The school hall was pretty small. The teacher had taken my class there. She was on a chair behind a table on the little stage. She had told us to line up against the side wall. The door at the back of the hall furthest from the stage opened. 2 young men walked in & 1 of them said, ‘Is Martin Stern here?’ The teacher answered ‘No, he hasn’t come in today.’ I didn’t understand what was happening so I put my hand up & said, I had come in. I was taken by the shoulder & led out of the back of that little hall. I looked around as I was being led out & I’ll never forget the ashen face of the teacher. They took me outside. They were just probably 18. Civilian clothes, raincoats. A grey, very slightly drizzly day. They put me on the back of one of their bikes which they had leaning against the lamppost and they cycled with me on the back of one of their bikes through Amsterdam talking with me in perfect Dutch. We arrived at a big red brick building. Up the stairs to the first floor. I was led into a large office with just one big desk in the middle, behind which sat a man in a green military type of uniform who started asking me questions. I asked ‘When can I go home? When can I go back to school?” He said that was not his job to answer those questions. His job was to find out if I was the little boy he was looking for. When he’d satisfied himself that he’d got the little boy he wanted, he ordered a man to take me out. As I was led past this one open door I could see with his back to me the man I’d been living with for 2 years. I called out to him. I wanted to run up to him. But I was dragged away. They just wanted me to give away the fact that I knew him so well that I could recognise him from behind, so that he couldn’t deny under interrogation that he’d been harbouring the little son of a Jew. He was sent to Neuengamme. His wife got just his spectacles back with a false death certificate lying that he had died of natural causes. She was also arrested but released the next day. The baby had been left alone in the flat, was rescued by neighbours who heard him crying.