She didn’t seem to hear. She seized me again, led me to the washroom window, and pushed me in ahead of her. In the reeking room stood a nurse. I drew back in alarm, but Mien was behind me.
“This is the sister,” Mien said to the nurse.
I turned my head to the side—I would not look at the bodies that lined the far wall. Mien put an arm around my shoulder and drew me across the room till we were standing above that heartbreaking row.
“Corrie! Do you see her?”
I raised my eyes to Betsie’s face. Lord Jesus—what have You done?
Oh Lord, what are You saying? What are You giving me?
For there lay Betsie, her eyes closed as if in sleep, her face full and young. The care lines, the grief lines, the deep hollows of hunger and disease were simply gone. In front of me was the Betsie of Haarlem, happy and at peace. Stronger! Freer! This was the Betsie of heaven, bursting with joy and health. Even her hair was graciously in place as if an angel had ministered to her.
At last I turned wonderingly to Mien. The nurse went silently to the door and opened it for us herself. “You can leave through the hall,” she said softly.
I looked once more at the radiant face of my sister. Then Mien and I left the room together. A pile of clothes was heaped outside in the hallway; on top lay Nollie’s blue sweater.
I stopped to pick it up. The sweater was threadbare and stained with newsprint, but it was a tangible link with Betsie. Mien seized my arm. “Don’t touch those things! Black lice! They’ll all be burned.”
And so I left behind the last physical tie. It was just as well. It was better. Now what tied me to Betsie was the hope of heaven.
15
The Three Visions
The beauty of Betsie’s face sustained me over the next days, as I went from one to another of the women who had loved her, describing to them her peace and her joy.
Two mornings after her death, the count was off at roll call. The other barracks were dismissed, 28 remained in ranks, eyes front. The loudspeaker beeped and a voice came on: a woman was missing; the entire barracks would stand on the Lagerstrasse until she was found. Left, right, left, right, endlessly tramping to drive the chill from weary legs. The sun came up, a wan wintry sun that did not warm. I looked down at my feet: my legs and ankles were swelling grotesquely. By noontime there was no feeling in them. Betsie, how happy you are today! No cold, no hunger, nothing between you and the face of Jesus!
The dismissal order came in the afternoon. We learned later that the missing woman had been found dead on one of the upper platforms. It was the following morning when over the loudspeaker during roll call came the word: “Ten Boom, Cornelia!”
For an instant I stood stupidly where I was. I had been Prisoner 66730 for so long that I almost failed to react to my name. I walked forward.
“Stand to the side!”
What was going to happen? Why had I been singled out? Had someone reported the Bible?
The roll call dragged on. From where I stood I could see almost the entire Lagerstrasse, tens of thousands of women stretching out of sight, their breath hanging white in the night air.
The siren blew for dismissal; the guard signaled me to follow her. I splashed through the slush, trying to keep up with the strides of her tall boots. My legs and feet were still painfully swollen from the long count the day before, my shoes were held together with bits of string.
I hobbled behind the guard into the administration barracks at the opposite end of the Lagerstrasse from the hospital. Several prisoners were standing in line at a large desk. An officer seated behind it stamped a paper and handed it to the woman in front of him.
“Entlassen!” he said.
Entlassen? Released? Was—was the woman free then? Was this— were we all— He called a name and another prisoner stepped to the desk. A signature, a stamp:
“Entlassen!”
At last “Ten Boom, Cornelia,” was called. I stepped to the desk, steadying myself against it. He wrote, brought down the stamp, and then I was holding it in my hand: a piece of paper with my name and birthday on it, and across the top in large black letters: CERTIFICATE OF DISCHARGE.
Dazed, I followed the others through a door at our left. There at another desk I was handed a railway pass entitling me to transportation through Germany to the Dutch border. Outside this office a guard pointed me down a corridor into still another room. There the prisoners who had been ahead of me were tugging their dresses over their heads and lining up against the rear wall.
“Clothing over here!” a smiling prison trustee told me. “Entlassen physical,” she explained.
I drew the Bible over my head along with the dress, rolled them together and buried the bundle at the bottom of the clothing pile. I joined the others, the wooden wall rough against my bare back. Strange how the very word “release” had made the procedures of prison a hundred times more hateful. How often Betsie and I had stood like this. But the thought of freedom had stirred in me, and the shame of this inspection was greater than all the others.
At last the doctor arrived, a freckled-faced boy in a military uniform. He glanced along the lineup with undisguised contempt. One by one we had to bend, turn around, spread our fingers. When he reached me, his eyes traveled down to my feet and his lips puckered in disgust.
“Edema,” he said. “Hospital.”
He was gone. With one other woman who had not “passed,” I scrambled back into my clothes and followed the trustee from the building. Day had broken, a sullen gray sky spitting snow. We started up the Lagerstrasse, past the endless streets of barracks.
“Then—we’re not—aren’t we to be released?”
“I imagine you will be, as soon as the swelling in your legs goes down,” the trustee said. “They only release you if you’re in good condition.” I saw her look at the other prisoner: the woman’s skin and eyes were a dull dark yellow.
Sick call stretched around the side of the hospital, but we walked straight through the door and into a ward at the rear. The room was crammed with double-decker cots. I was assigned a place on an upper bunk next to a woman whose body was covered with erupting pustules. But at least it was near a wall where I could keep my swollen legs elevated. That was what mattered now: to get the swelling down, to pass the inspection.
WHETHER THAT RAY of freedom shed a new, relentless light on Ravensbruck, or whether this was truly the most savage place yet, I could not tell. The suffering was unimaginable. Around me were survivors of a prison train that had been bombed on its way here. The women were horribly mutilated and in terrible pain, but at each moan two of the nurses jeered and mimicked the sounds.
Even in the other patients, I saw that stony indifference to others that was the most fatal disease of the concentration camp. I felt it spread to myself: how could one survive if one kept on feeling? The paralyzed and the unconscious kept falling out of the crowded narrow cots; that first night four women fell from upper bunks and died on the floor. It was better to narrow the mind to one’s own need, not to see, not to think.
But there was no way to shut out the sounds. All night women cried out a German word I didn’t know. “Schieber!” Over and over from rasping throats: “Schieber!”
Finally I realized that they were calling for bedpans. It was out of the question for most of the women in this room to make it to that filthy latrine next door. At last, reluctant to lower my legs, I climbed down from my cot and set about the chore. The gratitude of the patients was heart-wrenching. “Who are you? Why are you doing this?”—as though cruelty and callousness were the norm, ordinary decency the marvel.
As a wintry dawn crept through the windows, I realized it was Christmas Day.
I WENT EACH morning to the clinic at the front of the hospital where I could hear the tramping of feet on the Lagerstrasse outside. Each time the verdict was “Edema of the feet and ankles.” Many of those who attended the clinic were, like myself, discharged prisoners. Some had been released months ago: their discharge papers
and railway passes were ragged from opening and refolding. And—what if Betsie were still alive? Surely our prison term would have been up together. But Betsie would never, never have passed the physical. What if she were here with me? What if I were to pass the inspection and she . . .
There are no “ifs” in God’s kingdom. I could hear her soft voice saying it. His timing is perfect. His will is our hiding place. Lord Jesus, keep me in Your will! Don’t let me go mad by poking about outside it.
I kept looking for someone to give the Bible to. How easy it would be, back in Holland, to get another—a hundred others. There were not many Hollanders in the ward who would be able to read the Dutch text, but at last I slipped it around the neck of a grateful young woman from Utrecht.
The sixth night I spent in the ward both bedpans were suddenly and mysteriously missing. In an upper bunk on the center aisle were two Hungarian gypsies whose muttering was part of the babble of the room. I never walked past their cot because one of them had a gangrenous foot that she would thrust in the face of anyone who came near. Now someone screamed out that the gypsies had the bedpans, hidden under their blankets to save them the trip to the toilets. I went to their cot and pleaded with them—though I didn’t know whether they understood German or not.
Suddenly in the dark something wet and sticky coiled around my face. The woman had taken the bandage from her foot and flung it at me. I ran sobbing down the corridor and washed and washed beneath the wall spigot in the latrine. I would never step into that aisle again! What did I care about the wretched bedpans! I couldn’t bear . . .
But of course I did go back. I had learned much, in the past year, about what I could and could not bear. As the gypsies saw me heading down the aisle toward them, both bedpans clattered onto the floor.
THE NEXT MORNING the doctor on duty at the clinic stamped the medical approval on my discharge form. Events that had dragged so slow now moved with bewildering speed. In a dressing shed near the outer gate of the camp, I was outfitted with clothes. Underthings; a woolen skirt; a truly beautiful silk blouse; sturdy, almost-new shoes; a hat; an overcoat. I was handed a form to sign stating that I had never been ill at Ravensbruck, never had an accident, and that the treatment had been good. I signed.
In another building I received a day’s bread ration and food coupons for three additional days. I was also given back my watch, my Dutch money, and Mama’s ring. And then I was standing with a group of ten or twelve just inside the gate.
The heavy iron doors swung open; at the heels of a woman guard, we marched through. We climbed the little hill: now I could see the lake, frozen from shore to shore. The pines and the distant church steeple sparkled in the winter sun like an old-fashioned Christmas card.
I could not believe it. Perhaps we were only going to the Siemens factory; tonight we would march back to camp. But at the top of the hill we turned left, toward the center of the small town. I could feel my feet swelling in the tight new shoes, but I bit my lip and made myself stride along. I imagined the guard turning around, pointing a scornful finger: “Edema! Send her back to camp!”
At the small train station the guard turned and left us without a backward glance. Apparently we were all traveling as far as Berlin, then each pursuing her separate route home. There was a long wait on cold iron benches.
The feeling of unreality persisted. Only one thing seemed familiar, the hungry hollow in my stomach. I put off getting into my bread allowance as long as I could, but at last reached into my overcoat pocket. The packet was gone. I sprang up from the bench, looking beneath it, retracing my steps through the station. Whether I had dropped it or it had been stolen, the bread was gone, and with it the ration coupons.
At last a train pulled into the station and we crowded eagerly to it, but it was for military personnel only. Late in the afternoon we were allowed aboard a mail train, only to be put off two stops farther on to make room for a food shipment. The trip became a blur. We reached the huge, bomb-gutted terminal in Berlin sometime after midnight.
It was New Year’s Day, 1945. Betsie had been right: she and I were out of prison. . . .
Snow drifted down from a shattered skylight as I wandered, confused and frightened, through the cavernous station. I knew that I must find the train to Uelzen, but months of being told what to do had left me robbed of initiative. At last someone directed me to a distant platform. Each stop now was agony in the stiff new shoes. When I reached the platform at last, the sign said not uelzen but olsztyn, a town in Poland in exactly the opposite direction. I had to cross those acres of concrete floors again.
Ahead of me an elderly man, pink-cheeked from working in the roofless station, was raking bomb rubble into a pile. When I asked him for directions, he took me by the arm and led me himself to the proper platform. “I was to Holland once,” he said, voice wistful with recollection. “When the wife was alive, you know. Right on the sea we stayed.”
A train was standing on the track and I climbed aboard. It was hours before anyone else arrived, but I did not dare get off for fear I would not find my way back again. By the time the train started up, I was dizzy for lack of food. At the first stop outside Berlin, I followed the other passengers into the station café. I showed the woman behind the cashbox my Dutch guilders and told her I had lost my coupons.
“That’s an old story! Get out of here before I call the police!”
The trip was endless. Many miles of track could be traveled only at a crawl. Some sections were gone altogether, and there were interminable, long detours and many changes of train. Often we did not stop in a station at all, for fear of air raids, but exchanged freight and passengers in the countryside.
And all the while, out my window passed once-beautiful Germany. Fire-blackened woods, the gaunt ribs of a church standing over a ruined village. Bremen especially brought tears to my eyes. In all that wasteland, I saw one human being, an old woman poking at a heap of bricks.
In Uelzen there was a long wait between trains. It was late at night, the station was deserted. As I dozed in an empty coffee bar, my head dropped forward until it rested on the small table in front of me. A blow on my ear sent me sprawling almost to the floor.
“This is not a bedroom!” the furious station agent shrieked. “You can’t use our tables to sleep on!”
Trains came. Trains didn’t come. I climbed on and off. And then I was standing in a line at a customs shed and the sign on the little station building said NIEUWERSCHANS. As I left the building, a workman in a blue cap and blue overalls stepped up to me. “Here! You won’t get far on those legs! Hang onto my arm.”
He spoke Dutch.
I clung to him and hobbled across some tracks to where another train was waiting, engine already puffing smoke. I was in Holland.
We jerked forward. Flat, snow-covered fields glided past the window. Home. It was still occupied Holland, German soldiers still stood at intervals along the tracks—but it was home.
The train was going only as far as Groningen, a Dutch city not far from the border. Beyond that, rails were torn up and all except government travel banned. With the last of my strength, I limped to a hospital near the station.
A nurse in a sparkling white uniform invited me into a little office. When I had told my story, she left the room. In a few minutes she was back with a tray of tea and rusk. “I left the butter off,” she said. “You’re suffering from malnutrition. You must be careful what you eat.”
Tears tumbled into the hot tea as I drank. Here was someone who felt concern for me. There were no available beds in the hospital, she said, but one of the staff was away and I was to have her room. “Right now I have a hot tub running.”
I followed her down gleaming corridors in a kind of happy dream. In a large bathroom, clouds of steam were rising from a glistening white tub. Nothing in my life ever felt as good as that bath. I lay submerged to my chin, feeling the warm water soothe my scab-crusted skin. “Just five minutes more!” I would beg each time the nurse rapped at
the door.
At last I let her hand me a nightgown and lead me to a room where a bed was turned down and waiting. Sheets. White sheets top and bottom. I could not get enough of running my hands over them. The nurse was tucking a second pillow beneath my swollen feet. I struggled to stay awake: to lie here clean and cared for was such joy I did not want to sleep through a minute of it.
I STAYED IN the hospital at Groningen ten days, feeling my strength return. For most meals, I joined the nurses in their own dining room. The first time I saw the long table set with silverware and glasses, I drew back in alarm.
“You’re having a party! Let me take a tray to my room!” I did not feel ready yet for laughter and social chatter.
The young woman beside me laughed as she pulled out a chair for me. “It’s not a party! It’s just supper—and skimpy enough at that.”
I sat down blinking at knives, forks, tablecloth—had I once eaten like this, every day in the year? Like a savage watching his first civilized meal, I copied the leisurely gestures of the others as they passed bread and cheese and unhurriedly stirred their coffee.
The ache in my heart was to get to Willem and Nollie—but how could it be done with the travel ban? Telephone service, too, was more limited than ever, but at last the girl at the hospital switchboard reached the telephone operator in Hilversum with the news of Betsie’s death and my release.
In the middle of the second week, hospital authorities arranged a ride for me on a food truck headed south. We made the illegal trip at night and without headlights: the food had been diverted from a shipment headed for Germany. In the gray early morning the truck pulled up to Willem’s big brick nursing home. A tall, broad-shouldered girl answered my knock, and then went dashing down the hallway with the news that I was here.
In a moment my arms were around Tine and two of my nieces. Willem arrived more slowly, limping down the corridor with the help of a cane. We held each other a long time while I told them the details of Betsie’s illness and death.
The Hiding Place Page 24