A very impressive read

It rained during my lunch break. I dìd go for a walk! But I didn't take pictures. I was busy holding my umbrella and trying to stay dry...

So a an emergency blip a photo of the book I finished the other day. It is actually written in English and translated into Dutch. I didn't realise at first, because I thought the author was Dutch. He is, but he has been living in the UK for a long time. The original title is "The cut out girl".

My review :
A very impressive read. I thought I knew all there was to know about the Netherlands at the time of World War II, but the book still had some new insights for me. I didn't know that we had the highest percentage of Jewish people being taken and murdered, even higher than in Germany! Due amongst others to the registration of all Jewish citizens and the cooperation of the Jewish Council and Dutch officials. If only all registrations had been destroyed early on... And apparently the resistance began to take a serious form when Dutch men were taken to work in Germany. That moved the people more than Jewish neighbours being taken... The Catholic priests asked for help way earlier than the protestant Church did. And, according to the book, such requests for help from the pulpit were very meaningful to enlist actual help.

Besides interesting facts it's also an interesting read because the story is told from the perspective of a young girl given up for safety by her parents and spending the years of war in hiding in several different families. She feels very much at home and at ease in the first one, but has to leave because of a knock at the door by nazi sided policemen. Her other addresses are merely to keep her out of the hands of the nazis, but there's no real family life and she even suffers from abuse.

After the war she is welcomed back in the family where she spent the first period of hiding. From then on the book is about her growing up and interactions with her chosen family that come to an abrupt ending in the eighties.

From start to finish this was an interesting read about war, about growing up, about a family. It is non fiction, the author (a nephew of Lien, the girl) also tells about his conversations with Lien, his spending time in the Netherlands visiting all the places she mentions and his visits to various libraries to do research.

Highly recommendable!