Mauritshuis exhibition reveals how Dutch men hid in attic to avoid being taken to Germany in second world war

The 13-year-old boy answered the doorbell. “Tell your dad I’m here,” said a man, who stored his bicycle and then disappeared upstairs.

It was 1944, and right under the noses of Nazi command, people were hiding in the attic of The Hague’s Mauritshuis museum from forced labour conscription – Arbeitseinsatz – under which hundreds of thousands of men from the Nazi-occupied Netherlands were conscripted to work in Germany.