So far all I knew of Amersfoort was this street. It was in a quiet suburb with new duplexes surrounded by gardens.

My father was walking with short, brisk steps. He doffed his hat with a flourish to a woman picking flowers in her front garden. She apparently said something to him, for he slowed his steps for a moment. When he reached our house, I saw that he was holding a package. A small brown package.

I went downstairs, stuck my head around the living room door and announced, ‘Father’s coming with a package.’

‘What’s in it?’ I asked at the front door.

‘In what?’ asked my father, calmly hanging up his coat and hat after placing the package on the coat rack.

‘Oh, honestly!’ I said impatiently. ‘In the package that you just put down.’

‘You’ll see,’ he said. ‘Come.’

I followed him in. He set the package on the table while everyone looked on with curiosity. It had been wrapped with string and he patiently untied the knots, then opened the paper. It was the yellow stars.

‘I brought some for all of us,’ he said, ‘so you can sew them on all your coats.’

My mother took one out of the package and examined it closely. ‘Let me go and see if I have some yellow thread on hand,’ she said.

‘It’s orange,’ I said, ‘you ought to use orange thread for it.’

‘If you ask me,’ said my brother’s wife, Lotte, ‘it would be better to use thread in the colour of your coat.’

‘It’ll look awful on my red jacket,’ said Bettie, who had come over from Amsterdam to stay with us for a couple of days.

‘I’ll leave it to you to figure out how to do it,’ said my father. ‘As long as you remember that they should be chest-high on the left side.’

‘How do you know that?’ asked my mother.

‘It was in the paper,’ said my father. ‘Didn’t you read it? They have to be clearly visible.’

‘Goodness, you’ve brought a lot of them,’ said my mother, handing out a few stars to each of us. ‘Could you get that many?’

‘Oh yes,’ said my father, ‘as many as I wanted.’

‘That’s convenient,’ she said. ‘Now we can save some for our summer clothes.’

We took the coats from the coat rack and started sewing on the stars. Bettie worked very carefully with small, invisible stitches. ‘You have to hem them,’ she said to me when she saw me sewing one on my coat with big messy stitches. ‘It’ll look much neater.’

‘That star shape is really awkward,’ I said. ‘How can you get a hem in these wretched points?’

‘You have to tack the hem first,’ said Bettie. ‘Next you pin it to your coat, sew it on and take out the tacking thread. That’s guaranteed to make it look good.’

I tried again, but I wasn’t as clever with a needle and thread as my sister. My star wound up being lopsided.