogue,
Lien’s parents were not observant: “It is really Hitler who makes Lien Jewish.”
From 1941, seven-year-old Lien attends a Jewish school. Jews have a “J” stamped
in their passports and are banned from the civil service, cinemas and
universities. Signs appear outside markets and parks: “Forbidden for Jews”. In
May 1942, her mother had to stitch a yellow star with the word “Jew” on to their
clothes and eight-year-old Lien was bullied by children calling her a “dirty
Jew”.
One day her mother sat beside her on the bed. “I must tell you a secret,” she
said. “You are going to stay somewhere else for a while.” A woman took Lien to a
family in Dordrecht. Unknown to Lien, they were arrested within months and sent
to their deaths in Auschwitz. The family she
stayed with are the author’s grandparents, Jans and Henk van Es. But just as she
started to feel at home, the police arrived and she had to run. Lien spent the
rest of the war with a strict Protestant family in the village of Bennekom.
There she was treated as a servant rather than one of the family, and sexually
abused by one of their relations: “The rapes are a secret, hard and poisonous,
that she swaddles within.”
Some 4,000 Jewish children survived the war in hiding in Holland. Lien was one
of just 358 who stayed with a non-Jewish family after 1945: she asked to return
to the Van Eses. Bart van Es – an Oxford English professor who has lived in
Britain since the age of three – had always known that his grandparents had
sheltered Jewish children. But it was only after the death of his uncle in 2014
that he began to ask questions and made contact with Lien, now in her 80s and
living in Amsterdam.
Winner of the 2018 Costa biography award,
this deeply moving account of Lien’s life is the result of his personal journey
into the history of his family and his country’s treatment of the Jews. Many
felt their suffering was not adequately acknowledged after the war.
Unbelievably, some even received tax demands for the time they spent in the
camps.
Writing with an almost Sebaldian simplicity and understatement, Van Es weaves
together history and Lien’s recollections to tell the story of her traumatic
childhood. Unsurprisingly, what she experienced left her “badly damaged” and
questioning her very existence: “I ought not to be here.” The Van Eses did not
understand the true depth of Lien’s trauma as one of the “hidden children” and
this led to tragic misunderstandings later when Jans fell out with Lien, ending
all communication with her. Even as an adult, Lien seemed fated to be “cut out”
from her family. By telling Lien’s story, Van Es brings her back into it, an
experience he describes as transformative: “getting to know Lien has changed
me”.
• PD
Smith’s City:
A Guidebook for the Urban Age is
published by Bloomsbury. The Cut Out Girl: A Story of War and Family, Lost and
Found is published by Penguin
O Prémio Costa vai para a “extraordinária” biografia de uma sobrevivente do
Holocausto
The Cut Out Girl,
de Bart van Es, diz-nos como sobreviveu — e como viveu — Lien de Jong, hoje com
85 anos. É o Livro do Ano para o Prémio Costa.
Lucinda Canelas
30 de Janeiro de 2019
A mulher que subiu ao palco na terça-feira à noite para estar ao lado de Bart
van Es no momento em que ele recebia o Prémio Costa para Livro do Ano chama-se
Lien de Jong, tem 85 anos e está contente porque o escritor quis contar a
história dela. “Sempre disse que sem família não temos uma história, mas agora,
graças ao Bart, eu tenho uma história e também uma espécie de família […] que
vem do passado. O Bart reabriu os caminhos da família”, disse a mulher que está
no centro da biografia The
Cut Out Girl: a Story of War and Family, Lost and Found, que valeu a
este professor de Oxford o prémio no valor de 30 mil libras (34 mil euros).
Durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial, numa Holanda que colaborou, provavelmente de
forma mais eficiente do que qualquer outro país, na entrega
de todos os cidadãos judeus – homens, mulheres, crianças – aos nazis, que depois
os enviavam para campos de extermínio e de trabalhos forçados,
os pais de Lien de Jong confiaram-na a outra família na esperança de a salvarem.
Sabiam que corriam um risco terrível e deixá-la com um casal holandês que
pudesse educá-la como sua pareceu-lhes a única solução.
“Ela foi-me retirada pelas circunstâncias. Que possam, com a melhor das boas
vontades e com sabedoria, cuidar dela”, escreve a mãe de Lien em Agosto de 1942,
na carta que dirige à família que viria a cuidar da sua filha. Tanto ela como o
marido morreriam no complexo de Auschwitz.
Para escrever The
Cut Out Girl (Fig Tree, 2018), o professor de Literatura Inglesa que
tem escrito sobre Shakespeare e que bem cedo trocou a Holanda, onde nasceu, pela
Inglaterra, teve de mergulhar no passado de duas famílias: a da biografada e a
sua, já que foram os seus avós, Jannigje e Henk van Es, que a acolheram durante
a guerra. Bart van Es já ouvira falar de Lien (diminutivo de Hesseline) e de
como, terminado o conflito, nos anos 1950, se afastara dos Van Es na sequência
de um desentendimento, de um mal-entendido de que ninguém queria falar.
“Uma carta foi enviada e uma ligação quebrou-se”, escreve
o autor na primeira página do prólogo,
numa passagem em que coloca o leitor na cozinha do apartamento de Lien. “Ainda
hoje, quase 30 anos depois, se sente magoada ao falar destas coisas.” Que versão
teria ela do que acontecera depois da guerra?
Para responder a esta e a outras perguntas, o autor vira-se obrigado a
seguir-lhe o rasto e descobrira que vivia agora em Amesterdão. Vencidas as
muitas resistências iniciais de Lien, que estava relutante em regressar àquele
passado doloroso, encontraram-se e, graças às muitas conversas que tiveram desde
2014, ano em que o escritor começou a trabalhar neste projecto, tornaram-se
amigos. Van Es descobriu que ela guardara muitos documentos relativos à sua vida
e que, depois de ter passado por casa dos seus avós, estivera noutra família de
acolhimento e que sofrera maus tratos, tendo sido até vítima de violência
sexual.
“É um livro muito importante. É uma história que nunca teria sido contada se ele
não tivesse ido atrás dela. Todos achámos que tem um enorme eco no que se passa
hoje no mundo, com tantas pessoas deslocadas e tantas histórias que ficam por
contar”, disse a presidente do júri, a apresentadora da BBC Sophie Raworth, aqui
citada pelo diário The
Guardian, elogiando em seguida a escrita de Bart van Es e garantindo
que a obra tem vindo a ser subestimada. “Todos fomos surpreendidos por ela.
Sentimos que era uma jóia escondida que queríamos pôr sob os holofotes.”
Lidas as críticas ao livro publicadas por muitos jornais e revistas britânicos,
na sua maioria muito elogiosas, saltam à vista adjectivos como “assombroso”,
“intenso”, “elegante”, “luminoso”, “comovente”. Para Raworth, The
Cut Out Girltem ainda o mérito de, através de uma narrativa bem
urdida que junta duas famílias, pôr a Holanda a olhar para o seu passado
colaboracionista.
Recorda o diário que 4000 crianças judias sobreviveram à guerra no país ao
permanecerem escondidas mas, dessas, apenas cerca de 350 continuaram a viver com
famílias não-judias depois do conflito. Lien, que deixara a casa dos Van Es
fugida à polícia e que acabara por viver junto da outra família de acolhimento
um período verdadeiramente traumático da sua infância e juventude, pediu para
regressar mais tarde. E fê-lo, ficando até que se deu a ruptura que este livro
procura explicar e reparar. Diz o autor que os seus avós, ambos membros da
resistência holandesa, não foram capazes de compreender até que ponto a perda
dos pais e as violações durante a guerra a tinham marcado para sempre.
Contar a história da menina que os avós ajudaram a salvar dos nazis mudou a sua
vida, reconhece o escritor, que lhes dedica o livro, assim como aos pais de
Lien, Charles e Catharine de Jong-Spiero. Este livro é um reencontro das duas
famílias e, disse-o o autor ao receber o Prémio Costa, uma homenagem aos Van Es,
“que mostraram tanta coragem quando muitos não o fizeram”. É também, e
sobretudo, uma demonstração do “amor” que sente por Lien, a mesma mulher que
ainda hoje faz questão de dizer que só nasceu depois da guerra.
THE IRISH TIMES
Tue, Jan
29, 2019, 19:30
Martin
Doyle
The Cut Out Girl, a powerful story about a young girl’s struggle to survive Nazi
persecution, and a man’s attempt to unveil his family’s secrets, by Prof Bart
van Es of Oxford University, has been named the 2018 Costa Book of the Year.
The Cut Out Girl is the extraordinary true story of a young Jewish girl in the
Netherlands who hides from the Nazis in the homes of an underground network of
foster families, one of them the author’s grandparents.
Lien de Jong 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.
Sally Rooney had been the bookies’
favourite for the £30,000 prize, having won
the £5,000 Costa Novel of the Year earlier this month
for her bestselling and critically aclaimed second novel, Normal People.
The other category winners from whom the winner was chosen were Stuart Turton
for his first novel, The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, the Scottish poet JO
Morgan for Assurances and children’s writer Hilary McKay for The Skylarks’ War.
BBC broadcaster Sophie Raworth chaired a judging panel that included RTÉ
broadcaster Rick O’Shea.
The Cut
Out Girl, published by Fig Tree, is the seventh biography to take the overall
prize since its introduction in 1985. The last biography to win was H is for
Hawk by Helen Macdonald in 2014.
This is
the 47th year of the Costa Book Awards, originally established in 1971 by
Whitbread. The 2017 Costa Book of the Year was Inside the Wave, the final
collection of poetry by Helen Dunmore, published shortly before her death.
OXFORD ARTS BLOG
Stuart Gillespie
2 Aug 2018
The Cut Out Girl by
Oxford English professor Bart van Es has
been named Costa Book of the Year, after previously winning the
biography category of the awards. Professor van Es triumphed ahead of literary
figures including novelist Sally Rooney. Read our Q&A below with Professor van
Es, whose book tells the story of Lien de Jong, a young Dutch girl hidden from
the Nazis during World War II.
The last time Lien de Jong saw her parents was in the Hague, where she was
collected at the door by a stranger and taken away to be hidden from the Nazis.
She was raised by her foster family as one of their own, but a falling out after
the war put an end to their relationship. What was her side of the story,
wondered Oxford University's Professor
Bart van Es, a grandson of the couple who looked after Lien.
Professor van Es, of St Catherine's College and Oxford's English Faculty, talks
to Arts Blog about
the journey that led to the publication of his new book, The
Cut Out Girl: A Story of War and Family, Lost and Found.
How did you discover the story of Lien de Jong?
I had always known that my grandparents had been part of the Dutch wartime
resistance and had sheltered Jewish children, but I had never looked into what
actually happened. Then in November 2014 my eldest uncle died and I knew that if
I did not pursue the matter now this history would be lost forever. Thanks to my
mother’s maintaining of an old connection, I got to meet Lien, who was by that
time over 80 and living in Amsterdam. As a young Jewish girl Lien had lived in
hiding with my grandparents and after the war she had continued to live with
them. However, a row in the 1980s had cut her off from the family, which meant
that she and I had never met. Lien was cautious when we met in late December
2014, but, once trust was established, we struck up a powerful partnership. Lien
agreed to work with me and shared a wealth of materials: letters, photographs,
official documents, and also a poetry book that she kept up throughout the war.
Through many tens of hours of recorded interviews, Lien shared a story that was
immensely moving and far more complex than I could have imagined.
Can you describe the process of researching and writing the book?
Starting out from those interviews with Lien, this became an archival research
project as well as a literary journey. In January 2015 I decided to visit the
places of Lien’s childhood: her parents’ home in The Hague (now a physiotherapy
gym), my grandparents' old address in Dordrecht (now in a deprived area
inhabited mainly by recent immigrants), and a series of other hiding addresses
across the Netherlands, including my mother’s home village, where Lien spent
time. These places brought their own stories, which I then began to investigate.
Among other things I spent a lot of time at the Dutch National Archives looking
at the prosecution material on 230 Dutch police officers who were investigated
after the war for their role in the Holocaust. What I ended up with was a huge
amount of material: the intimate narrative of Lien’s life from childhood to old
age combined with archival evidence on resistance networks, police
collaboration, and the wider history of Jews in the Netherlands. The challenge
was to put this into a single book.
How easy was it to combine academic research with such a personal story?
It was challenging to combine the two kinds of material I had to hand, and I had
some sleepless nights over what I was doing. After various experiments I opted
for a double narrative with one strand in the first person (describing my
travels and the documentary evidence I encountered) and a second strand that was
much more novelistic (written in the third person, voicing the childhood
experiences of Lien). I’d never written in such an emotionally intense way
before. It was exciting and all-consuming. At the same time it was important to
remain academically objective: there could be no factual errors about what
happened in the war and afterwards, both because of its historical importance
and because there were real, still-living people involved.
Are there any moments from your conversations with Lien that particularly stand
out?
The things that stand out for me are the documents that Lien has kept with her.
For example, there is the letter that Lien’s mother wrote to my grandparents in
August 1942, in which she gave up her child in the hope that Lien would survive
the war even if the rest of the family could not. There is also the last letter
that Lien ever wrote to her mother, which was not delivered because her parents
were already in Auschwitz by the time it would have been sent via the secret
post. Also very powerful are the wider stories of resistance activity that came
to me in the course of my research. In one case a group of young Dutch women
decided that the only way in which they could save Jewish babies would be to
claim them as their own illegitimate children, fathered by German soldiers. This
brought absolute safety to the babies, but also, of course, terrible shame to
the women themselves.
In the book I try to answer some big questions, including:
·
Why was the Netherlands so compliant with the Nazis, so that 80% of the
country’s Jews were killed, a far higher percentage than elsewhere in the West?
·
What was it that made some brave people (such as my grandparents) resist the
Nazis?
·
What were the psychological consequences for survivors and rescuers?
·
And, most pressingly as far as The
Cut Out Girl story is concerned, how could my grandmother (who
rescued Lien and brought her up as her own daughter after the war) have ended up
quarrelling with the person she saved from the Holocaust? How could she have
sent her a letter, in July 1988, that cut Lien out of her life?
Answering those questions will, I hope, give a new perspective on what happened
in World War II.
KIRKUS
REVIEWS
A professor’s story of how
he found and befriended an estranged member of his extended family, a Jewish
woman his grandparents had adopted during World War II.
When van Es (English
Literature/Univ. of Oxford; Shakespeare’s Comedies: A Very Short Introduction,
2016, etc.) returned to his native Holland to meet Lien, an elderly Jewish
woman, he knew only that she had grown up with his father as an adopted sister.
Later—and very mysteriously—she had received a letter from the author’s
grandmother severing all connection to the family. Through correspondence and
interviews, van Es learned that Lien’s mother sent her daughter to live among
Christians willing to protect her from the Nazis. For a year and a half, she
lived quietly, missing the parents she never saw again but loving her adopted
family. When the van Es home was raided by local Dutch authorities, Lien fled.
For more than a year, she moved from hiding place to hiding place, focused
solely on surviving. Eventually, she made her way to central Holland, where she
spent the next year living with the stern Van Laar family and getting raped by
the brother of her adopted father. When she returned to the van Es family in
1945, she had become a brooding teenager. She appeared to grow out of her
unhappiness, training first to become a social worker, and then marrying and
having children. Yet her “perfect” life did not stop her from later trying to
commit suicide. The author’s grandmother saw her behavior as selfish and put
what would become a permanent distance between them. Unlike his grandmother, van
Es saw that the trauma Lien endured had made her feel cut off from herself and
Jewish heritage, like a “cut out” figure in someone else’s culture and life.
Compassionate and thoughtfully rendered, the book is both a memorable portrait
of a remarkable woman and a testament to the healing power of understanding.
A complex and uplifting
tale.
Referência - ÓBITO de Hendrik van Es
Hendrik van Es
casado com
Jannigje van Es-de Jong
Dodrecht em 8 de Novembro de 1906
Falecido em 20 de Outubro de 1979
Ali e Gerard
Kees e Truus
Marianne e Pierre
Henk e Dieuwke
Geert Jan e Renée