Well here goes on this posts topic...
'The Cut Out Girl'
by Bart van Es
In the afternoon of Saturday 5th October many people gathered to watch Bart van Es in a smallish church hall here in the North of England; Bart a author and English Lit Professor of Oxford University writes of true events of his encouter with Lien a lady with a past experience in occupied Holland...
The last time Lien saw her parents was in the Hague when she was collected at the door by a stranger and taken to a city far away to be hidden from the Nazis. She was raised by her foster family as one of their own, but a falling out well after the war meant they were no longer in touch. What was her side of the story, Bart van Es - a grandson of the couple who looked after Lien - wondered? What really happened during the war, and after?
So began an investigation that would consume and transform both Bart van Es's life and Lien's. Lien was now in her 80s and living in Amsterdam. Reluctantly, she agreed to meet him, and eventually they struck up a remarkable friendship. The Cut Out Girl braids together a powerful recreation of Lien's intensely harrowing childhood story with the present-day account of Bart's efforts to piece that story together. And it embraces the wider picture, too, for Holland was more cooperative in rounding up its Jews for the Nazis than any other Western European country; that is part of Lien's story too.
I personally found it fasinating, obviously from being not that 'old' and learning how people in other countries lived and during the war times as well, I mean I've seen and gone to museums like the Eden camp up here in the North of England, but it's a different thing altogether of someones life and what they saw and heard and lived out of the whole experience they had. It's fasinating the things you learn just from the book or Bart's talk on how she went from place to place. Now your going to have to excuse me as I am the worlds slowest of readers and only a quater of the way through the book but his talk definatly was the best I'd been to... now I've been to some where the author or talker is *ahem* can you actually say this?... should I say the author has got one person in the audience having nodded off but Bart's was different everyone either was on sat upright, jotting stuff down or nodding along with what he was saying. Here's my photo I took with one of them in our local paper!!
Bart van Es reading from his book.
Love, Rae.
