And yet the following morning it was Lieutenant Rahms himself who unlocked my cell door and escorted me to the hearing. Apparently he did not know of the regulation that forbade prisoners to step on the mat, for he indicated that I was to walk ahead of him down the center of the hall. I avoided the eyes of the guards along the route, guilty as a well-trained dog discovered on the living room sofa.
In the courtyard this time, a bright sun was shining. “Today,” he said, “we will stay outside. You are pale. You are not getting enough sun.”
Gratefully I followed him to the farthest corner of the little yard where the air was still and warm. We settled our backs against the wall. “I could not sleep last night,” the lieutenant said, “thinking about that Book where you have read such different ideas. What else does it say in there?”
On my closed eyelids the sun glimmered and blazed. “It says,” I began slowly, “that a Light has come into this world, so that we need no longer walk in the dark. Is there darkness in your life, Lieutenant?”
There was a very long silence.
“There is great darkness,” he said at last. “I cannot bear the work I do here.”
Then all at once he was telling me about his wife and children in Bremen, about their garden, their dogs, their summer hiking vacations. “Bremen was bombed again last week. Each morning I ask myself, are they still alive?”
“There is One who has them always in His sight, Lieutenant Rahms. Jesus is the Light the Bible shows to me, the Light that can shine even in such darkness as yours.”
The man pulled the visor of his hat lower over his eyes; the skull-and-crossbones glinted in the sunlight. When he spoke it was so low I could hardly hear. “What can you know of darkness like mine. . . .”
Two more mornings the hearings continued. He had dropped all pretense of questioning me on my underground activities and seemed especially to enjoy hearing about my childhood. Mama, Father, the aunts—he wanted to hear stories about them again and again. He was incensed to learn that Father had died right here in Scheveningen; the documents on my case made no mention of it.
These documents did answer one question: the reason for solitary confinement. “Prisoner’s condition contagious to others in cell.” I stared at the brief typed words where Lieutenant Rahms’s finger rested. I thought of the long wind-haunted nights, the scowling guards, the rule of silence. “But, if it wasn’t punishment, why were they so angry with me? Why couldn’t I talk?”
The lieutenant squared the edges of the papers in front of him. “A prison is like any institution, Miss ten Boom, certain rules, certain ways of doing things—”
“But I’m not contagious now! I’ve been better for weeks and weeks, and my own sister is so close! Lieutenant Rahms, if I could only see Betsie! If I could just talk with her a few minutes!”
He lifted his eyes from the desk and I saw anguish in them. “Miss ten Boom, it is possible that I appear to you as a powerful person. I wear a uniform, I have a certain authority over those under me. But I am in prison, dear lady from Haarlem, a prison stronger than this one.”
It was the fourth and final hearing, and we had come back into the small hut for the signing of the procès-verbal. He gathered up the completed transcript and went out with it, leaving me alone. I was sorry to say good-bye to this man who was struggling so earnestly for truth. The hardest thing for him seemed to be that Christians should suffer. “How can you believe in God now?” he’d ask. “What kind of a God would have let that old man die here in Scheveningen?”
I got up from the chair and held my hands out to the squat little stove. I did not understand either why Father had died in such a place. I did not understand a great deal.
And suddenly I was thinking of Father’s own answer to hard questions: “Some knowledge is too heavy . . . you cannot bear it . . . your Father will carry it until you are able.” Yes! I would tell Lieutenant Rahms about the traincase—he always liked stories about Father.
But when the lieutenant returned to the room a guard from the women’s wing was with him. “Prisoner ten Boom has completed her hearings,” he said, “and will return to her cell.”
The young woman snapped to attention. As I stepped through the door, Lieutenant Rahms leaned forward.
“Walk slowly,” he said, “in Corridor F.”
Walk slowly? What did he mean? The guard strode down the long door-lined halls so swiftly I had to trot to keep up with her. Ahead of us a prison trustee was unlocking the door to a cell. I trailed behind the guard as much as I dared, my heart thumping wildly. It would be Betsie’s cell—I knew it!
Then I was abreast of the door. Betsie’s back was to the corridor. I could see only the graceful upswept bun of her chestnut hair. The other women in the cell stared curiously into the corridor; her head remained bent over something in her lap. But I had seen the home Betsie had made in Scheveningen.
For unbelievably, against all logic, this cell was charming. My eyes seized only a few details as I inched reluctantly past. The straw pallets were rolled instead of piled in a heap, standing like little pillars along the walls, each with a lady’s hat atop it. A headscarf had somehow been hung along the wall. The contents of several food packages were arranged on a small shelf; I could just hear Betsie saying, “The red biscuit tin here in the center!” Even the coats hanging on their hooks were part of the welcome of that room, each sleeve draped over the shoulder of the coat next to it like a row of dancing children—
“Schneller! Aber schnell!”
I jumped and hurried after my escort. It had been a glimpse only, two seconds at the most, but I walked through the corridors of Scheveningen with Betsie’s singing spirit at my side.
ALL MORNING I heard doors opening and closing. Now keys rattled outside my own: a very young guard in a very new uniform bounded in.
“Prisoner stand at attention!” she squeaked. I stared at her wide, blinking eyes; the girl was in mortal fear of something or someone. Then a shadow filled the doorway and the tallest woman I had ever seen stepped into the cell. Her features were classically handsome, the face and height of a goddess—but one carved in marble. Not a flicker of feeling registered in her eyes.
“No sheets here either, I see,” she said in German to the guard. “See that she has two by Friday. One to be changed every two weeks.”
The ice-cold eyes appraised me exactly as they had the bed. “How many showers does the prisoner get?”
The guard wet her lips. “About one a week, Wachtmeisterin. ”
One a week! One shower a month was closer!
“She will go twice a week.”
Sheets! Regular showers! Were conditions going to be better? The new head matron took two strides into the cell; she did not need the cot to reach the overhead bulb. Rip! Off came my red-cellophane lampshade. She pointed to a box of soda crackers that had come in a second package from Nollie.
“No boxes in the cells!” cried the little guard in Dutch, as indignantly as though this had been a long-standing rule.
Not knowing what else to do, I dumped the crackers out onto the cot. At the matron’s unspoken command, I emptied a bottle of vitamins and a sack of peppermint drops the same way.
Unlike the former head matron, who shrieked and scolded endlessly in her rusted-hinge voice, this woman worked in a terrifying silence. With a gesture, she directed the guard to feel beneath the mattress. My heart wedged in my throat; my precious remaining Gospel was hidden there. The guard knelt and ran her hands the length of the cot. But whether she was too nervous to do a thorough job or whether there was a more mysterious explanation, she straightened up empty-handed.
And then they were gone.
I stood gazing numbly at the jumble of food on my cot. I thought of this woman reaching Betsie’s cell, reducing it again to four walls and a prison cot. A chill wind was blowing through Scheveningen, cleaning, ordering, killing.
IT WAS THIS tall, ramrod-straight woman who unlocked the door to my cell one afternoon in t
he second half of June and admitted Lieutenant Rahms. At the severity in his face, I swallowed the greeting that had almost burst from me.
“You will come to my office,” he said briefly. “The notary has come.”
We might as well have been total strangers. “Notary?” I said stupidly.
“For the reading of your Father’s will.” He made an impatient gesture; obviously this minor matter had interrupted a busy day. “It’s the law—family present when a will is opened.”
Already he was heading from the cell and down the corridor. I broke into a clumsy run to keep up with the strides of the silent woman beside me. The law? What law? And since when had the German occupation government concerned itself with Dutch legal procedures? Family. Family present. . . . No, don’t let yourself think of it!
At the door to the courtyard the matron turned, erect and impassive, back along the corridor. I followed Lieutenant Rahms into the dazzling early summer afternoon. He opened the door for me into the fourth hut. Before my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I was drowning in Willem’s embrace.
“Corrie! Corrie! Baby sister!” It was fifty years since he had called me that.
Now Nollie’s arm was around me too, the other one still clinging to Betsie, as though by the strength of her grip she would hold us together forever. Betsie! Nollie! Willem! I did not know which name to cry first. Tine was in that little room too—and Flip! And another man; when I had time to look, I recognized the Haarlem notary who had been called in on the watch shop’s few legal consultations. We held each other at arm’s length to look, we babbled questions all at once.
Betsie was thin and prison-pale. But it was Willem who shocked me. His face was gaunt, yellow, and pain-haunted. He had come home this way from Scheveningen, Tine told me. Two of the eight men crowded into his tiny cell had died of jaundice while he was there.
Willem! I could not bear to see him this way. I crooked my arm through his, standing close so that I did not have to look at him, loving the sound of his deep rolling voice. Willem did not seem aware of his own illness: his concern was all for Kik. This handsome blonde son had been seized the month before while helping an American parachutist reach the North Sea. They believed he had been on one of the recent prison trains into Germany.
As for Father, they had learned a few more facts about his last days. He had apparently become ill in his cell and been taken by car to the municipal hospital in The Hague. There, no bed had been available. Father had died in a corridor, separated somehow from his records or any clue as to his identity. Hospital authorities had buried the unknown old man in the paupers’ cemetery. The family believed they had located the particular grave.
I glanced over at Lieutenant Rahms. He was standing with his back to us as we talked, staring down at the cold unlit stove. Swiftly I opened the package that Nollie had pressed into my hand with the first embrace. It was what my leaping heart had told me: a Bible, the entire Book in a compact volume, tucked inside a small pouch with a string for wearing around the neck as we had once carried our identity cards. I dropped it quickly over my head and down my back beneath my blouse. I couldn’t even find words with which to thank her: the day before, in the shower line, I had given away my last remaining Gospel.
“We don’t know all the details,“ Willem was saying in a low voice to Betsie, “just that after a few days the soldiers were taken off guard duty at the Beje and police stationed there instead.” The fourth night, he believed, the chief had succeeded in assigning Rolf and another of our group to the same shift. They had found all the Jews well, though cramped and hungry, and seen them to new hiding places.
“And now?” I whispered back. “They’re all right now?”
Willem lowered his deep-sunk eyes to mine. He had never been good at concealing difficult truths. “They’re all right, Corrie—all except Mary.” Old Mary Itallie, he said, had been arrested one day walking down a city street. Where she had been going and why she had exposed herself this way in broad daylight, nobody knew.
“The time is up.” Lieutenant Rahms left his perusal of the stove and nodded to the notary. “Proceed with the reading of the will.”
It was a brief, informal document: the Beje was to be home for Betsie and me as long as we wanted it; should there ever be any money realized from the sale of house or watch shop, he knew we would recall his equal love for us all; he committed us with joy to the constant care of God.
In the silence that followed, we all suddenly bowed our heads. “Lord Jesus,” Willem said, “we praise You for these moments together under the protection of this good man. How can we thank him? We have no power to do him any service. Lord, allow us to share this inheritance from our father with him as well. Take him too, and his family, into Your constant care.”
Outside, a guard’s footsteps sounded on the crunchy gravel walk.
12
Vught
Get your things together! Get ready to evacuate! Collect all possessions in pillowcases!” The shouts of the guards echoed up and down the long corridor.
I stood in the center of my cell in a frenzy of excitement. Evacuate! Then—then something was happening! We were leaving the prison! The counter-invasion must have begun!
I snatched the pillowcase from the little wad of straw I had stuffed into it. What riches this coarse bit of muslin had been in the two weeks since it had been provided: a shield for my head from the scratch and smell of the bedding. It almost didn’t matter that the promised sheets had never arrived.
With trembling hands I dropped my few belongings into it, the blue sweater, the pajamas—covered now back and front with embroidered figures—toothbrush, comb, a few remaining crackers wrapped in toilet paper. My Bible was in its pouch on my back where it remained except when I was reading it.
I put on my coat and hat and stood at the iron door clutching the pillowcase in both hands. It was still early in the morning; the tin breakfast plate had not yet been removed from the shelf in the door. Getting ready had taken no time at all.
An hour passed. I sat on the cot. Two hours. Three. It was warm in the cell this late June day. I took off my hat and coat and folded them next to me on the cot.
More time passed. I kept my eyes on the ant hole, hoping for a last visit from my small friends, but they did not appear. Probably I had frightened them by my early dashing about. I reached into the pillowcase, took one of the crackers, and crumbled it about the little crack. No ants. They were staying safely hidden.
And suddenly I realized that this too was a message, a last wordless communication among neighbors. For I, too, had a hiding place when things were bad. Jesus was this place, the Rock cleft for me. I pressed a finger to the tiny crevice.
The afternoon sun appeared on the wall and moved slowly across the cell. And then all at once there was a clanging out in the corridor. Doors scraped. Bolts banged. “Out! Schnell! All out! No talking!”
I snatched up my hat and coat.
My door screeched open. “Form ranks of five.” The guard was already at the next cell.
I stepped out into the hall. It was jammed from wall to wall: I had never dreamed so many women occupied this corridor. We exchanged looks. “In-va-sion,” we mouthed silently, the soundless word sweeping through the massed women like an electric charge.
Surely the invasion of Holland had begun! Why else would they be emptying the prison!
Where would we be taken? Where were we headed? Not into Germany! Dear Jesus, not Germany.
The command was given and we shuffled forward down the long chilly halls, each carrying a pillowcase, with her belongings forming a little bulge at the bottom. At last we emerged into the wide courtyard inside the front gate of the prison and another long wait began. But this wait was pleasant with the late afternoon sun on our backs. Far to the right I could see the columns of the men’s section. But crane my neck though I would, I could not see Betsie anywhere.
At last the huge gate swung in and a convoy of gray transport buses drove thr
ough. I was herded aboard the third one. The seats had been removed, the windows painted over. The bus lurched dreadfully as it started up but we were standing too close together to fall. When the bus ground to a stop, we were at a freight yard somewhere on the outskirts of the city.
Again we were formed into ranks. The guards’ voices were tense and shrill. We had to keep our heads facing forward, eyes front. Behind us we could hear buses arriving, then lumbering away again. It was still light, but I knew by the ache in my stomach that it was long past suppertime.
And then, ahead and to the left of me, in the newest group of arriving prisoners, I spotted a chestnut bun. Betsie! Somehow, some way, I was going to get to her! Now instead of wanting the day to end, I prayed that we would stay where we were until dark.
Slowly the long June day faded. Thunder rumbled and a few drops of rain fell. At last a long row of unlit coaches rolled slowly over the tracks in front of us. They banged to a stop, rolled forward a little farther, then stopped again. After a while they began backing. For an hour or more the train switched back and forth.
By the time the order came to board, it was pitch dark. The ranks of prisoners surged forward. Behind us the guards shouted and cursed: obviously they were nervous at transporting so many prisoners at one time. I wriggled and shoved to the left. Elbows and shoulders were in my way but I squirmed past. At the very steps of the train, I reached out and seized Betsie’s hand.
Together we climbed onto the train, together found seats in a crowded compartment, together wept tears of gratitude. The four months in Scheveningen had been our first separation in fifty-three years; it seemed to me that I could bear whatever happened with Betsie beside me.
More hours passed as the loaded train sat on the siding. For us they flew, there was so much to share. Betsie told me about each of her cellmates—and I told her about mine and the little hole into which they scrambled at any emergency. As always, Betsie had given to others everything she had. The Bible that Nollie had smuggled to her she had torn up and passed around, book by book.
The Hiding Place Page 18