Holocaust fiction is never easy to read, how ever I was engrossed by the The Cut Out Girl. It's always a treat when you get to talk to someone who went through a historical event, terrible or not. This story told by an elderly woman who was hidden during the holocaust is one of those remarkable stories of survival.

This book is an interesting mix of memory, journal, and pictures. However, this is not the kind of war book I was expecting. This is less about telling the story of the girl in the picture and more about the speaker trying to understand his own life and family story. There are certainly good re-tellings and memories that make things personal for the reader but it could not balance the rest of the story. I found it hard to focus on the writing because it was choppy and simplistic. There was too much history and not a lot of tracking the storyline that would keep me interested. I give this book 1/5 for being hard to follow and not building the story.

-- I received a free review copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Many thanks for this opportunity! --

I had a lot of ups and downs with this book. While Lien's story was incredibly interesting and shed light on a side of history I did not know much about beforehand, the book had a tendency to drift off into a vanity piece on the author's journey of self-discovery, which, frankly, I wasn't all that interested in - if that was left to an introduction, or a thought piece at the end, I believe the book would have profited. I was there for the history, for the young girl and her experiences of being Jewish in World War II Europe, and making a life for herself in the shambles that remained afterwards.
And that part paid off. Bart van Es manages to tell Lien's fragmented memories in a haunting way, evoking a world foreign experiences, and reminding us at the same time that we need to be careful not to slip off into the same mistakes again.

Any book with a WWII background is never going to be a light read. This book is about one girl who, like many others, was placed in someone else's home by her parents just so she could live. The Cut Out Girl shows us what it took to escape and survive, the heights that parents went to to make sure their children lived!
A girl whose life changed since she was young, going through different homes and meeting people - some good and others not.
Like I said before, this book is not going to be an easy read. It will disturb you as it should for that era was anything but nightmarish. And it is books like The Cut Out Girl that lets us into the lives of the people who survived and not just state facts about the war.

I gave this book a 5 out of 5 star review. It was an enjoyable and I would recommend. to others. Generously provided to me through NetGalley

This is an unusual book, the story of a highly personal quest set against the background of the Second World War and a sometimes painfully honest set of reflections by the author as well as his subject.

Bart van Es, an academic, sets out to uncover a family mystery relating to Lien, the Jewish girl hidden by his grandparents during the German occupation of the Netherlands. Having been treated as part of the family for many years after the war, a breach suddenly occurred between Lien and his grandmother which no-one can explain to him so he tracks down Lien and goes to talk to her. They have many conversations, he visits the places she remembers and he writes her story.

Lien's recollections of her experiences are very poignant. Her parents place her for safety with strangers and she never sees them again. Some of the people she stays with are kind to her, others are not. But she survives, marries and has children, apparently a happy ending.

What struck me most was the vivid way in which the author recounts Lien's survival mechanism. In order to cope with the fear and uncertainty of wartime life in hiding, she becomes distanced from those about her. This disconnection is accentuated during a period of horrific sexual abuse and the long term effects, in the form of severe depression, do not surface until much later in her life.

Lien's openness is recounting her story prompts the author to reflect on his own relationship with his step-daughter in a rather touching way. The explanation for the breach turns out to be rather trivial, the sort of thing that happens in many ordinary families, but this very triviality points up the complexity of the relationships between those who bravely hid children like Lien and the children themselves, both during the war and after.

(Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC.)

4.5 stars
“Without families you don’t get stories.” (Lien, the girl of this title). This sounds like something we might all accept as true, but how profound this really is in relation to this book and what it means for this story is something that I won’t forget. This is about the Holocaust, about the goodness of some Dutch families in helping to save Jewish children, about the opposite of that when thousands were turned in, about the author’s journey to discover the details of his family’s part in saving Lien, who grew up with his grandparents. There is no doubt, though, that this is Lien’s story, but it also reflects the stories of many more Jewish children who were hidden during the war.

How quickly things changed from a happy childhood to being sent away before you are nine years old in order to be saved from being rounded up by the Nazis. It’s impossible to imagine the heart break of sending your children away to save them, when love for your child somehow has to help you through the grief of sending her away. It’s impossible to imagine the fear, not really understanding when your mother says “I must tell you a secret,” she tells her. “You are going to stay somewhere else for a while.” In alternating narratives we are told Lien’s story in the past and the author’s journey to discover his family’s past as well. When he meets her she is in her eighties and the meeting and their ultimate connecting make for many poignant moments. Bart van Es visits the places and people who would remember her and pieces together the times. Lien was moved from home to home - safe from the Nazis but not always living an easy life, and not always safe from other evils, as further unimaginable things happen to her .

A lot is packed into this book: the brutal history of the Holocaust, love of family, the bravery and goodness of people, the trauma of separation, losing the feeling of belonging. Reading Holocaust fiction is heartbreaking and gut wrenching enough when an author is able to bring to the page the horrors that eat at you the reader, but reading biographies and memoirs takes that horror we can only imagine in a novel, to a different level where you find it hard to breathe when these memories are relived. Van Es tells us , “ If I was to do something before these people and their memories disappeared forever, it must be now.” If we as human beings are going to do something meaningful, we have to read their memories so what happened is not forgotten.

(4.5 stars and not a perfect 5 stars because the writing felt a little disjointed at times moving around in time, but totally deserving of being bumped up to 5.)

I received an advanced copy of this book from Penguin Press through NetGalley.

I had trouble getting into this one. Story was ok, writing was ok but about half way through and just could not finish... Sorry, maybe next time.

Many thanks to #NetGalley and Penguin Press for allowing me to read a copy of this book in exchange for an honest opinion.

I have always been fascinated by stories of the Second World War and as my father served with the Canadian Army in Netherlands for quite some time, I have a particular interest in stories of that time. I have also been fortunate enough to visit the Netherlands and see places like the Annex where Anne Frank and her family hid or the hidden cupboard in the home of Corrie Ten Boom where many people would hide for shorter periods of time. In spite of all that, I did not find this book a particularly easy one to read. The author Bart van Es had a very personal reason for writing this book. His family had been involved in helping to hide a young Jewish girl, Lientje during the war and had even fostered her for some years after the war but ultimately there had been a break n the family relationship that vanEs wanted to understand.

The story is told at times through the eyes of young Lientje, who although now a senior is telling her story to vanEs. I was saddened to learn that when she had left her family to go into hiding she had really had very little understanding of what was about to happen or why. I can only imagine what that must have been like for her on an emotional level and it made me think of children who are still being separated from their parents in 2018 (albeit for different reasons) and what the long term ramifications of those separations will be.

On another level this book is a bit of a detective story as vanEs travels to various places in the Netherlands to follow up on what Lientje has shared with him. In some cases there is quite a bit to see and learn and in others the landscape has changed dramatically through time. Some of the contacts he makes as he explores are able to fill in the gaps that are inevitable in Lientje's mind. It was fascinating to see it all come together and a few history lessons interjected along the way were extremely eye opening for me.

Sadly, not all who helped to hide Lientje from the Germans had her best interests at heart. There were those who treated her more as a servant than a family member and even those who sexually abused her. When the war ended there were no parents for her to go home to and throughout her lifetime she struggled to deal with the emotions and self-esteem issues that developed as a result of her experiences. She was like a child cut out of her element struggling to find out where she would fit. She would not have been alone in this experience. I was stunned to read that in early 1944, a resistance leader who had a strong Calvinist background had begun printing leaflets that instructed the members of her resistance group (who had saved about 80 children) to "keep hold of their charges in the event that a mother or father should return to reclaim their child. By handing their children to the resistance, she argued, Jewish parents had renounced their parental rights."

The book includes many wonderful photographs that really helped me to visualize who was who in the story and it was rewarding to see the relationship develop between the author and his subject, to the point where once again "family" connections were established. Even more satisfying was the knowledge that revisiting her past and learning more of things she had not understood as she was living these experiences helped to bring about a healing and wholeness for her.

This is a story which still has much to teach the reader of today and is one would definitely recommend to those wishing to better understand what it was like to lose the story of one's past.

Lien is a Jew. When she is eight years old she is "given" to another family to save her from the death camps and the Nazis. She will never see her mother and father again. Through the war she is shuttled from house to house trying to keep her safe. Some of the homes were not safe. In one home she was taped by an adopted uncle. In another she was used as a servant. This is a story that takes you into the reality of being a hidden child. It was not easy. Even after the war the Jewish children felt displaced. They had to hide who they were for so long that they forgot who they were. This is Lien's story. It is sad, and tragic. But she finally finds her voice. She discovers who she is and she is comfortable with that. An excellent, excellent story. Highly recommended!

The Cut Out Girl is an engrossing read of the author's inquiry about why a girl his grandparents had fostered during WWII was inexplicably excised from the family forty years later. Van Es tracked down Lien, the Jewish girl, reared by his family, and revealed her story. The first past is a little confusing because the author introduces several people and gets sidetracked with minutia. Readers will think they have discerned the reason for the fracture, only to discover the real reason was pretty trite. Liens story is fascinating and heartbreaking. I really enjoyed the story.

This is a biography of a young Jewish girl who goes to various homes during WWIInto hide from tne Nazis. It is well written and poignant. A great addition to the biographies of Jews during WWII.

I would like to thank Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a free copy of this book. This is my honest and unbiased opinion of it.

The Cut Out Girl was an interesting story about World War II and the Holocaust. I don't want to give too much away about the story, but I do believe anyone who is interested in this time period will enjoy this book.

This book has two interconnected stories, the author, Bart Van Es's family hid a Jewish girl named Lientje, during World War II. He decides to rack Lientje down so he can understand the full story behind her life and what is was life in the Netherlands when it was occupied by the Nazi's. I found this to be a very interesting story and certainly recommend it to anyone who is interested in this time period.

Thank you to the publisher, Random House, for sending me an ARC of this book.

Gripping true account of a young Jewish girl from Holland that found refuge via living with various foster families during the Nazi occupation. This book is raw and informative. The author did an amazing job of capturing details of this time period that allowed me to visualize what this poor girl was experiencing.