The Hiding Place

by Corrie ten Boom

  He ran down the stairs. Above us the hammering and the tramp of boots had stopped. I heard the alley door open and Willemse’s voice, smooth and ingratiating.

  “Come in, won’t you?”

  “Have you heard!” A woman’s voice. “They’ve got Oom Herman!”

  Pickwick? Not Pickwick!

  “Oh?” I heard Willemse say. “Who was with him?” He pumped her as hard as he could, then placed her under arrest. Blinking with fright and confusion, the woman was seated with us along the wall. I recognized her only as a person who occasionally took messages for us about the city. I stared in anguish at the sign in the window announcing to the world that all was as usual at the Beje. Our home had been turned into a trap: how many more would fall into it before this day was over? And Pickwick! Had they really caught Pickwick?

  Kapteyn appeared with Betsie in the dining room door. Her lips were swollen and puffy, a bruise was darkening on her cheek. She half fell into the chair next to mine.

  “Oh Betsie! He hurt you!”

  “Yes.” She dabbed at the blood on her mouth. “I feel so sorry for him.”

  Kapteyn whirled, his white face even paler. “Prisoners will remain silent!” he shrieked. Two men were clumping down the stairs and into the dining room carrying something between them. They had discovered the old radio beneath the stairs.

  “Law-abiding citizens, are you?” Kapteyn went on. “You! The old man there. I see you believe in the Bible.” He jerked his thumb at the well-worn book on its shelf. “Tell me, what does it say in there about obeying the government?”

  “‘Fear God,’” Father quoted, and on his lips in that room the words came as blessing and reassurance. “‘Fear God and honor the queen.’”

  Kapteyn stared at him. “It doesn’t say that. The Bible doesn’t say that.”

  “No.” Father admitted. “It says, ‘Fear God, honor the king.’ But in our case, that is the queen.”

  “It’s not king or queen!” roared Kapteyn. “We’re the legal government now, and you’re all lawbreakers!”

  The doorbell rang again. Again there were the questions and the arrest. The young man—one of our workers—had barely been assigned a chair when again the bell sounded. It seemed to me that we had never had so many callers: the dining room was getting crowded. I felt sorriest for those who had come simply on social visits. An elderly retired missionary was brought in, jaw quivering with fear. At least, from the banging and thumping above, they had not yet discovered the secret room.

  A new sound made me jump. The phone down in the hall was ringing.

  “That’s a telephone!” cried Willemse.

  He glared around the room, then, grabbing me by the wrist, yanked me down the stairs behind him. He thrust the receiver up against my ear but kept his own hand on it.

  “Answer!” he said with his lips.

  “This is the ten Boom residence and shop,” I said as stiffly as I dared.

  But the person on the other end did not catch the strangeness. “Miss ten Boom, you’re in terrible danger! They’ve arrested Herman Sluring! They know everything! You’ve got to be careful!” On and on the woman’s voice babbled, the man at my side hearing everything.

  She had scarcely hung up when the phone rang again. A man’s voice, and again the message, “Oom Herman’s been taken to the police station. That means they’re on to everything. . . .”

  At last, the third time I repeated my formal and untypical little greeting, there was a click on the other end. Willemse snatched the earpiece from my hand.

  “Hello! Hello!” he shouted. He jiggled the cradle on the wall. The line had gone dead. He shoved me back up the stairs and into my chair again. “Our friends wised up,” he told Kapteyn. “But I heard enough.”

  Apparently Betsie had received permission to leave her chair: she was slicing bread at the sideboard. I was surprised to realize it was already lunchtime. Betsie passed the bread around the room but I shook my head. The fever was raging again. My throat ached and my head throbbed.

  A man appeared in the doorway. “We’ve searched the whole place, Willemse,” he said. “If there’s a secret room here, the devil himself built it.”

  Willemse looked from Betsie to Father to me. “There’s a secret room,” he said quietly. “And people are using it or they would have admitted it. All right. We’ll set a guard around the house till they’ve turned to mummies.”

  In the hush of horror that followed, there was a gentle pressure on my knees. Maher Shalal Hashbaz had jumped up into my lap to rub against me. I stroked the shining black fur. What would become of him now? I would not let myself think about the six people upstairs.

  It had been half an hour since the doorbell had rung last. Whoever had caught my message over the phone must have spread the alarm. Word was out: no one else would walk into the trap at the Beje.

  Apparently Willemse had come to the same conclusion because abruptly he ordered us on our feet and down to the hallway with our coats and hats. Father, Betsie, and me he held in the dining room till last. In front of us down the stairs came the people from Tante Jans’s rooms. I held my breath scanning them. Apparently most of those at the prayer service had left before the raid. But by no means all. Here came Nollie, behind her, Peter. Last in the line came Willem.

  The whole family then. Father, all four of his children, one grandchild. Kapteyn gave me a shove.

  “Get moving.”

  Father took his tall hat from the wall peg. Outside the dining room door, he paused to pull up the weights on the old Frisian clock.

  “We mustn’t let the clock run down,” he said.

  Father! Did you really think we would be back home when next the chain ran out?

  The snow had gone from the streets; puddles of dirty water stood in the gutters as we marched through the alley and into the Smedestraat. The walk took only a minute, but by the time we got inside the double doors of the police station, I was shaking with cold. I looked anxiously around the foyer for Rolf and the others we knew, but saw no one. A contingent of German soldiers seemed to be supplementing the regular police force.

  We were herded along a corridor and through the heavy metal door where I had last seen Harry de Vries. At the end of this hall was a large room that had obviously been a gymnasium. Windows high in the walls were covered with wire mesh; rings and basketball hoops were roped to the ceiling. Now a desk stood in the center of the room with a German army officer seated behind it. Tumbling mats had been spread out to cover part of the floor and I collapsed onto one of them.

  For two hours the officer took down names, addresses, and other statistics. I counted those who had been arrested with us: 35 people from the raid on the Beje.

  People from previous arrests were sitting or lying about on the mats, too, some of them faces we knew. I looked for Pickwick but he was not among them. One of them, a fellow watchmaker who often came to the Beje on business, seemed especially distressed at what had happened to us. He came and sat down beside Father and me.

  At last the officer left. For the first time since the alarm buzzer sounded, we could talk among ourselves. I struggled to sit up. “Quick!” I croaked. “We’ve got to agree on what to say! Most of us can simply tell the truth but—” My voice died in my throat. It seemed to my flu-addled brain that Peter was giving me the most ferocious frown I had ever seen.

  “But if they learn that Uncle Willem was teaching this morning from the Old Testament, it could make trouble for him,” Peter finished for me.

  He jerked his head to one side, and I clamored unsteadily to my feet. “Tante Corrie!” he hissed when we were on the other side of the room. “That man, the watchmaker! He’s a Gestapo plant.” He patted my head as though I were a sick child. “Lie down again, Tante Corrie. Just for heaven’s sake don’t do any talking.”

  I was waked by the heavy door of the gym slamming open. In strode Rolf.

  “Let’s have it quiet in here!” he shouted. He leaned close to Willem and said s
omething I could not hear. “Toilets are out back,” he continued in a loud voice. “You can go one at a time under escort.”

  Willem sat down beside me. “He says we can flush incriminating papers if we shred them fine enough.” I fumbled through my coat pockets. There were several scraps of papers and a billfold containing a few paper rijksdaalders. I went over each item, trying to think how I would explain it in a court process. Beside the row of outdoor toilets was a basin with a tin cup on a chain. Gratefully I took a long drink—the first since the tea Betsie had brought me that morning.

  Toward evening a policeman carried into the gym a large basket of fresh hot rolls. I could not swallow mine. Only the water tasted good to me, though I grew embarrassed at asking again and again to be taken outside.

  When I got back the last time, a group had gathered around Father for evening prayers. Every day of my life had ended like this: that deep steady voice, that sure and eager confiding of us all to the care of God. The Bible lay at home on its shelf, but much of it was stored in his heart. His blue eyes seemed to be seeing beyond the locked and crowded room, beyond Haarlem, beyond earth itself, as he quoted from memory: “Thou art my hiding place and my shield: I hope in thy word. . . . Hold thou me up, and I shall be safe. . . .”

  None of us slept much. Each time someone left the room he had to step over a dozen others. At last light crept through the high, screened windows at the top of the room. The police again brought rolls. As the long morning wore on, I dozed with my back up against the wall; the worst pain now seemed to be in my chest. It was noon when soldiers entered the room and ordered us on our feet. Hastily we struggled into our coats and filed again through the cold corridors.

  In the Smedestraat a wall of people pressed against police barricades set across the street. As Betsie and I stepped out with Father between us, a murmur of horror greeted the sight of “Haarlem’s Grand Old Man” being led to prison. In front of the door stood a green city bus with soldiers occupying the rear seats. People were climbing aboard while friends and relatives in the crowd wept or simply stared. Betsie and I gripped Father’s arms to start down the steps. Then we froze. Stumbling past us between two soldiers, hatless and coatless, came Pickwick. The top of his bald head was a welter of bruises, dried blood clung to the stubble on his chin. He did not look up as he was hauled onto the bus.

  Father, Betsie, and I squeezed into a double seat near the front. Through the window I caught a glimpse of Tine standing in the crowd. It was one of those radiant winter days when the air seemed to shimmer with light. The bus shuddered and started up. Police cleared a path and we inched forward. I gazed hungrily out the window, holding onto Haarlem with my eyes. Now we were crossing the Grote Markt, the walls of the great cathedral glowing a thousand shades of gray in the crystal light. In a strange way it seemed to me that I had lived through this moment before.

  Then I recalled.

  The vision. The night of the invasion. I had seen it all. Willem, Nollie, Pickwick, Peter—all of us here—drawn against our wills across this square. It had all been in the dream—all of us leaving Haarlem, unable to turn back. Going where?

  10

  Scheveningen

  Outside Haarlem the bus took the south road, paralleling the sea. On our right rose the low sandy hills of the dune country, soldiers silhouetted on the ridges. Clearly we were not being taken to Amsterdam.

  A two-hour drive brought us instead into the streets of The Hague. The bus stopped in front of a new, functional building; word was whispered back that this was Gestapo headquarters for all of Holland. We were marched—all but Pickwick, who seemed unable to rise out of his seat—into a large room where the endless process of taking down names, addresses, and occupations began all over again.

  On the other side of the high counter running the length of the room, I was startled to see both Willemse and Kapteyn. As each of the prisoners from Haarlem reached the desk, one or the other would lean forward and speak to a man seated at a typewriter and there would be a clatter of sound from the machine.

  Suddenly the chief interrogator’s eye fell on Father. “That old man!” he cried. “Did he have to be arrested? You, old man!”

  Willem led Father up to the desk. The Gestapo chief leaned forward. “I’d like to send you home, old fellow,” he said. “I’ll take your word that you won’t cause any more trouble.”

  I could not see Father’s face, only the erect carriage of his shoulders and the halo of white hair above them. But I heard his answer.

  “If I go home today,” he said evenly and clearly, “tomorrow I will open my door again to any man in need who knocks.”

  The amiability drained from the other man’s face. “Get back in line!” he shouted. “Schnell! This court will tolerate no more delays!”

  But delays seemed all that this court existed for. As we inched along the counter, there were endless repetitions of questions, endless consulting of papers, endless coming and going of officials. Outside the windows the short winter day was fading. We had not eaten since the rolls and water at dawn.

  Ahead of me in line, Betsie answered, “Unmarried,” for the twentieth time that day.

  “Number of children?” droned the interrogator.

  “I’m unmarried,” Betsie repeated.

  The man did not even look up from his papers. “Number of children!” he snapped.

  “No children,” said Betsie resignedly.

  Toward nightfall a stout little man wearing the yellow star was led past us to the far end of the room. A sound of scuffling made us all look up. The wretched man was attempting to hold onto something clutched in his hands.

  “It’s mine!” he kept shouting. “You can’t take it! You can’t take my purse!”

  What madness possessed him? What good did he imagine money would do him now? But he continued to struggle, to the obvious glee of the men around him.

  “Here, Jew!” I heard one of them say. He lifted his booted foot and kicked the small man in the back of his knees. “This is how we take things from a Jew.”

  It made so much noise. That was all I could think as they continued to kick him. I clutched the counter to keep from falling myself as the sounds continued. Wildly, unreasonably, I hated the man being kicked, hated him for being so helpless and so hurt. At last I heard them drag him out.

  Then all at once I was standing in front of the chief questioner. I looked up and met Kapteyn’s eyes, just behind him.

  “This woman was the ringleader,” he said.

  Through the turmoil inside me, I realized it was important for the other man to believe him. “What Mr. Kapteyn says is true,” I said. “These others—they know nothing about it. It was all my—”

  “Name?” the interrogator inquired imperturbably.

  “Cornelia ten Boom, and I’m the—”

  “Age?”

  “Fifty-two. The rest of these people had nothing to do—”

  “Occupation?”

  “But I’ve told you a dozen times!” I burst out in desperation.

  “Occupation?” he repeated.

  It was dark night when we were marched at last out of the building. The green bus was gone. Instead we made out the bulk of a large canvas-roofed army truck. Two soldiers had to lift Father over the tailgate. There was no sign of Pickwick. Father, Betsie, and I found places to sit on a narrow bench that ran around the sides.

  The truck had no springs and bounced roughly over the bomb-pitted streets of The Hague. I slipped my arm behind Father’s back to keep him from striking the edge. Willem, standing near the back, whispered back what he could see of the blacked-out city. We had left the downtown section and seemed to be headed west toward the suburb of Scheveningen. That was our destination then, the federal penitentiary named after this seaside town.

  The truck jerked to a halt; we heard a screech of iron. We bumped forward a few feet and stopped again. Behind us massive gates clanged shut.

  We climbed down to find ourselves in an enormous cour
tyard surrounded by a high brick wall. The truck had backed up to a long low building; soldiers prodded us inside. I blinked in the white glare of bright ceiling lights.

  “Nasen gegen Mauer!” (Noses to the wall!)

  I felt a shove from behind and found myself staring at cracked plaster. I turned my eyes as far as I could, first left and then right. There was Willem. Two places away from him, Betsie. Next to me on the other side was Toos. All like me standing with their faces to the wall. Where was Father?

  There was an endless wait while the scars on the wall before my eyes became faces, landscapes, animal shapes. Then somewhere to the right a door opened.

  “Women prisoners follow me!”

  The matron’s voice sounded as metallic as the squealing door.

  As I stepped away from the wall, I glanced swiftly around the room for Father. There he was—a few feet out from the wall, seated in a straight-backed chair. One of the guards must have brought it for him.

  Already the matron was starting down the long corridor that I could see through the door. But I hung back, gazing desperately at Father, Willem, Peter, all our brave underground workers.

  “Father!” I cried suddenly. “God be with you!”

  His head turned toward me. The harsh overhead light flashed from his glasses.

  “And with you, my daughters,” he said.

  I turned and followed the others. Behind me the door slammed closed. And with you! And with you! Oh Father, when will I see you next?

  Betsie’s hand slipped around mine. A strip of coconut-palm matting ran down the center of the wide hall. We stepped onto it off the damp concrete.

  “Prisoners walk to the side.” It was the bored voice of the guard behind us. “Prisoners must not step on the matting.”

  Guiltily we stepped off the privileged path.

  Ahead of us in the corridor was a desk, behind it a woman in uniform. As each prisoner reached this point, she gave her name for the thousandth time that day and placed on the desk whatever she was wearing of value. Nollie, Betsie, and I unstrapped our beautiful wristwatches. As I handed mine to the officer, she pointed to the simple gold ring that had belonged to Mama. I wriggled it from my finger and laid it on the desk along with my wallet and paper guilders.