“Where are they now?” the soldier persisted.
Cocky leaned down and began gathering up the broken bits of cup. The man jerked her upright. “Where are your brothers?”
“The oldest one is at the Theological College. He doesn’t get home most nights because—”
“What about the other two?”
Cocky did not miss a breath.
“Why, they’re under the table.”
Motioning us all away from it with his gun, the solider seized a corner of the cloth. At a nod from him, the taller man crouched with his rifle cocked. Then he flung back the cloth.
At last the pent-up tension exploded: Cocky burst into spasms of high hysterical laughter. The soldiers whirled around. Was this girl laughing at them?
“Don’t take us for fools!” the short one snarled. Furiously he strode from the room and minutes later the entire squad trooped out—not, unfortunately, before the silent soldier had spied and pocketed our precious packet of tea.
It was a strange dinner party that evening, veering as it did from heartfelt thanksgiving to the nearest thing to a bitter argument our close-knit family had ever had. Nollie stuck by Cocky, insisting she would have answered the same way. “God honors truth-telling with perfect protection!”
Peter and Bob, from the viewpoint of the trapdoor, weren’t so sure. And neither was I. I had never had Nollie’s bravery—no, nor her faith either. But I could spot illogic. “And it isn’t logical to say the truth and do a lie! What about Annaliese’s false papers—and that maid’s uniform on Katrien?”
“‘Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth,’” Nollie quoted. “‘Keep the door of my lips.’ Psalm 141!” she finished triumphantly.
“All right, what about the radio? I had to lie with my lips to keep that!”
“And yet whatever came from your lips, Corrie, I am sure it was spoken in love!” Father’s kindly voice reproached my flushed face.
Love. How did one show it? How could God Himself show truth and love at the same time in a world like this?
By dying. The answer stood out for me sharper and chillier than it ever had before that night: the shape of a Cross etched on the history of the world.
IT WAS GETTING harder and harder to find safe homes in the country for the scores of Jews who were passing through our underground station by early 1943. Even with ration cards and forged papers there were not enough places for them all. Sooner or later we knew we were going to have to start hiding people here in the city. How sad that the very first should have been the dearest of all.
It was in the middle of a busy morning in the shop when Betsie slipped through the workshop door. “Harry and Cato are here!” she said.
We were surprised. Harry had never come to the Beje in the daytime because he feared his yellow star would cause awkwardness for us. Father and I hurried behind Betsie up the stairs.
Harry de Vries related the familiar story. The visit the evening before from an NSB quisling. The announcement that the shop was confiscated. Who cared if Harry were a Christian? Any Jew can convert to avoid trouble, the NSBer said. This morning the appearance of a uniformed German to make it official: the shop was closed “in the interest of national security.”
“But—if I am a security risk,” said poor Harry, “surely they will not stop with taking my store.”
Doubtless they would not. But just then there was absolutely no available place outside the city. In fact the only underground address we had at the moment was the home of a woman named De Boer, not four blocks from the Beje.
That afternoon I knocked on Mrs. De Boer’s door. She was a dumpy woman dressed in a blue cotton smock and bedroom slippers. We supplied Mrs. De Boer with ration cards and had arranged an emergency appendectomy from there. She showed me the living quarters in her attic. Eighteen Jews were staying there, most of them in their early twenties. “They’ve been cooped up too long,” she said. “They sing and dance and make all sorts of noise.”
“If you think one more couple is too much . . .”
“No. No . . . how can I turn them away? Bring them tonight. We’ll manage.”
And so Harry and Cato began their life at Mrs. De Boer’s, living in one of the narrow dormers in the attic. Betsie went every day to take them some homemade bread, a bit of tea, a slice of sausage. But Betsie’s main concern was not for the morale of Harry and Cato, it was for their very lives.
“They’re in danger, you know,” she told Father and me. “It’s true that these young people are at the bursting point. This afternoon they were making such a commotion I could hear them down on the street.”
There were other concerns, that bitter gray winter. Though there was little snow, the cold came early and stayed late, and fuel was scarce. Here and there in the parks and along the canals trees began to disappear as people cut them down to heat cookstoves and fireplaces. The damp unheated rooms were hardest on the very young and the very old. One morning Christoffels did not appear for Bible reading in the dining room, nor later in the workshop. His landlady found him dead in his bed, the water in his washbasin frozen solid. We buried the old clockmaker in the splendid suit and vest he had worn to the Hundredth Birthday Party, six years and another lifetime ago.
Spring came slowly. We celebrated my fifty-first birthday with a little party in the de Vrieses’ alcove home.
It was one week later, April 22, that Cato arrived alone at the Beje. Inside the door she burst into tears. “Those foolish young people went crazy! Last night eight of them left the house. Naturally they were stopped and arrested—the boys hadn’t even bothered to cut their sideburns. The Gestapo didn’t have any trouble getting information out of them.”
The house had been raided, she said, at 4:00 that morning. Cato was released when they discovered she was not Jewish. “But everyone else—Harry, Mrs. De Boer, too—oh what will become of them?”
For the next three days Cato was at the Haarlem police station from early morning until curfew, pestering Dutch and Germans alike to let her see her husband. When they sent her away, she stepped across the street and waited silently on the sidewalk.
Friday just before the noon closing when the shop was crowded, a policeman pushed open the street door, hesitated, then continued back into the rear room. It was Rolf van Vliet, the officer who had been here when our ration cards were first delivered. He took off his cap and I noticed again that startling orange-red hair.
“This watch is still not keeping time,” Rolf said. He took off his wristwatch, placed it on my workbench, and leaned forward. Was he saying something? It was all I could do to hear. “Harry de Vries will be taken to Amsterdam tomorrow. If you want to see him, come promptly at three this afternoon.” And then, “Do you see? The second hand still hesitates at the top of the dial.”
At three that afternoon Cato and I stepped through the tall double doors of the police station. The policeman on duty at the guard post was Rolf himself.
“Come with me,” he said gruffly. He led us through a door and along a high-ceilinged corridor. At a locked metal gate he stopped. “Wait here,” Rolf said.
Someone on the other side opened the gate and Rolf passed through. He was gone several minutes. Then the door opened again and we were face to face with Harry. Rolf stood back as Harry took Cato into his arms.
“You have only a few seconds,” whispered Rolf.
They drew apart, looking into each other’s eyes.
“I’m sorry,” said Rolf. “He’ll have to go back.”
Harry kissed his wife. Then he took my hand and shook it solemnly. Tears filled our eyes. For the first time Harry spoke. “I shall use this place—wherever they’re taking us,” he said. “It will be my witness stand for Jesus.”
Rolf took Harry by the elbow.
“We will pray for you many times every day, Harry!” I cried as the gate swung shut.
An instinct which I shared with no one told me that this was the last time I would ever see our friend The Bulldog.
/> THAT NIGHT WE held a meeting about Rolf: Betsie and I and the dozen or so teenage boys and girls who acted as messengers for this work. If Rolf had risked his own safety to tell us about Harry’s transport, perhaps he should work with us.
“Lord Jesus,” I said aloud, “this could be a danger for all of us and for Rolf, too.” But even with the words came a flood of assurance about this man. How long, I wondered, would we be led by this Gift of Knowledge.
I assigned one of our younger boys to follow Rolf home from work the next day and learn where he lived. The older boys, the ones susceptible to the factory draft, we sent out only after dark now, and then most often dressed as girls.
The following week I visited Rolf at home. “You have no idea how much it meant to see Harry,” I said when I was safe inside. “How can we repay this kindness?”
Rolf ran his hands through his bright hair. “Well, there is a way. The cleaning woman at the jail has a teenage son and they’ve almost picked him up twice. She’s desperate to find another place for him to live.”
“Perhaps I can help,” I said. “Do you think she could find that her watch needs repairing?”
The next day Toos came to the door of Tante Jans’s room where I was talking with two new volunteers for our work. More and more, I was leaving the watch shop to her and Father as our underground “operation” required more time. “There’s a funny looking little woman downstairs,” Toos said. “She says her name is Mietje. She says to tell you ‘Rolf sent her.’”
I met Mietje in the dining room. The hand that I shook was ridged and leathery from years of scrubbing floors. A tuft of hair grew from her chin. “I understand,” I said, “that you have a son you’re very proud of.”
“Oh yes!” Mietje’s face lit up at the mention of him.
I took the bulky old alarm clock she had brought with her. “Come for your clock tomorrow afternoon and I’ll hope to have good news.”
That night we listened to our messengers’ reports. The long, cruel winter had opened up places at several addresses. There was a place on a nearby tulip farm, but the farmer had decided he must be paid for the risk he was taking. We would have to provide a fee—in silver rijksdaalders, not paper money—plus an additional ration card. It didn’t happen often that a “host” would require money for his services; when one did we paid gladly.
When Mietje appeared the following morning, I took a small banknote from my purse and tore off a corner. “This is for your son,” I said. “Tonight he is to go to the Gravenstenenbrug. There is a tree stump right next to the bridge—they cut down the tree last winter. He is to wait beside it, looking into the canal. A man will come up and ask if he has change for a bankbill. Your son is to match the missing corner, and then follow this man without asking questions.”
Betsie came into the dining room as Mietje was grasping my hand in her two sandpaper ones. “I’ll make it up to you! Somehow, some day, I’ll find a way to repay you!”
Betsie and I exchanged smiles. How could this simple little soul help with the kind of need we faced?
AND SO THE work grew. As each new need arose, a new answer was found, too. Through Pickwick, for example, we met the man at the central telephone exchange whose department handled orders to connect and disconnect lines. With a little rewiring and juggling of numbers, he soon had our instrument in operation.
What a day it was when the old wall phone in the rear hall jangled joyously for the first time in three years! And how we needed it! For by now there were eighty Dutchmen—elderly women and middle-aged men along with our teenagers—working in “God’s underground” as we sometimes laughingly called ourselves. Most of these people never saw one another; we kept face-to-face contacts as few as possible. But all knew the Beje. It was headquarters, the center of a spreading web: the knot where all threads crossed.
But if the telephone was a boon, it was also a fresh risk—as was each added worker and connection. We set the phone’s ring as low as we could and still hear it; but who might happen to be passing through the hall when it rang?
For that matter how long would curious eyes up and down the street continue to believe that one small watch shop was quite as busy as it appeared? It was true that repair work was in demand: plenty of legitimate customers still passed in and out. But there was altogether too much coming and going, especially in the early evening. The curfew was now 7:00 p.m., which in spring and summer left no nighttime hours at all in which workers could move legally through the streets.
It was an hour and a half before that time on the first of June, 1943, and I was thinking of all this as I sat impatiently behind my workbench. Six workers still not back and so many loose ends to tie up before 7:00. For one thing, being the first of the month, Fred Koornstra should be arriving with the new ration cards. The hundred cards which had seemed such an extravagant request a year ago were now far too few for our needs, and Fred was only one of our suppliers, some of the stolen cards coming from as far away as Delft. How long can we go on this way? I wondered. How long can we continue to count on this strange protection?
My thoughts were interrupted by the side entrance bell. Betsie and I reached it at the same instant. In the alley stood a young Jewish woman cradling a tiny blanketed bundle in her arms. Behind her I recognized an intern from the maternity hospital.
The baby, he told us in the hallway, had come prematurely. He had kept mother and child in the hospital longer than permitted already because she had nowhere else to go.
Betsie held out her arms for the baby and at that moment Fred Koornstra opened the door from the shop. He blinked a moment at seeing people in the hall, then turned with great deliberation to the meter on the wall. The young doctor, seeing what he took to be an actual meterman, turned as white as his own collar. I longed to reassure both him and Fred, but knew that the fewer of the group who knew one another, the safer it was for all. The poor intern gulped a hasty good-bye while Betsie and I got mother and baby up to the dining room and closed the door on Fred and his work.
Betsie poured a bowl of the soup she had cooked for supper from a much-boiled bone. The baby began a thin high wail; I rocked it while the mother ate. Here was a new danger, a tiny fugitive too young to know the folly of making a noise. We had had many Jewish children over a night or several nights at the Beje and even the youngest had developed the uncanny silence of small hunted things. But at two weeks this one had yet to discover how unwelcoming was its world: we would need a place for them far removed from other houses.
And the very next morning into the shop walked the perfect solution. He was a clergyman friend of ours, pastor in a small town outside of Haarlem, and his home was set back from the street in a large wooded park.
“Good morning, Pastor,” I said, the pieces of the puzzle falling together in my mind. “Can we help you?”
I looked at the watch he had brought in for repair. It required a very hard-to-find spare part. “But for you, Pastor, we will do our very best. And now I have something I want to confess.”
The pastor’s eyes clouded. “Confess?”
I drew him out of the back door of the shop and up the stairs to the dining room.
“I confess that I too am searching for something.” The pastor’s face was now wrinkled with a frown. “Would you be willing to take a Jewish mother and her baby into your home? They will almost certainly be arrested otherwise.”
Color drained from the man’s face. He took a step back from me. “Miss ten Boom! I do hope you’re not involved with any of this illegal concealment and undercover business. It’s just not safe! Think of your father! And your sister—she’s never been strong!”
On impulse I told the pastor to wait and ran upstairs. Betsie had put the newcomers in Willem’s old room, the farthest from windows on the street. I asked the mother’s permission to borrow the infant: the little thing weighed hardly anything in my arms.
Back in the dining room, I pulled back the coverlet from the baby’s face.
&nbs
p; There was a long silence. The man bent forward, his hand in spite of himself reaching for the tiny fist curled around the blanket. For a moment I saw compassion and fear struggle in his face. Then he straightened. “No. Definitely not. We could lose our lives for that Jewish child!”
Unseen by either of us, Father had appeared in the doorway. “Give the child to me, Corrie,” he said.
Father held the baby close, his white beard brushed its cheek, looking into the little face with eyes as blue and innocent as the baby’s own. At last he looked up at the pastor. “You say we could lose our lives for this child. I would consider that the greatest honor that could come to my family.”
The pastor turned sharply on his heels and walked out of the room.
So we had to accept a bad solution to our problem. On the edge of Haarlem was a truck farm that hid refugees for short periods of time. It was not a good location, since the Gestapo had been there already. But there was nowhere else available on short notice. Two workers took the woman and child there that afternoon.
A few weeks later we heard that the farm had been raided. When the Gestapo came to the barn where the woman was hidden, not the baby but the mother began to shriek with hysteria. She, the baby, and her protectors were all taken.
We never learned what happened to them.
ALTHOUGH WE HAD a friend at the telephone exchange, we could never be sure that our line was not tapped. So we developed a system for coding our underground messages in terms of watches.
“We have a woman’s watch here that needs repairing. But I can’t find a mainspring. Do you know who might have one?” (We have a Jewish woman in need of a hiding place and we can’t find one among our regular contacts.)
“I have a watch here with a face that’s causing difficulty. One of the numbers has worked loose and it’s holding back the hand. Do you know anyone who does this kind of repair work?” (We have a Jew here whose features are especially Semitic. Do you know anyone who would be willing to take an extra risk?)
The Hiding Place Page 11