Parents who saved their only child by giving her away

Via aleksey godin. Read and think about what we are doing to stolen children of Central American families who tried to emigrate to the US and had their children taken from them.

By Sean Coughlan
BBC News education and family correspondent
  • 3 August 2018
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Lien

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Lien was one of thousands of Dutch Jewish children hidden from the Nazis by a secret resistance network

In August 1942, a stranger knocked on the door of a house in the Hague, in the Netherlands.

An eight-year-old girl was handed over to the safekeeping of the unknown visitor, to be taken to another town. The girl would never see her mother or father again.

Lien de Jong was a Jewish child under Nazi occupation and her parents had taken the agonising decision to try to save her by losing her.

The yellow stars were unpicked from her clothes and she was taken from her home and disappeared into an underground network of resistance families.

‘Look after her’

Lien’s mother had put a note into her coat pocket.

“Imagine for yourself the parting between us,” wrote Lien’s mother to whoever would be looking after her daughter.

“Although you are unknown to me, I imagine you as a man and a woman who will, as a father and mother, care for my only child.

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A letter sent by Lien’s mother written to the unknown families she hoped would protect her daughter

“She has been taken from me by circumstance. May you, with the best will and wisdom, look after her.”

In August 2018, an Oxford University academic has written a book telling Lien’s haunting story for the first time.

The Cut Out Girl shows how she was one of 4,000 Dutch Jewish children hidden away from the Nazis by non-Jewish families.

The author, Prof Bart van Es, has a personal connection – he is the grandson of the foster parents who risked their lives to protect her.

Secret identities

It’s a story told in close-up and claustrophobic detail.

Lien was passed through safe houses and hidden rooms, living a life of false identities, police raids, escapes and pretending to be someone else’s child in nine different families.

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Lien, now 84, survived the War but found it difficult to find her own sense of identity

Prof Van Es says even though his family had been part of these resistance efforts, he found a great reluctance to talk about wartime experiences.

If the topic was raised, he says, his grandmother would “shut it off”.

Lien had survived the War – but had fallen out with the Van Es family who had sheltered her.

And when Prof Van Es made contact with Lien, he began to understand the ambiguities and complexities of the Nazi occupation.

‘I had no idea’

Lien, now 84 and speaking this week on a visit to London, has a clear memory of that last time with her parents and relations – almost all of who were to die in the Holocaust.

“I remember the day,” she says. In retrospect it was the “most terrible thing” but at the time, she says, it seemed almost exciting, with all her family gathered to see her off.

“I couldn’t see what was coming, I had no idea.”

Although there was a long tradition of religious tolerance in the Netherlands, Prof Van Es says, he was “shocked” at how much the Dutch authorities had assisted with the detentions and deportation of Jewish families.

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Getty Images

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Raids rounding up suspects or hideaways in Amsterdam in 1943

There were efficiency targets and financial bonuses for catching Jews – and a higher proportion of the Jewish population in the Netherlands died under the Nazis than in France, Belgium, Italy or even Germany.

It was an intimate kind of savagery – and Prof Van Es says the willingness of the Dutch police to chase Jewish neighbours was a profound “moral failure”.

Lien says her own experiences showed that in human nature “there is no black or white” and that the same ordinary people “can do good or bad things”.

There were people who behaved with principle, others with pragmatism and some who exploited the suffering of others.

Betrayals

Prof Van Es records a woman who appeared to be a patriotic resistance helper, who shared underground newspapers.

But she was an informer who was sending hidden Jewish families to their deaths.

There were others, says Prof Van Es, who showed “amazing bravery” and an almost “transcendent sense of moral purpose”.

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As the Dutch celebrated the end of Nazism, Lien was left without any family or home to go back to

There were rescuers who carried on despite knowing that they would be caught and killed.

Some women ensured the safety of Jewish babies by registering them as their own, and claiming they had been born from affairs with German soldiers.

These women would face being “absolutely ostracised by their own community” and publicly shamed as collaborators and traitors.

Another man who was unable to cope with looking after hideaway children while trying to keep a job cut off his own finger so he could get sick leave and carry on protecting these Jewish refugees.

‘No difference’

There were others who showed a more opportunistic approach.

One of the Dutch policemen who raided a house where Lien was hiding was a notoriously aggressive hunter of Jews.

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Lien and Bart van Es, the grandson of her foster parents, who has written her story

As the balance of the War shifted, he became part of the resistance and claimed to have been heroically fighting the Nazis all along.

Not all hideaways were safe. And rescuers were not always good, Lien says.

In one house, she says, she was raped and abused by a relative of the family protecting her.

And such real-life stories do not have tidy endings.

Lien says when the War ended and the Nazis were defeated, “it didn’t make any difference” to her.

“There was no future.” Everything of her old life had been destroyed – there was no scene at the end of the movie where the survivor goes home.

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Getty Images

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The Westerbork camp where many Jewish families were transported from the Netherlands

“At the end of the War, I couldn’t listen to what anyone was saying. Nothing anyone said seemed important.

“It took me a very long time to realise that my whole family had gone – all my memories.”

Her parents had died in Auschwitz and she returned to the nearest thing she had to a family, the home of Prof Van Es’s grandparents.

Reconstruction

While post-War Holland was rebuilding, Lien struggled to start again.

She married another Holocaust survivor – a classmate of Anne Frank – but there was an unrelenting sense of dislocation and she attempted suicide.

Almost her only surviving wartime relative had also killed himself.

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Lien’s childhood had been lost and she had to find a new sense of “belonging”

But it didn’t end there. She trained as a social worker and says she liked to work with children who seemed as lost and rootless as she had felt herself.

“When no-one cares about you, it’s very difficult.”

If not reconciled to her past, she began to face her ghosts.

She had therapy, she wrote about her feelings, she took part in a gathering in Amsterdam of other hidden wartime Jewish children and went to Auschwitz.

She became a mother and grandmother and was back in touch with her wartime foster family.

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A poem written for Lien by her father before she was taken away into hiding

If she has learned anything from this, she says, it’s the importance of individuals being part of a family and community and having a sense of belonging and shared values.

“It’s very important you have people to belong to.”

Lien talks of her worries about a return of anti-Semitism and intolerance. But she isn’t bitter about her wartime persecutors any more. “They were who they were.”

Prof Van Es says it was an “intense” journey into his own family history.

And as he researched the places where Lien had lived and hidden “the ghosts of the old Europe seemed very present”.

The Cut Out Girl by Bart van Es is published by Penguin Books.

Wednesday Open Thread | Wesley Bell DEFEATED 27 year incumbent St. Louis Prosecutor Bob McCullough in Democratic Primary | 3CHICSPOLITICO

ST. LOUIS COUNTY, Mo. (KMOV.com) -In a monumental upset, Wesley Bell has unseated longtime St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch in Tuesday’s Democratic primary. McCulloch, trailing by 10 points with 90 percent of precincts reporting, conceded shortly before 11 p.m. Bell, a Ferguson City Councilman, ran on a criminal-justice reform platform, which includes devoting resources…
— Read on 3chicspolitico.com/2018/08/08/wednesday-open-thread-wesley-bell-defeated-27-year-incumbent-st-louis-prosecutor-bob-mccullough-in-democratic-primary/

Israel’s family separation law

Speaking at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday, Netanyahu said:

The Nation-State Law, first of all, entrenches the Law of Return. It raises it to another level and this law, of course, grants an automatic right to Jews, and only to them, to come here and receive citizenship. The Nation-State Law, for example, prevents the exploitation of the family reunification clause under which very, very many Palestinians have been absorbed into the country since the Oslo agreement, and this law helps prevent the continued uncontrolled entry into Israel of Palestinians. It could be that this law will also be able to assist us in blocking the future entry of labor migrants.

In other words, one of Netanyahu’s primary motivations in passing the Jewish Nation-State Law was to prevent Palestinian families from living together.

Netanyahu reveals one of the motivations behind the ‘Jewish Nation-State Law’: to stop Palestinians from ‘exploiting’ family unification procedures to join their families in Israel.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visits the separation wall near Tarqumiya in the West Bank, July 20, 2016. (Haim Zach/GPO)

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visits the separation wall near Tarqumiya in the West Bank, July 20, 2016. (Haim Zach/GPO)

Many people have been asking what harm Israel’s “Jewish Nation-State Law” actually causes — what rights it infringes on, and how it changes the current situation in Israel, in which Jews are already a privileged class. I myself, wrote just last week that the law’s power lies more in its declarations than its legal ramifications.

I stand corrected.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explained on Sunday exactly how the law harms an untold number of non-Jewish Israeli citizens, specifically, Palestinian citizens of Israel who are married to or who are immediate relatives of Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza.

Speaking at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday, Netanyahu said:

The Nation-State Law, first of all, entrenches the Law of Return. It raises it to another level and this law, of course, grants an automatic right to Jews, and only to them, to come here and receive citizenship. The Nation-State Law, for example, prevents the exploitation of the family reunification clause under which very, very many Palestinians have been absorbed into the country since the Oslo agreement, and this law helps prevent the continued uncontrolled entry into Israel of Palestinians. It could be that this law will also be able to assist us in blocking the future entry of labor migrants.

In other words, one of Netanyahu’s primary motivations in passing the Jewish Nation-State Law was to prevent Palestinian families from living together.

[tmwinpost]

Family reunification is a procedure by which Israeli citizens can obtain residency and eventually citizenship for their immediate family who are not citizens.

For Jews, the procedure is moot because Jews can already obtain citizenship under the so-called Law of Return. For non-Jewish, non-Palestinian family members of Israeli citizens, family unification can be an arduous process but not all that unlike similar procedures in many other countries.

If your spouse is Palestinian, however, a demographic almost exclusively comprised of Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel, you are barred from bringing your family member into Israel and obtaining status for them as if they were Russian, Danish, Nigerian, Mexican, American, Egyptian, or virtually any other nationality.

That ban was first put in place 15 years ago and justified as a security measure. Technically, it is an “emergency regulation,” a category of laws that are only valid as long as Israel is in a “state of emergency,” which it has been for the past 70 years. If the state had argued honestly that the point of halting family unification for Palestinians is borne of demographic and not security concerns, the High Court would have struck it down as unconstitutional.

What Netanyahu said on Sunday is that now, with the Jewish Nation-State Law on the books, he and his government can now be honest about their intentions. Israel does not want more Palestinian citizens — not due to any security concerns but simply because it doesn’t want more Palestinians living in Israel. With a constitutional amendment declaring Israel to be the Jewish state, where only Jews have a right to national self-determination, discriminatory laws with exclusively demographic aims are legitimate. Preventing Palestinian families from living together is a legitimate legislative objective.

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In the name of maintaining Israel as a “Jewish and democratic” state, Netanyahu — like Rabin, Barak, Livni, and virtually all of his predecessors — has concluded that demography is one of the most fundamental elements of Israeli national security.

Take a minute and think about what that means. It means that there is such a thing as a demographic threat. It means that someone’s child, solely by virtue of being born, is a national security threat. It means that who you marry and your right to live with them in your home is a grave national security concern. It means that Palestinian families, simply by virtue of being Palestinian families, are a threat to the Jewish state. It means that one ethno-religious group of Israeli citizens is entitled to the right to family, and another group, which comprises 20 percent of all Israeli citizens, is not.

Hungary rolls out red carpet for German carmakers

Avoid paying Germans and export jobs – take advantage of low wages in Hungary with wannabe strong man in control – way to not be good!

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BMW is following in the footsteps of its German rivals like Mercedes and Audi by investing a billion euros in a new plant in Hungary. The Central European country has become an attractive location for German carmakers.