When we were older, we hardly noticed things like that any more. Children under ten are often crueller than adults. I remember that we had a maid who had to ask her priest’s permission to work for us. The priest gave his consent and even told her she didn’t have to eat fish on Friday, which was lucky for her because on Friday evenings we used to have elaborate dinners with all sorts of meat dishes.

My father was a religious man who liked having a home in which Jewish law and ritual practices were maintained. It must have been painful for him to see his children gradually abandon these customs in their eagerness to participate in everything and hang around with their non-Jewish friends. Dave, as the oldest, had the hardest time, since he was the first to break with tradition. He made it easy for us, his sisters. I still remember the first time I ate a rabbit leg with a friend in an automat. I was doing something that was strictly forbidden. I hesitated for a moment before biting into it, the way you do before jumping into a swimming pool at the beginning of the season. But if you don’t give up, it bothers you less the second time. During the occupation, the word ‘forbidden’ took on another significance for us. Jews were forbidden to go to cafés and restaurants, theatres and cinemas, swimming pools and parks. Owning a bicycle, a telephone, or a radio was also forbidden. So much was forbidden.

If I’d still been a little girl, I would definitely have wondered if it really was because we had killed Jesus.

During the first year of the war, I fell ill. I had to spend a long time in a convalescent hospital while my parents moved to the city of Amersfoort to live with my brother, who had married in the meantime.

I was in the pavilion of a hospital in Utrecht and was forbidden to get out of bed. For me, the state of war had been replaced by the state of my sedimentation rate. The distinction that the doctors and nurses made with regard to us patients was between serious and less serious cases of TB. Perhaps that was why I didn’t mind my long convalescence as much as I would have during normal times. Only during visiting hours did the war and the latest regulations enter my sickroom. But it was as if it didn’t involve me, as if it were taking place in another world.

Once I started getting better, I could no longer avoid it. I knew that once I left the hospital I would be stepping right back into Kloosterlaan, that the gang of jeering children would be waiting for me, and that I’d have to go through it all again.

The stars

From the window of my room I saw my father approaching in the distance. I’d left the hospital a few weeks earlier. I was supposed to rest several hours a day, but had made a complete recovery.