Bart van Es and his book The Cut Out Girl Photo: Penguin Books
The Cut Out Girl is a harrowing true story about a young girl's struggle to survive Nazi persecution, and a man's attempt to unveil his family's secrets about her connection to them.
Bart van Es’s award-winning book is the biography of Hesseline de Jong-Spiero, a Jewish girl fostered by the author’s own family when the Netherlands was occupied by Germany.
In Westerbork, in the Netherlands, Jews board a deportation train to Auschwitz Photo: Wikimedia Commons
The last time Lien 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 a succession of foster families as one of their own, but a falling out after the war put an end to her relationship with one couple who had looked after her.
Their grandson Bart van Es wondered what her side of the story was, and what really happened during the war, and after?
So began an investigation that would consume and transform both Bart's life and Lien's. This is an astonishing portrait of a young girl's struggle to survive war, and her powerful, tumultuous and painful ties with her foster family.
Bart van Es and Lien de Jong, the subject of his Costa Book of the Year-winning biography The Cut Out Girl Photo: Costa Book Awards
In Bart van Es’s conversation with Miri Young-Moir, he reveals some of the extraordinary coincidences which would reveal new information about a time of secrecy which had been either forgotten about or deliberately suppressed.
And the talk concludes with some sombre reflections on the book’s foreshadowing of the current state of Europe. Van Es decries the rise of intolerance and the loss of faith in democracy which accompanies rising levels of scapegoating and repression.
About the speakers
Bart van Es and Miri Young-Moir Photo: NZ Festival of the Arts
Bart van Es
Bart van Es is a Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St. Catherine’s College. He is the author of Spenser’s Forms of History, Shakespeare in Company, and Shakespeare’s Comedies. He was born in the Netherlands and now lives with his family in England.
Miri Young-Moir
Head of Public Programming at Te Papa, Miri Young-Moir has a background in museums and Holocaust studies. She holds a Masters in Humanities and Social Thought, completed at New York University (USA) as a Fulbright Fellow, and a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and Religious Studies and a Post Graduate Diploma in Education from Victoria University, Wellington.
Her academic research has focused on the intersection of memorialisation, art, education and museums, and the representation of trauma and the Holocaust.
Photo: NZ Festival of the Arts
This audio was recorded in partnership with the writers’ programme at the 2020 New Zealand Festival of the Arts in Wellington. https://www.festival.nz/
