"Once I even took the train to Utrecht, forty miles from Amsterdam, with my yellow star, this star which I still have. Why did I go? I just wanted to visit some friends. I was a little bit crazy, a little bit insane"

Abraham Pais recounts a dangerously bold act during a period when wearing the yellow star as a Jew in Nazi-occupied Netherlands marked one for extreme vulnerability, discrimination, and mortal risk. The simple act, traveling by train from Amsterdam to Utrecht, was transgressive not because of the distance but because of the identity Pais publicly displayed. The yellow star was not merely fabric; it was an enforced marker of otherness, persecution, and social isolation, intended by the Nazis to confine and monitor Jews, stripping away normalcy and the rights of free movement.

That Pais still possesses the star underlines how indelibly this historical trauma became part of his lived experience, a physical relic of survival and memory. The journey he describes wasn’t just a trip; it was an assertion of agency in the face of systematic erasure. The declared purpose of the trip, “to visit some friends,” evokes a haunting normality, a desire to cling to remnants of ordinary life despite an extraordinary threat. Pais’s reflection that he was “a little bit crazy, a little bit insane” hints at the psychological toll exerted by oppressive regimes and the surreal calculations of risk and survival they impose. The act could be seen as reckless or courageous, or perhaps the lines between those qualities blur under such circumstances.

This reminiscence gestures toward the tremendous courage required for even the most mundane acts under oppressive regimes. Pais’s decision reflects not only human vulnerability but the irrepressible drive to seek connection and maintain dignity. It is a powerful reminder that under conditions of terror, hope and defiance may be found in the smallest acts, a train ride, a visit to friends, where the decision to live like a human being risked everything. The “yellow star” thus becomes a symbol of both oppression and resilient identity, carried forward in memory long after literal survival.