reading

Prologue: December 2014

‘Without families you don’t get stories.’

The woman who tells me this stands making coffee in her apartment in Amsterdam. Her name is Hesseline, Lien for short. She is over eighty and there is still a simple beauty about her: a clear complexion without noticeable make-up; a little silver watch but no other jewellery; and shiny, unpainted nails. She is brisk in manner but also somehow bohemian, dressed in a long, dark grey cardigan with a flowing claret paisley scarf. Before today I have no memory of ever having met her. All the same, I know that this woman grew up with my father, who was born in the Netherlands immediately after the war. She was once part of my family, but this is no longer the case. A letter was sent and a connection was broken. Even now, nearly thirty years later, it still hurts Lien to speak of these things.

From her white open-plan kitchen we move to the seating area, which is full of winter sunlight, filtered partly through stained-glass artworks that are fitted against the panes. There are books, museum catalogues and cultural supplements spread beneath a low glass coffee table. The furniture is modern, as are the pictures on the walls.

We speak in Dutch.

‘You wrote in your email about being interested in the family history and about maybe writing a book,’ she says. ‘Well, the family thing doesn’t really play for me. The van Esses were important in my life for a long time, but not now. So what kind of writing do you do?’

Her tone is friendly but also businesslike. I tell her a little about my work as a professor of English Literature at Oxford University – writing scholarly books and articles on Shakespeare and Renaissance poetry – but she knows most of this already from the Internet.

‘So what is your motivation?’ she asks.

My motivation? I’m not sure. I think hers could be a complex and interesting story. Recording these things is important, especially now, given the state of the world, with extremism again on the rise. There’s an untold story here that I don’t want to lose.

On this bright December morning we talk of world affairs, of Israel, of Dutch politics, and about the situation in Britain, where David Cameron’s coalition government is nearing the end of its five-year term. We move quickly from subject to subject, almost as in an interview for a job.

After perhaps an hour she pushes away her empty cup and speaks definitively:

‘Yes, I have faith in this. Shall we sit at the table? Do you have a notebook and pen?’

I had not wanted to arrive like a reporter, so I need to ask her for paper and something to write with, but we are soon seated at the dining table, which is made of pale laminate wood. I can ask anything I want about what she remembers: what people said and did; what she wore and what she ate; the houses she lived in; and what she dreamt.

We sit in the warm modernity of the apartment and our first meeting stretches on for hours. The documents – photographs, letters, various objects – appear only gradually as she thinks of them, but by mid-afternoon, with the light outside already fading, the table is covered in mementos. These include a children’s novel with a bright yellow cover featuring a steamboat, and a ceramic tile with a cartoon on it of a drowning man. There is also a photo album of red imitation leather that has a well-worn spine. On the first page of the album there is a picture of a handsome couple with the words ‘Mamma’ and ‘Pappa’ written beneath in blue pen.

The woman on the left in the photograph is Lien’s mother, whose name is Catharine de Jong-Spiero. She is perched on the edge of a rattan chair, the curved back of which envelops her. The sun is full in her face and she is smiling a little shyly. Her husband Charles, Lien’s father, sits on the ground in front of her in his shirtsleeves, his large hands resting comfortably on his knees. He leans back against his wife, who has one of her hands on his shoulder, and he looks up with a confident, ironical gaze. There is an air of nonchalance about him, laughing at the idea of a posed photograph in a way that his wife, with her fixed smile, finds harder to do.

The man’s air of nonchalance is also there in a few more photographs pasted on the first page of the album. One shows him in the back of a motor car, surrounded by a group of dapper young men. In secret he holds his fingers, like bunny ears, behind the head of the friend who poses in front of him with a pair of gloves and a cane. In another he stands, hat in hand, in front of a large black doorway, his leg with its polished shoe thrust to the fore. There are about a dozen of these early pictures. The most crumpled of them – torn, folded and re-stuck with yellowing glue – is of a beach party of around twenty young men and women in bathing suits, smiling and embracing. A woman in white at the centre holds up what looks like a volleyball. ‘Mamma, Pappa, Auntie Ro, Auntie Riek and Uncle Manie,’ reads the handwritten text beneath.

Although I am unpractised at interviewing, a rhythm soon develops to our conversation. I ask countless questions, probing away at some detail, scribbling down notes.

‘What was the room like?’

‘Where did the light come from?’

‘What sounds could you hear?’

It is only when all the details of an episode are exhausted and she can tell me nothing further that we move on.

Darkness has fallen by the time that Lien mentions her poesie album: a kind of poetry scrapbook that nearly all girls in the Netherlands used to keep. At first she cannot find it, but then, after looking around in a side room, she suggests I stand on a chair and look on top of the bookshelf, where it lies wedged, kept safe from dust in a small transparent plastic bag. It is a grey cloth album of around eight by ten centimetres with a faded pattern of flowers on the cover. Inside, on the first of its facing pages, there is a set of rhymes that are signed ‘your father’ and dated ‘The Hague, 15 September 1940’. They begin as follows:

This is a little book where friends can write

Who wish for you a future bright

To keep you safe throughout the years

With many smiles and never tears.

I stand for a moment reading the sloping hand. Opposite, on the left, there are three old-fashioned paper cut outs in pastel colours: at the top, a wicker basket of flowers; and below, two girls in straw hats. The one on the right smiles and looks happy, like Lien’s mother in the photo, but the cut out girl on the left purses her lips as she clutches her posy. She glances sideways, as if unable to meet the viewer’s eyes.

1

It is really Hitler who makes Lien Jewish. Her parents are members of a Jewish sports club (there is a team photo that shows her father dressed in thick socks and an open-necked shirt), but other than that, they are not observant. They eat matzah at Passover and, under family influence, got married at a synagogue. Lien, aged seven, however, thinks more about the Dutch equivalent of Father Christmas, St Nicholas, and still remembers her fury at being told that he does not really exist. She feels a trick has been played upon her by the adults and hides herself in rage and embarrassment in the cupboard beneath the stairs that lead to the apartment above.

That cupboard at number 31 Pletterijstraat, The Hague, is just across the hall from her bedroom, which faces you as you come in through the front door. As you enter her room there is a line of four little windows right up against the ceiling, too high to look out of, that give a rather dim light. These windows connect to the back bedroom, where her parents sleep. The other bedroom, which looks out on to the road and connects to the kitchen, is sublet by Mrs Andriessen. She is elderly and rather a great lady, and, like everyone else, writes in Lien’s poesie album. ‘Dear little Lien, remain obedient and good, / and all shall love you, as they should,’ she instructs the child. Lien pays more attention to the flower pictures that are stuck in by Mrs Andriessen than she does to this wise advice.

By 20 April 1941, when Mrs Andriessen writes her entry, it is not easy for Jews to be obedient in occupied Holland. Jews must carry identity papers stamped with a ‘J’; they are banned from the Civil Service, from cinemas, cafés and universities; Jewish ownership of a radio is a criminal offence. But for Lien things are still just about normal. She goes to a mixed school, and the children’s names written in her album with careful fountain pens are, for the most part, not Jewish:

‘Let’s remain friends for ever, dear Lientje, what do you think of that?’ writes Ria.

‘A sunny, happy life, may it remain yours for ever,’ from ‘your girlfriend, Mary van Stelsen.’

‘Will you still remember me, even without this album page?’ asks Harrie Klerks.

This last entry causes Lien some upset because, in spite of promising to work tidily, Harrie blots and spoils a page of the album so that it needs to be cut out with a paperknife. Still, Lien generously gives him a second try.

Lien’s real worries, if she could formulate them, are not about the war but about her parents’ marriage. When she was very young, just two and a half, she had to leave the flat above a shop that they then rented to go to live with Auntie Fie and Uncle Jo and their two children in another part of town. Her parents got divorced. Mamma came to visit her, but she did not see Pappa for a very long time. After two years Mamma and Pappa got remarried and set up home in the Pletterijstraat, turning over a new leaf. Pappa has stopped travelling as much as he did when he worked as a salesman for Grandpa and he makes an effort to stay home at night, making children’s puzzles out of wood at the table under the big light in the kitchen. For Lien he makes a little painting of Jan Klaassen and Katrijn, the Dutch Punch and Judy, which is her most treasured possession. Jan Klaassen and Katrijn are sitting in the sunshine on top of a grey cloud that is raining down beneath them, holding umbrellas in their hands as they smile. Perhaps Jan Klaassen and Katrijn are a bit like Mamma and Pappa, who are happy now that they are out of the rain?

Lien gets terrible stomach aches and does not like eating anything except desserts. She has medicines from the doctor and one time, when she got really thin, she had to go and stay for six weeks in an infirmary, where you have to drink a lot of milk and eat porridge. It would be horrible to go back there, so she tries to eat as much as she can of the farmer’s kale and potato mash that Mamma makes her, but it always takes a very long time.

For his new job Pappa has a little factory like Grandpa’s, which is really no more than a shed and can be reached through the yard at the back of the flat. He makes jams and pickles using vats of fruits and vegetables and various sizes of glass jar. Lien watches while Pappa works, but she is not allowed to help because this is a very clean job that children’s fingers might spoil. Instead she is mainly to be found on the street, singing nursery rhymes and playing games like ‘Where shall I lay my handkerchief?’, with children huddled in a circle and one child going round and round until she finds someone to give the handkerchief to, who must then chase her to try to give it back. Lien loves this kind of playing; she is almost always outside when there is sunshine and will even put up with a bit of rain if there is fun to be had.

She also goes to ballet, which is very ladylike, and sometimes they have shows. In Mamma and Pappa’s bedroom there is a picture of her in front of the stage scenery. It was taken after a performance: she is wearing her costume of black skirt and white blouse and she holds up a glove puppet on her right arm. The puppet is rather lumpy and bumpy and looks owlish, but it is supposed to be Mickey Mouse. Apart from the ballet costume she loves her two best dresses. One is blue-grey silk, which she bought with Mamma on a shopping trip to the Bonneterie, the enormous department store with glass doors and a high ceiling that swallowed them up when they stepped inside. Its floors are so shiny you can see your face in them, and when you look down from the inside balcony on to the entrance hall the people below you look like ants. The other favourite is a little bell-shaped dress (known as a clock dress) of satin with petticoats underneath that her mother made by hand.

Lien’s world is a world of school, street games, and of grannies and grandpas, aunts and uncles and cousins. There is family all around them: at the end of short walks from the Pletterijstraat or at the end of short rides on the tram. In the summer they take the tram to Scheveningen, where they play on the beach. Pretty, the family dog, loves it there – running as fast as she can on the wet sand, just touching the water, leaving a long line of four-toed impressions for the sea to wash away. When Lien throws a tennis ball for Pretty she gets it back, moments later, all soggy and sticky and covered in sand.

Her favourite cousins are Rini and Daafje. They are almost like a brother and sister because Lien stayed with them for such a long time when Mamma and Pappa could not be friends. On one of the many days they spend together, Rini writes a short moral verse in the poesie album about ‘taking people as they come’. The poem is not particularly appropriate as Lien does very little judging of anything or anyone, but sometimes it’s easier just to write something standard, and that’s fine if the handwriting and the stuck-in pictures are beautiful, so Lien writes something moral and improving in Rini’s album as well.

And then there is Auntie Riek with cousin Bennie and the two little ones, Nico and baby Robbie, for whom Lien sometimes helps to care. There is a photo of Auntie Riek and Mamma squeezed on to a wooden chair, with Bennie (thumb in mouth) and Lien (with a white bow in her hair) perched precariously on their laps. Mamma sits on one arm of the seat, holding Lien with her left hand and Riek with her right. The chair looks terribly unsteady, the whole gang likely to topple over any minute, and though Mamma maintains her serious camera smile you can see that her sister-in-law is starting to laugh.

A favourite place is Uncle Manie’s ironware shop nearer the centre of the city, filled to the ceiling with racks of screws, door knockers, hammers and bicycle bells. One time Lien is given a beautiful pair of skates there, with white leather tops and long, sharp silvery blades. When it is winter Lien will be able to try them. She can already see herself gliding without effort past other children, racing ahead in the sunshine, turning a pirouette on the ice.

War in May 1940, when Holland is invaded, comes out of a blue sky in Lien’s memory. Standing with her parents, she sees planes up above and they tell her, ‘This is the war.’ Apart from this, not much happens. There are German soldiers who sit at tables outside cafés and sometimes walk the streets. They are friendly. It is only slowly that things start to change.

From the autumn of 1941 onwards the names in Lien’s poesie album become different. Or rather, they become more the same. Roosje Sanders, Judith Hirch, Ali Rosenthal, Jema Abrahams: those who write their names from September 41 to March ’42 are all unmistakably Jewish, and this is because Lien now has to go to a Jewish school. The poems they write are still about friendship, angels and flowers, but the pastel cut outs of bouquets and girls in crinolines, which were stuck all over the early pages, are now rare. On 15 September 1941 new signs appear outside libraries, markets, parks, museums and swimming pools: ‘Forbidden for Jews’.

2

It is January 2015. Having met with Lien for one day in December, I have come back to the Netherlands for a few weeks to continue our interviews. We have also decided that it would be good for me to visit the places where she lived. This is to spark her memory with photos and also to get a sense of the locations myself. So I am on my way to The Hague.

Historically speaking, The Hague was always considered a village and not a city. The quiz question ‘What is the capital of the Netherlands?’ is difficult to answer because the Dutch talk of a ‘head city’ rather than a ‘capital’, and the head city of the Netherlands is indisputably Amsterdam. The Hague is merely the seat of government. Though chosen as the meeting place of the States General of the new republic at the end of the sixteenth century, it was not granted the dignity of a university or even a town wall. The Protestant representatives of the seven provinces who broke away from the Spanish empire met there precisely because it was neutral and unthreatening. They held their meetings in a moated fortress, which today is still the home of the Dutch parliament. In The Hague there is no great port or tradition of trading but, all the same, its status as the birthplace of the Low Countries is apt. The city sits on sand dunes and the remains of a boggy shoreline that was first drained by subsistence farmers in the ninth century. Like so much of Holland it was raised by human labour from the North Sea.

Heading for The Hague, I drive along motorways that slice through the old sea floor, a monochrome carpet of identical squares. When compared to England, where I have lived since I was a teenager, the Dutch countryside feels seamlessly modern in its flat, perfectly organized uniformity. Every few minutes I pass a neat farmhouse of dark reddish-brown brick with a sharply pitched roof. In the yards of these farmhouses there are spotless tractors and feed silos and none of the agricultural lumber that is found on the other side of the North Sea. Even the livestock looks standardized: rectangular cows all stamped with variations of the same black and white. Straight, silvery ditches cut up the land into even portions that stretch into the morning mist.

As I reach the edge of the city, the farms are replaced by a succession of sleek steel and glass structures: car showrooms, distribution centres, noise barriers, and greenhouses inside which there is a controlled environment of carbon dioxide and light. These buildings, just as much as the farms, feel almost artificial. Holland, when seen through a car window, looks devoid of history of any kind.

Having turned off the motorway, I soon find myself in a district of tired red-brick terraced housing. I park on the Pletterijstraat, the street on which Lien used to live. At the start of the last century, when these houses were built, the city was booming. Posters with art nouveau illustrations promoted its virtues as a residential haven to farming folk from the overcrowded countryside and to immigrants from the colonies and the Near East. The Hague, suddenly, was not just a city but a city for the world. In 1900 it became the home of what would soon be called the Court of International Justice, housed in splendour at the newly constructed Peace Palace. As it had been at its origin, The Hague was, once again, a neutral meeting place for great powers. The Pletterijstraat, completed in 1912, held its place in this city of hope.

Today the street is still mainly residential, with a corner shop and a couple of independent garages that sell second-hand cars. The ground-floor flat at number 31 is now a small therapeutic gymnasium with the logo ‘Fysio Fitness’ splashed in yellow on its frosted glass. I press the buzzer and wait until a tall young man in a tracksuit opens the door. He is one of the gym instructors. Behind him in the lobby are two older gentlemen in exercise clothing: bunched-up shorts, faded cotton jumpers, bright trainers, and socks that are a bit too long.

I am left on my own in the little entrance hall, with the class getting going in what used to be Mrs Andriessen’s room. I can hear the exercise class in progress, with the instructor saying encouraging things.

To the right there is the cupboard where Lien hid when she discovered that St Nicholas was not real. In front of me is her old bedroom, now an office with healthcare qualifications pinned up on the walls. The windows let in some pale January light.

It does not take long to see the three-room apartment. Everything is decent, ordinary, and of a reasonable size. Behind the office is the bedroom of Lien’s parents, which now contains a massage table and an anatomical skeleton wearing a red bobble hat. Connected to this is a galley kitchen with a kettle and some fitness leaflets on the worktop. The scrubby backyard has become a storage place for random objects: a metal bin, a snow scoop, a bicycle, some breeze blocks, a stack of plates and some broken chairs. Looking over the fence I try to work out where Charles de Jong’s little factory would have stood.

Having been in the flat for less than ten minutes, I make my way out, waving politely to the gym instructor and the old men.

Back in the street and with nothing obvious to do next, I suddenly ask myself what I’m up to. Although I work as an academic, I am no expert on Dutch history or on Nazi persecution. Is visiting the addresses where Lien’s story takes me really research? Slightly on edge, with that question hanging over me, I begin to walk down the street.

Towards the end of the interwar period this area was becoming increasingly Jewish. In 1920, when the houses were new, there were just seven Jewish families on the Pletterijstraat. By 1940 there were thirty-nine. Almost directly opposite Lien’s house stood the Jewish orphanage, which moved into its specially commissioned premises in 1929 and soon afterwards began accepting German refugees. Thirty-five thousand moved to the Netherlands after the Nazis took power.

Those coming to these terraces in the 1920s and 1930s were not from the old Sephardic Jewish families, who had escaped to the Netherlands from Portugal in the late fifteenth century. The newer arrivals were German and Polish, but they too were following an established route. Since the eighteenth century many Eastern Ashkenazi Jews, whose first language was Yiddish rather than Hebrew, had migrated to Holland. The first German, or ‘Hoogduitsch’, synagogue was built in The Hague in the 1720s. Over the years, tens of thousands would make their journey across the continent. Here there were no pogroms, it was possible to join guilds, to become a freeman of the city, and even to pass the status of freeman down the family line. Although there were areas of the city that were more Jewish than others, there were no lines of division. From generation to generation, the immigrants took on the tastes and the habits of their compatriots and became straightforwardly Dutch. So when Napoleon took direct control of the Netherlands in 1811 and ordered the registration of surnames, many Jews took the opportunity to naturalize theirs. Joseph Izak, for example, as a long-standing citizen, opted for the plain, native-sounding ‘Joseph de Jong’.

The Portuguese, as the first settlers, remained distinct from these newer, more working-class arrivals. They were a kind of aristocracy, closely integrated with political power and trade. These Sephardic Jews, who had emerged as moneylenders after 1179 when the Lateran Council forbade the charging of interest amongst Christians, had escaped southern persecution and prospered in the seventeenth century in the great ports of Europe’s northern coast. Though less than 0.01 per cent of the population, Sephardic Dutch Jews owned a quarter of the sugar plantations in Surinam, and they were crucial to the financial structures of the new republic. It was the Portuguese-Jewish banker Isaac Lopez Suasso, for example, who advanced the necessary 2 million guilders, and arranged the hire of 6,000 Swedish mercenaries, when William III of Orange set out to claim the British Crown in 1688.

If anything, the Sephardic community in The Hague was even more accepted than that in Amsterdam. It was in The Hague, in 1677, that the sceptical Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza was buried in great splendour in the Protestant New Church. This was an astonishing gesture of acceptance, even if the church authorities broke up the grave soon after, for non-payment of fees.

Village status, combined with its function as a royal residence, made The Hague an easy place for special pleading. Thus when, in 1690, there was a little local difficulty over some passages in the Talmud, a solution was not hard to arrange. The problem involved the carrying of objects in public on the Sabbath, which was clearly forbidden. The question, though, was what counted as ‘in public’? In Amsterdam it had been decided that the whole city, as a walled unit, could reasonably be defined as ‘a home’. The Hague, unfortunately, did not have town walls. Learned rabbis had determined, however, that if the two stone bridges over its canals were to be replaced by drawbridges, then The Hague too would, logically, be a home. In consequence a Jewish delegation approached the governing magistrate. Might the bridges be modified at their cost? Two years later, in the true spirit of political accommodation, they were demolished and replaced.

German and Polish immigrants living in the Pletterijstraat in the 1920s and 1930s were hardly in a position to incur such expenses, even supposing they had the commitment to that degree of ingenuity in interpreting God’s laws. Yet, although not rich, the River District was perfectly pleasant. Then, as now, it was a place of diversity, where different races and religions lived neighbourly lives. There was, it is true, some resentment amongst non-Jews at the level of migration and, in response, the government had put a cap on numbers. Depending on what circle you moved in, Jews could be feared as socialists, as capitalists, as Zionists, as poor and low-skilled, or as rich and over-qualified, taking the best jobs. In the 1930s it could be hard for Jews to get a restaurant booking. Still, even in 1937 there was only a 4 per cent vote for the Dutch fascist party, the NSB.

Leaving the old orphanage behind me, I take a turn off the Pletterijstraat on to a side street, hoping to find a café. I pass a primary school with neat Jugendstil lettering over its doors announcing its year of completion: 1923. Since that time a mural has been added that shows a giraffe looking out of a painted window with a smiling girl seated on its back. At ground level there are other figures of children on the brickwork and a Perspex sign that tells me this is a Protestant Christian school. Further up the street I can see a kind of shopping precinct, so I head up in that direction in search of a coffee.

When I get there the precinct is something different from what I expected. It is as neat and tidy as it looked from a distance, with attractively lit shopfronts, but the rows of windows show only women in lingerie perched on bar stools with dark red, dimly lit cubicles to the rear. Some of the windows have closed curtains; others display messages such as ‘sensual massage’, ‘two women’, or ‘kinky sex’. Across the street from me there is a steel outdoor urinal where two men are urinating while they survey the scene.

As I walk through, feeling intrusive, it is difficult not to make eye contact with the women. My gaze moves quickly from one window to another, and I am conscious of my presence as a time-waster as well as a representative of the general crowd of men. Behind the glass in the warm light and with their thick layers of make-up the women look almost ageless, like bored but desperate sales assistants hovering at the front of a shop. A blonde young woman looks across at me, smiling, and then, as I pass, goes back to checking her phone.

In three or four minutes I have passed through the precinct and am back on the main road that leads to the station. From here I can loop back to the Pletterijstraat and get to my car.

Once again I am struck by the strangeness of this familiar country, which I left as a three-year-old forty years ago, returning only for the holidays every summer. I am now probably more English than anything, which is why the neat precinct for prostitutes is so foreign to me. The Dutch are pragmatic about these matters: it is logical to have sex or drugs or euthanasia out in the open, honest and regulated, and if it ends up less than a hundred yards from a primary school that cannot be helped.

This last hour, I feel, has been an immersion into the Low Countries: perfect motorways, a Protestant primary school, a red-light district, and the former home of a Jewish family now converted into a physiotherapy gym. This is a country of tolerance: letting people get on with things, not minding others’ business if it does not interfere with your own. This makes the Netherlands progressive. But might it also explain why the Germans were so often allowed to act as they did? The Netherlands of the 1930s was still what was called a society of ‘pillars’: separate strands, such as the Protestants, the Catholics and the Liberals, who brushed shoulders and exchanged polite greetings, but who rarely went further than that. One followed the law and kept things tidy. Everything else was another’s business, no need to interfere.

Of the 18,000 Jews in The Hague in 1940, 2,000 survived. Of the 400 old Portuguese Jews, so deeply embedded in the fabric of the state and the city, just eight returned. The entire Jewish orphanage, which stands across the road from me, was liquidated without survivors on 13 March 1943.

3

‘Jew’. In May 1942 Lien sees her mother at the dining table in the kitchen with a large sheet of yellow cloth. There is a pattern of stars upon it with black outlines, each with a word printed at its centre: ‘Jew’. Around every star there is a thin dotted line to make it easier to cut out. They must now wear these stars on each item of outside clothing, so Mamma carefully stitches a star reading ‘Jew’ on to the silk of the Bonneterie dress.

The children on the street whom she knows are the same as ever, but those on the way to school are not so kind. Sometimes they throw stones. Then one day a group of children runs up and grabs her, pushing her into a side street, chanting, ‘We have caught a Jew.’ When she does not come home her father goes out to find her. The gang backs away when it sees him, but once he takes her hand a bold lad edges closer. ‘Dirty Jew,’ he mumbles, half embarrassed, poised and ready to run off. Pappa ignores him, but not with his normal calmness; there is a tremor to his fingers as he leads her away from the alley and back to the flat.

As they reach number 31 they see Mrs Andriessen standing in the stairwell of the apartment block, half out on the pavement, looking for them. There is a worried, searching expression on her face and then a tense half-smile of relief when she sees Lien. This feels odd because Mrs Andriessen is almost always to be found in her soap-scented room. The old lady turns and calls something into the open door of their flat, her cheeks shiny and red. She seems to be telling Mamma that everything is all right. Lien suddenly thinks that because Mrs Andriessen is allowed to stay with them at the Pletterijstraat she must also be Jewish, like they are, though she is not sure about that.

Aunt Ellie, on the other hand, is not Jewish, because she is not really an auntie, just a good friend of Mamma’s who visits all the time even though she doesn’t have to wear a star.

When the summer holidays come, Lien often stays in the yard or the kitchen or on the flight of steps at the front of the house. She gets to know Lilly, who lives at number 29 upstairs. Lilly draws four evenly spaced pencil lines into the album and copies a poem perfectly on to the middle of the page:

Roses big and roses small

Soft as velvet on a wall

But the softest petal part

Is the rose of Lientje’s heart.

Lilly draws some extra lines diagonally in the left-hand corner of the page: ‘I lay in bed and mucked about / so Mum got cross and started to shout.’ Every time they read it aloud to themselves they start to giggle.

Then, one evening in early August, still in the holidays, Mamma comes into her bedroom, just as always, to tuck her in and kiss her goodnight. She sits down on the chair beside her, rests one hand on top of the covers and uses the other to stroke Lien’s hair. ‘I must tell you a secret,’ she tells her. ‘You are going to stay somewhere else for a while.’

There is a silence. Whatever comes after this becomes hazy, but this sentence, spoken in her mother’s voice, stays fixed. Lien remembers that her mother was very lovely, and kind, and that she felt loved.

The excitement of the secret presses heavily the next morning when Lien sits at the top of the outside steps with Lilly and a few other children beside her, wanting very much to tell. It feels special to have a secret, but it is not fun to have to keep it for so long. When Mamma comes home Lien runs down the steps and catches up with her. ‘Can’t I tell?’ she whispers. ‘I think it’s a really nice secret.’ But Mamma won’t let her; it is very important that nobody else knows.

That evening there is a gathering of aunts and uncles who squeeze themselves into the kitchen and then, as its gets ever fuller, find a place to look into it from the doorway of her parents’ room. It is not a birthday party because there are no children (except for her and baby Robbie), but still Lien is the centre of attention: she has the gooey taste of chocolate in her mouth, which is almost unfamiliar, and is asked to sit on nearly everyone’s lap. For some reason she decides to behave badly, laughing in the high-pitched squeal that Mamma doesn’t like as she points to a spot on Aunt Ellie’s nose, but, no matter how much she squeals and points at people, she is not told off. Her shrieks cut through the murmur of the other voices; the adults speak low to each other and have eyes only for Lien. Everything goes so quickly. There is no time for talking or even for thinking about the questions that emerge and then edge away, just out of sight, in her mind. It all feels rushed, but still the evening runs on for hours as a succession of hugs and whispers; she is only half-conscious of being carried slumbering to her bedroom in her father’s arms.

In the morning, soon after she has had her bread and cheese, there is a lady at the door, even grander than Mrs Andriessen and not so old. She has a firm jolly manner just like the nurse at the doctor’s surgery, saying nice things about her, and asking questions about her schoolwork and about what books she enjoys. Lien is embarrassed that she does not do much reading, though she remembers to say that she likes Jan Klaassen and Katrijn. The lady is quite young but not at all like a mother. It is a real adventure to be going with her, the kind of adventure that gives you a little feeling of sickness in your mouth. On the outside she is excited but on the inside she feels calm. They are unstitching the stars from her dresses – the two women’s fingers moving very fast.

Lien can keep her own name and her surname, de Jong, but she must not say anything about Mamma or Pappa or family. She is not to be Jewish now, just a normal girl from Rotterdam whose parents have been killed in the bombing. If anyone asks, she must say that the lady is Mrs Heroma and that she is taking her to her aunt who lives in Dordrecht, which is a different town. It is important to stay very close to the lady, hugged tight into her body so that nobody who knows her can see that Lien is not wearing her star. Mamma says exactly the same things as the lady and gets her to repeat them, even though Lien feels she knows them already. Then, a kiss with a hug that hurts a little and she is outside in the Pletterijstraat, walking fast in step with the lady, trying hard to keep herself pressed into her coat. The bag of her things, including her poesie album and Pappa’s puzzle, is over Mrs Heroma’s shoulder and bangs its edge against her with every stride.

It is not far from Lien’s house to the station, so their walk through the streets and then through the park (where Jews are forbidden) to the Hollands Spoor railway is over almost as soon as it starts. The station front looks like a palace, but there is no time to look at it because their train is about to depart. Lien thinks for a moment about her bedroom, close enough for her to run back.

Mrs Heroma talks to her about funny place names. There are lots in Holland, she says. For example, the Double Sausage Street in Amsterdam, The Moustache in Groningen, or Ducksick Road in Zeeland. There is also a road called Behind the Wild Pig. Lien thinks these names are funny. She likes Mrs Heroma and giggles as they watch the houses of The Hague pass faster and faster through the window of the train compartment, the kchunk, kchunk of the wheels on the railway growing louder and closer together. The smoke from the locomotive is dirty but it smells clean. ‘Does Lien know any funny place names?’ After a lot of thinking, she remembers Cow Thief Street, which Mrs Heroma had not known about. ‘Cow Thief Street, that’s a good one!’ Mrs Heroma says.

Lien is about to say, ‘It’s not far from our house,’ when she stops herself just in time.

Unlike The Hague, Dordrecht has only one railway station. It is also like a palace, only a bit smaller, without the princess towers of the station they left behind. They walk through another park – bigger than theirs at home, and sleepy in the afternoon sunlight – then through streets with little houses, nothing at all like the three-storey apartment blocks of The Hague. Her legs are tired now and it takes a bit longer each time to get to a new corner, but at each one Mrs Heroma tells her the street name and then a funny one from somewhere else in Holland, so Lien presses on. They reach the Mauritsweg (at which Mrs Heroma says ‘Trousers Street’), then the Krispijnseweg (‘Buttermountain Street’) and finally the Bilderdijkstraat (‘Rabbitpipe Street’), and they have arrived. All the houses that Lien has passed seemed little compared to the ones in The Hague, but these ones in the Bilderdijkstraat are the littlest of all. In fact the street doesn’t really look like it has houses; it just has two long, low red-brick walls with doors and windows set in it, stretching as far as Lien can see.

In the road a group of boys is running and shouting. Mrs Heroma, ignoring the commotion, walks straight to the door of number 10 and knocks hard on the little round windowpane. In her coat pocket, unbeknownst to Lien, there is a letter. It is written in the same steady hand that her mother used on the second page of the little girl’s album. The letter, which still survives in Lien’s apartment in Amsterdam, is dated August 1942. It reads as follows:

Most Honoured 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. She has been taken from me by circumstance. May you, with the best will and wisdom, look after her.

Imagine for yourself the parting between us. When shall we ever see her again? On 7 September she will be nine. I hope it will be a joyful day for her.

I want to say to you that it is my wish that she will think only of you as her mother and father and that, in the moments of sadness that will come to her, you will comfort her as such.

If God wills it, we will all, after the war, shake one another by the hand in joyous reunion. Directed to you as the father and mother of:

Lientje

Bart van Es

THE CUT OUT GIRL

A Story of War and Family, Lost and Found

FIG TREE

Prologue: December 2014

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