‘What on earth are you doing?’ It was my father’s voice. I was startled because I hadn’t heard him approach.

‘Trying on a coat,’ I said.

‘This is no time to be thinking of a new coat.’

‘I don’t want this one anyway,’ I said.

‘I’ve looked everywhere for you. Are you coming?’

I took off the coat and hung it back up. After sitting in the dark so long, the bright sunlight made me squint. The streets were busy. Many unfamiliar cars and motorcycles drove past us. A soldier asked somebody in front of us how to get to the market square. It was explained to him with much waving of hands and arms. The soldier clicked his heels, saluted, and set off in the direction that he’d been shown. German soldiers were now passing us constantly. We calmly walked past them.

‘You see,’ said my father when we were almost home, ‘they aren’t doing anything to us.’ As we passed the neighbour’s gate, he muttered again, ‘They aren’t doing anything to us.’

Kloosterlaan

When my sister and I were little, the other children used to call us names as we were leaving school. They’d frequently be lying in wait for us at the end of Kloosterlaan. ‘Come along,’ Bettie would say firmly as she grabbed my hand. Sometimes I’d meekly suggest taking another street or turning around, but she kept walking, pulling me along, straight toward the jeering gang. Lashing out right and left with her schoolbag, my sister forced her way through the pack of children who punched and pushed us from all sides. I wondered why we were different.

‘My teacher says Jews are bad,’ a neighbour’s child who went to a Catholic school once told me. ‘You killed Jesus.’

At the time I didn’t even know who Jesus was. I once saw my brother fight a boy who wouldn’t stop calling him a ‘kike’. The kid only shut up when Dave knocked him down. When Dave came home with a bleeding head, my father showed us a scar on his temple that he’d got during his school years when a kid had scratched him with a nail. ‘In Twente where I grew up, they also used to call us names,’ he said.

I had a friend who used to pick me up on our way to school. Her name was Nellie and she was light blonde. She always remained standing on the doorstep but never came in. If the door was open, she would peer into the hall with curiosity. ‘What’s it like in your house?’ she asked one day.

‘Come in and take a look,’ I said.

But she didn’t dare because her mother had forbidden her to enter a Jewish house. I was eleven then, old enough to be able to laugh it off. I told her that my father used to eat a soup made out of little children, which my mother had cooked for him. After that my friend would come in secretly, without her mother’s knowledge.