“Betsie,” I whispered when The Snake was far enough away, “what can we do for these people? Afterward I mean. Can’t we make a home for them and care for them and love them?”
“Corrie, I pray every day that we will be allowed to do this! To show them that love is greater!”
And it wasn’t until I was gathering twigs later in the morning that I realized that I had been thinking of the feeble-minded, and Betsie of their persecutors.
SEVERAL DAYS LATER my entire work crew was ordered to the hospital for medical inspection. I dropped my dress onto the pile just inside the door and joined the file of naked women. Ahead of us, to my surprise, a doctor was using a stethoscope with all the deliberateness of a real examination.
“What is this for?” I whispered to the woman ahead of me.
“Transport inspection,” she hissed back, not moving her head.
“Munitions work.”
Transport! But they couldn’t! They mustn’t send me away! Dear God, don’t let them take me away from Betsie!
But to my terror I passed one station after another—heart, lungs, scalp, throat—and still I was in the line. Many were pulled out along the way, but those who remained looked hardly stronger. Swollen stomachs, hollow chests, spindly legs: how desperate for manpower Germany must be!
I halted before a woman in a soiled white coat. She turned me around to face a chart on the wall, her hand cold on my bare shoulder. “Read the lowest line you can.”
“I—I can’t seem to read any of them.” Lord forgive me! “Just the top letter. That big E.” The top letter was an F.
The woman seemed to see me for the first time. “You can see better than that! Do you want to be rejected?”
At Ravensbruck, munitions transport was considered a privilege; food and living conditions in the factories were said to be far better than here in the camp.
“Oh yes, Doctor! My sister’s here at Ravensbruck! She’s not well! I can’t leave her!”
The doctor sat down at her table and scrawled something on a piece of paper. “Come back tomorrow to be fitted for glasses.”
Catching up to the line, I unfolded the small blue slip of paper. Prisoner 66730 was instructed to report for an optical fitting at 6:30 the following morning. Six-thirty was the time the transport convoys were loaded.
And so as the huge vans rumbled down the Lagerstrasse the next day, I was standing in a corridor of the hospital waiting my turn at the eye clinic. The young man in charge was perhaps a qualified eye doctor, but his entire equipment consisted of a box of framed glasses, from gold-rimmed bifocals to a plastic-framed child’s pair. I found none that fitted and at last was ordered back to my work detail.
But, of course, I had no work assignment, having been marked down for transport. I walked back uncertainly toward Barracks 28. I stepped into the center room. The supervisor looked up over the heads of the knitting crew.
“Number?” she said.
I gave it and she wrote it in a black-covered book. “Pick up your yarn and a pattern sheet,” she went on. “You’ll have to find a place on one of the beds, there’s no room here.” And she turned back to the pile of finished socks on the table.
I stood blinking in the center of the room. Then grabbing a skein of the dark gray wool, I dashed through the dormitory door. And thus began the closest, most joyous weeks of all the time in Ravensbruck. Side by side, in the sanctuary of God’s fleas, Betsie and I ministered the Word of God to all in the room. We sat by deathbeds that became doorways of heaven. We watched women who had lost everything grow rich in hope. The knitters of Barracks 28 became the praying heart of the vast diseased body that was Ravensbruck, interceding for all in the camp—guards, under Betsie’s prodding, as well as prisoners. We prayed beyond the concrete walls for the healing of Germany, of Europe, of the world—as Mama had once done from the prison of a crippled body.
And as we prayed, God spoke to us about the world after the war. It was extraordinary; in this place where whistles and loudspeakers took the place of decisions, God asked us what we were going to do in the years ahead.
Betsie was always very clear about the answer for her and me. We were to have a house, a large one—much larger than the Beje—to which people who had been damaged by concentration-camp life would come until they felt ready to live again in the normal world.
“It’s such a beautiful house, Corrie! The floors are all inlaid wood, with statues set in the walls and a broad staircase sweeping down. And gardens! Gardens all around it where they can plant flowers. It will do them such good, Corrie, to care for flowers!”
I would stare at Betsie in amazement as she talked about these things. She spoke always as though she were describing things that she saw—as if that wide, winding staircase and those bright gardens were the reality, this cramped and filthy barracks the dream.
BUT IT WASN’T a dream. It was really, achingly, endlessly true, and it was always during roll calls that the accumulated misery threatened to overwhelm me.
One morning three women from Barracks 28 lingered inside a few minutes to avoid the cold. All the following week the entire barracks was punished by an extra hour at attention. The lights on the Lagerstrasse were not even lit when we were driven from our bunks at 3:30 A.M.
It was during this preinspection lineup one morning that I saw what I had till then refused to believe. Headlights appeared at the far end of the long street, wavering over the snow. Trucks with open flatbeds in the rear were approaching, spattering slush as they passed. They pulled up at the front door of the hospital. The door opened and a nurse appeared, supporting an old woman whose legs buckled as she limped down the steps. The nurse lifted her gently onto the back of a truck. They were pouring out the door now, leaning on the arms of nurses and hospital helpers, the old, the ill. Last of all came orderlies with stretchers between them.
Our eyes took in every detail of the scene; our brains refused. We had known, of course, that when overcrowding reached a certain point, the sickest were taken to the brick building at the foot of the great square smokestack. But, that these women here in front of us—these very ones. It was not possible. Above all I could not put it together with the kindly behavior of the nurses. That one in the truck just ahead, bending solicitously, even tenderly, over her patient. . . . What was passing through her mind just now?
AND ALL THE while, it grew colder. One night during evening roll call, a platoon somewhere far down the Lagerstrasse began a rhythmic stamping. The sound grew as others picked it up. The guards did not stop us and at last the entire street was marching in place, pounding tattered shoes against the frozen ground, driving circulation back into numb feet and legs. From now on this was the sound of roll call, the stamping of thousands of feet on the long dark street.
And as the cold increased, so did the special temptation of concentration-camp life: the temptation to think only of oneself. It took a thousand cunning forms. I quickly discovered that when I maneuvered our way toward the middle of the roll-call formation we had a little protection from the wind.
I knew this was self-centered: when Betsie and I stood in the center, someone else had to stand on the edge. How easy it was to give it other names! I was acting only for Betsie’s sake. We were in an important ministry and must keep well. It was colder in Poland than in Holland; these Polish women probably were not feeling the chill the way we were.
Selfishness had a life of its own. As I watched Mien’s bag of yeast compound disappear, I began taking it from beneath the straw only after lights-out when others would not see and ask for some. Wasn’t Betsie’s health more important? You see, God, she can do so much for them! Remember that house, after the war!
And even if it wasn’t right—it wasn’t so very wrong, was it? Not wrong like sadism and murder and the other monstrous evils we saw in Ravensbruck every day. Oh, this was the great ploy of Satan in that kingdom of his: to display such blatant evil that one could almost believe one’s own secret sins didn’t matter.
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The cancer spread. The second week in December, every occupant of Barracks 28 was issued an extra blanket. The next day a large group of evacuées arrived from Czechoslovakia. One of them assigned to our platform had no blanket at all and Betsie insisted that we give her one of ours. So that evening I “lent” her a blanket. But I didn’t “give” it to her. In my heart, I held onto the right to that blanket.
Was it coincidence that joy and power imperceptibly drained from my ministry? My prayers took on a mechanical ring. Even Bible reading was dull and lifeless. Betsie tried to take over for me, but her cough made reading aloud impossible.
And so I struggled on with worship and teaching that had ceased to be real. Until one drizzly raw afternoon when just enough light came through the window to read by, I came to Paul’s account of his “thorn in the flesh.” Three times, he said, he had begged God to take away his weakness, whatever it was. And each time God had said, Rely on Me. At last Paul concluded—the words seemed to leap from the page—that his very weakness was something to give thanks for. Because now Paul knew that none of the wonders and miracles that followed his ministry could be due to his own virtues. It was all Christ’s strength, never Paul’s.
And there it was.
The truth blazed like sunlight in the shadows of Barracks 28. The real sin I had been committing was not that of inching toward the center of a platoon because I was cold. The real sin lay in thinking that any power to help and transform came from me. Of course it was not my wholeness, but Christ’s that made the difference.
The short winter day was fading; I could no longer separate the words on the page. And so I closed the Bible and to that group of women clustering close, I told the truth about myself—my self-centeredness, my stinginess, my lack of love. That night real joy 225 returned to my worship.
Each roll call the wind seemed sharper. Whenever she could, Mien smuggled newspapers from the staff room at the hospital, which we placed inside our clothes. Nollie’s blue sweater beneath Betsie’s dress was black with newsprint.
The cold seemed to be affecting Betsie’s legs. Sometimes in the morning she could not move them at all and two of us would have to carry her between us. It was not hard—she weighed no more than a child. But she could no longer stamp her feet as the rest of us did to keep the blood flowing. When we returned to the dormitory, I would rub her feet and hands, but my own only picked up the chill from hers.
It was the week before Christmas that Betsie woke up unable to move either legs or arms. I shoved my way through the crowded aisles to the center room. The Snake was on duty.
“Please!” I begged. “Betsie is ill! Oh please, she’s got to get to the hospital!”
“Stand at attention. State your number.”
“Prisoner 66730 reporting. Please, my sister is sick!”
“All prisoners must report for the count. If she’s sick she can register at sick call.”
Maryke de Graaf, a Dutch woman on the tier above ours, helped me form a cradle with our arms and carry Betsie outside. The rhythmic stamping had already begun in the Lagerstrasse. We carried her to the hospital, then stopped. In the light of the street lamps, the sick-call line stretched to the edge of the building and out of sight around the corner. In the sooty snow alongside, three bodies lay where they had fallen.
Without a word, Maryke and I turned and carried our load back to the Lagerstrasse. After roll call we got her back into bed. Her speech was slow and blurred, but she was trying to say something.
“A camp, Corrie—a concentration camp. But we’re . . . in charge . . .” I had to bend very close to hear. The camp was in Germany. It was no longer a prison, but a home where people who had been warped by this philosophy of hate and force could come to learn another way. There were no walls, no barbed wire, and the barracks had windowboxes. “It will be so good for them . . . watching things grow. People can learn to love, from flowers. . . .”
I knew by now which people she meant. The German people. I thought of The Snake standing in the barracks door that morning. “State your number. All prisoners must report for the count.”
I looked into Betsie’s shrunken face. “We are to have this camp in Germany instead, Betsie? Instead of the big house in Holland?”
“Oh no!” she seemed shocked. “You know we have the house first! It’s ready and waiting for us . . . such tall, tall windows! The sun is streaming in—”
A coughing fit seized her; when finally she lay still, a stain of blood blackened the straw. She dozed fitfully during the day and night that followed, waking several times with the excitement of some new detail about our work in Holland or Germany.
“The barracks are gray, Corrie, but we’ll paint them green! Bright, light green, like springtime.”
“We’ll be together, Betsie? We’re doing all this together? You’re sure about that?”
“Always together, Corrie! You and I . . . always together.”
When the siren blew next morning, Maryke and I again carried Betsie from the dormitory. The Snake was standing at the street door. As we started through it with our fragile burden, she stepped in front of us. “Take her back to the bunks.”
“I thought all pris—”
“Take her back!”
Wonderingly, we replaced Betsie on the bed. Sleet rattled against the windows. Was it possible that the atmosphere of Barracks 28 had affected even this cruel guard? As soon as roll call was dismissed, I ran back to the dormitory. There, beside our bed, stood The Snake. Beside her two orderlies from the hospital were setting down a stretcher. The Snake straightened almost guiltily as I approached. “Prisoner is ready for transfer,” she snapped.
I looked at the woman more closely: had she risked fleas and lice to spare Betsie the sick-call line? She did not stop me as I started after the stretcher. Our group of knitters was just entering the big room. As we passed, a Polish friend dropped to her knees and made the sign of the Cross.
Sleet stung us as we reached the outside. I stepped close to the stretcher to form a shield for Betsie. We walked past the waiting line of sick people, through the door, and into a large ward. They placed the stretcher on the floor and I leaned down to make out Betsie’s words, “. . . must tell people what we have learned here. We must tell them that there is no pit so deep that He is not deeper still. They will listen to us, Corrie, because we have been here.”
I stared at her wasted form. “But when will all this happen, Betsie!”
“Now. Right away. Oh, very soon! By the first of the year, Corrie, we will be out of prison!”
A nurse had caught sight of me. I backed to the door of the room and watched as they placed Betsie on a narrow cot close to the window. I ran around to the outside of the building. At last Betsie caught sight of me; we exchanged smiles and soundless words until one of the camp police shouted at me to move along.
About noontime I put down my knitting and went out to the center room. “Prisoner 66730 reporting. Request permission to visit the hospital.” I stood ramrod straight.
The Snake glanced up, then scrawled out a pass. Outside it was still sleeting. I reached the door of the ward but the horrible nurse would not let me enter, even with my pass. So I went again to the window next to Betsie’s cot. I waited until the nurse left the room, then tapped gently.
Betsie’s eyes opened. Slowly she turned her head.
“Are you all right?” I formed with my lips.
She nodded.
“You must get a good rest,” I went on.
She moved her lips in reply but I could not follow. She formed the words again. I bent my head to one side, level with hers. The blue lips opened again: “. . . so much work to do . . .”
The Snake was off duty during the afternoon and evening, and though I asked the other guards repeatedly, I did not again get permission to leave. The minute roll call was dismissed the following morning, I headed for the hospital, permission or no.
I reached the window and cupped my eyes to peer in. A nurse wa
s standing directly between me and Betsie. I ducked out of sight, waited a minute, then looked again. A second nurse had joined the first, both now standing where I wanted to see. They stepped to the head and foot of the bed: I gazed curiously at what lay on it. It was a carving in old yellow ivory. There was no clothing on the figure; I could see each ivory rib, and the outline of the teeth through the parchment cheeks.
It took me a moment to realize it was Betsie.
The nurses had each seized two corners of the sheet. They lifted it between them and carried the bundle from the room before my heart had started to beat again in my chest.
Betsie! But—she had too much to do! She could not— Where were they taking her? Where had they gone? I turned from the window and began running along the side of the building, chest hurting me as I breathed.
Then I remembered the washroom. That window at the rear—that was where . . .
My feet carried me mechanically around to the back of the building. And there, with my hand on the windowsill, I stopped. Suppose she was there? Suppose they had laid Betsie on that floor?
I started walking again. I walked for a long time, still with that pain in my chest. And each time my feet took me back to the washroom window. I would not go in. I would not look. Betsie could not be there.
I walked some more. Strangely enough, although I passed several camp police, no one stopped or questioned me.
“Corrie!”
I turned around to see Mien running after me. “Corrie, I’ve looked for you everywhere! Oh Corrie, come!”
She seized my arm and drew me toward the back of the hospital. When I saw where she was headed, I wrenched my arm free. “I know, Mien. I know already.”
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