The Netherlands has been a place of refuge for Jews since at least the 15th century when Sephardic Jews fleeing from Portugal found freedom and prosperity there. In 1677, the sceptical Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza was buried with honours in the Protestant New Church in The Hague, which Bart van Es describes as “an astonishing gesture of acceptance”. When the Nazis came to power in Germany, some 35,000 refugees fled to the Netherlands. By 1940, when Germany invaded Holland, there were some 18,000 Jews in The Hague, which portrayed itself as an open and idealistic “city for the world”. Only 2,000 of them would survive the war and the concentration camps.

Hesseline, known as Lien, lived there, at 31 Pletterijstraat, with her parents, Charles and Catharine de Jong-Spiero. Although they were married at a synagogue, Lien’s parents were not observant: “It is really Hitler who makes Lien Jewish.” From 1941, seven-year-old Lien attends a Jewish school. Jews have a “J” stamped in their passports and are banned from the civil service, cinemas and universities. Signs appear outside markets and parks: “Forbidden for Jews”. In May 1942, her mother had to stitch a yellow star with the word “Jew” on to their clothes and eight-year-old Lien was bullied by children calling her a “dirty Jew”.

One day her mother sat beside her on the bed. “I must tell you a secret,” she said. “You are going to stay somewhere else for a while.” A woman took Lien to a family in Dordrecht. Unknown to Lien, they were arrested within months and sent to their deaths in Auschwitz. The family she stayed with are the author’s grandparents, Jans and Henk van Es. But just as shestarted to feel at home, the police arrived and she had to run. Lien spent the rest of the war with a strict Protestant family in the village of Bennekom. There she was treated as a servant rather than one of the family, and sexually abused by one of their relations: “The rapes are a secret, hard and poisonous, that she swaddles within.”

Writing with simplicity, Van Es weaves together history and Lien’s recollections to capture the trauma of her childhood

Some 4,000 Jewish children survived the war in hiding in Holland. Lien was one of just 358 who stayed with a non-Jewish family after 1945: she asked to return to the Van Eses. Bart van Es – an Oxford English professor who has lived in Britain since the age of three – had always known that his grandparents had sheltered Jewish children. But it was only after the death of his uncle in 2014 that he began to ask questions and made contact with Lien, now in her 80s and living in Amsterdam.

Winner of the 2018 Costa biography award, this deeply moving account of Lien’s life is the result of his personal journey into the history of his family and his country’s treatment of the Jews. Many felt their suffering was not adequately acknowledged after the war. Unbelievably, some even received tax demands for the time they spent in the camps.

Writing with an almost Sebaldian simplicity and understatement, Van Es weaves together history and Lien’s recollections to tell the story of her traumatic childhood. Unsurprisingly, what she experienced left her “badly damaged” and questioning her very existence: “I ought not to be here.” The Van Eses did not understand the true depth of Lien’s trauma as one of the “hidden children” and this led to tragic misunderstandings later when Jans fell out with Lien, ending all communication with her. Even as an adult, Lien seemed fated to be “cut out” from her family. By telling Lien’s story, Van Es brings her back into it, an experience he describes as transformative: “getting to know Lien has changed me”.

• PD Smith’s City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age is published by Bloomsbury. The Cut Out Girl: A Story of War and Family, Lost and Found is published by Penguin(RRP £16.99). To order a copy, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.