Costa prize-winner Bart van Es on why he had to tell his family’s Holocaust story

The Cut Out Girl is the gripping tale of a Jewish girl who escaped the Nazis, written by her saviours’ grandson. Here, author and heroine talk about their life-affirming collaboration

^‘I must tell you a secret,” Lien de Jong’s mother said to her gently one day. “You are going to stay somewhere else for a while.” It was August 1942 in occupied Holland and De Jong was eight years old. The family was Jewish, but not observant. She would never see her parents again; they were murdered in Auschwitz six months later. She was sent to live with a non-Jewish family, the Van Eses, the first in a series of temporary homes in the Netherlands’ wartime underground network.

Bart van Es is a Dutch-born English literature professor at Oxford University, who usually “writes scholarly books and articles on Shakespeare and Renaissance poetry”. He is also the grandson of Jans and Henk van Es, who, as part of the Dutch resistance, sheltered Jewish children such as Lien de Jong during the occupation. His account of her extraordinary, harrowing story of loss, survival and love, The Cut Out Girl, has just won the Costa Book of the Year award.

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from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2HDxFyA