Corrie ten Boom, Her Story
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. Ilooked 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 words: "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 | 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 HIDING PLACE
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 birthdate 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 trusty 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 trusty 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 trusty 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 which 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 which 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 round 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 step 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 J 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. Fireblackened 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.
"Almost," said Willem slowly, "almost I could wish to have this same news of Kik. It would be good for him to be with Betsie and Father." They had had no word of this tall blond son since his deportation to Germany. I remembered his hand on my shoulder, guiding me on our bicycles through the blacked-out streets to Pickwick's. Remembered his patient coaching: "You have no cards, Tante Corrie! There are no Jews." Kik! Are the young and brave as vulnerable as the old and slow?
I spent two weeks in Hilversum, trying to adjust to what my eyes had told me that first moment. Willem was dying. Only he seemed unaware of it as he hobbled along the halls of his home bringing comfort and counsel to the sick people in his care. They had over fifty patients at the moment, but what I could not get over was the number of young women in help: nurse's aides, kitchen helpers, secretaries. It was several days before I perceived that most of these "girls" were young men in hiding from the forced-labor conscription which had grown more ruthless than ever.
And still something in me could not rest until I got back to Haarlem. Nollie was there, of course. But it was the Beje, too, something in the house itself that called me, beckoned me, told me to come home.
The problem, again, was getting there. Willem had the use of an official car for nursing-home business, but only within a radius of Hilversum. Finally, after many relayed phone calls, he told me the trip had been arranged.
The roads were deserted as we set out; we passed only two other cars all the way to the rendezvous spot with the car from Haarlem. Ahead, pulled off onto the snow at the side of the road, we saw it, a long black limousine with official government plates and curtained rear windows. I kissed Willem goodbye and then stepped quickly, as instructed, into the rear of the limousine. Even in the curtained gloom the ungainly bulk beside me was unmistakable.
"Oom Herman!" I cried. "My dear Cornelia." His great hand closed around both of mine. "God permits me to see you again."
I had last seen Pickwick sitting between two soldiers on the prison bus in The Hague, his poor bald head bruised and bleeding. Now here he was, waving aside my sympathy as though that had been an incident too trivial to recall.
He seemed as well informed as ever about everything that went on in Haarlem, and as the uniformed driver sped us along the empty roads, he filled me in on all the details I ached to know. All of our Jews were safe except for Mary Itallie, who had been sent to Poland following her arrest in the street. Our group was still operating, although many of the young men were in hiding.
He warned me to expect changes at the Beje. After the police guard had been removed, a series of homeless families had been housed there, although at the moment he believed the living quarters above the shop were empty. Even before the house was unsealed, loyal Toos had returned from Scheveningen and reopened the watch business. Mr. Beukers, the optician next door, had given her space in his shop from which she had taken orders to give to our repairmen in their homes.
As my eyes adjusted to the dim light I made out my friend's face more clearly. There was perhaps an extra knob or two on the misshapen head, teeth were missing—but to that vast, kindly ugliness the beating had made no real difference at all.
Now the limousine was threading the narrow streets of Haarlem. Over the bridge on the Spaarne. Across the Grote Markt in the shadow of St. Bavo's, into the Barteljorisstraat. I was out of the car almost before it stopped, running down the alley, through the side door, and into Nollie's embrace. She and her girls had been there all morning, sweeping, washing windows, airing sheets for my homecoming. Over Nollie's shoulder I saw Toos standing in the rear door to the shop, laughing and sobbing both at once. Laughing because I was home; crying because Father and Betsie, the only two people she had ever allowed herself to love, would never be.
Together we trooped through the house and shop, looking, stroking—"Remember how Betsie would set out these cups?" "Remember how Meta would scold Eusie for leaving his pipe here?" I stood on the landing outside the dining room and ran my hand over the smooth wood of the Frisian clock. I could see Father stopping here, Kapteyn at his heels.
"We mustn't let the clock run down. ... I opened the glass face, moved the hands to agree with my wristwatch, and slowly drew up the weights. I was home. Life, like the clock, started again: mornings repairing watches in the workshop, noons most often bumping on my tireless bicycle out to Bos en Hoven Straat.
And yet .. . in a strange way, I was not home. I was still waiting, still looking for something. I spent days prowling the alleys and canal banks nearby, calling Maher Shalal Hashbaz by name. The elderly vegetable lady three stores down told me that the cat had mewed at her door the night of our arrest and she had taken him in. For months, she said, the small children of the neighborhood had banded together to bring food to "Opa's kitty." They had brought scraps from garbage pails and even tidbits from their own scanty plates smuggled past watchful mothers, and Mr. Hashbaz had remained sleek and fat.
It was mid-December, she said, when he had not appeared one night to her call, nor had she seen him since. And so IJ searched, but with a sinking heart: in this winter of Holland's hunger, all my searching brought not one single cat or dog to my call. ; I missed more than the cat; the Beje needed people to fill its rooms. I remembered Father's words to the Gestapo chief in The Hague: "I will open my door to anyone in need... . " No one in the city was in greater need than its feeble-minded. Since the start of the Nazi occupation they had been sequestered by their families in back rooms, their schools and training centers shut down, hidden from a government which had decided they were not fit to live. Soon a group of them was living at the Beje. They still could not go out on the streets, but here at least they had new surroundings and a program of sorts with the time I could take from the shop.
And still my restlessness continued. I was home, I was working and busy—or was I? Often I would come to with a start at my workbench to realize that I had sat for an hour staring into space. The repairmen Toos had found—trained under Father—were excellent. I spent less and less time in the shop; whatever or whoever I was looking for was not there.
Nor upstairs. I loved the gentle people in my care, but the house itself had ceased to be home. For Betsie's sake I bought plants for every windowsill, but I forgot to water them and they died.
Maybe I missed the challenge of the underground. When the national group approached me with a request, I agreed eagerly. They had false release papers for a prisoner in the Haarlem jail. What could be simpler than to carry this document around the corner and through those familiar wooden doors.
But as the doors closed behind me my heart began to race. What if I couldn't get out? What if I was trapped?
"Yes?" A young police lieutenant with bright orange hair stepped from behind the reception desk. "You had an appointment?"
It was Rolf. Why was he being so stiff with me? Was I under arrest? Were they going to put me in a cell? "Rolf!" I said. "Don't you know me?"
He peered at me as though trying to refresh his memory. "Of course!" he said smoothly. "The lady at the watch shop! I heard you were closed down for a while."
I gaped at him. Why, Rolf knew perfectly—and then I recalled where we were.
THE HIDING PLACE Al
In the central foyer of the police station with half a dozen German soldiers looking on. And I had greeted one of our group by name, practically admitted a special relationship between us, when the cardinal rule of the underground was... . I ran my tongue over my lips. How could I have been so stupid?
Rolf took the forged papers from my shaking hands and glanced through them "These must be passed upon by the police chief and the military overcommand together," he said. "Can you return with them tomorrow afternoon at four? The chief will be in a meeting until Theard no more. At the words "tomorrow afternoon" I had bolted for the door. I stood thankfully on the sidewalk until my knees stopped knocking. If I had ever needed proof that I had no boldness or cleverness of my own, I had it now. Whatever bravery, or skill I had ever shown were gifts of God—sheer loans from Him of the talent needed to do a job. And it was clear, from the absence of such skills now, that this was no longer His work for me.
I crept meekly back to the Beje. And it was at that moment, as I stepped into the alley, that I knew what it was I was looking for.
It was Betsie.
It was Betsie I had missed every moment of every day since I ran to the hospital window and found that she had left Ravensbruck forever. It was Betsie I had thought to find back here in Haarlem, here in the watchshop and in the home she loved.
But she was not here. And now for the first time since her death, I remembered. "We must tell people, Corrie. We must tell them what we learned... ."
That very week I began to speak. If this was God's new work for me, then He would provide the courage and the words. Through the streets and suburbs of Haarlem I bumped on my bicycle rims, bringing the message that joy runs deeper than despair.
It was news that people needed to hear that cheerless spring of 1945. No Bride of Haarlem tree filled the air with fragrance; only the stump had been too big to haul off for firewood. No tulips turned fields into carpets of color: the bulbs had all been eaten. No family was without its tragedy. In churches and club rooms and private homes in those desperate days I told the truths Betsie and I had learned in Ravensbruck.
And always at these meetings, I spoke of Betsie's first vision: of a home here in Holland where those who had been hurt could learn to live again unafraid. At the close of one of these talks a slender, aristocratic lady came up to me. I knew her by sight: Mrs. Bierens de Haan whose home in the suburb of Bloemendaal was said to be one of the most beautiful in Holland. I had never seen it, only the trees at the edge of the huge park in which it was set, and so I was astonished when this elegantly dressed lady asked me if I were still living in the ancient little house on the Barteljorisstraat.
17D: CORRIE TEN BOOM " "How did you—yes, I do. But "My mother often told me about it. She went there frequently to see an aunt of yours who, I believe, was in charitable work?"
In a rush it all came back. Opening the side door to let in a swish of satin and rustle of feathers. A long gown and a plumed hat brushing both sides of the narrow stairs. Then Tante Jans standing in her doorway with a look that froze in the bones the thought of bouncing a ball.
"Tam a widow," Mrs. Bierens de Haan was saying, "but I have five sons in the Resistance. Four are still alive and well. The fifth we have not heard from since he was taken to Germany. As you spoke just now something in me kept saying, 'Jan will come back and in gratitude you will open your home for this vision of Betsie ten Boom."'
It was two weeks later that a small boy delivered a scented envelope to the side door; inside in slanted purple letters was a single line, "Jan is home."
Mrs. Bierens de Haan herself met me at the entrance to her estate. Together we walked up an avenue of ancient oaks meeting above our heads. Rounding the final bend, we saw it, a fifty-six-room mansion in the center of a vast lawn. Two elderly gardeners were poking about the flowerbeds.
"We've let the gardens go," Mrs. Bierens de Haan said. "But Ithought we might put them back in shape. Don't you think released prisoners might find therapy in growing things?"
I didn't answer. I was staring up at the gabled roof and the leaded windows. Such tall, tall windows... . "Are there—" my throat was dry. "Are there inlaid wood floors inside, and a broad gallery around a central hall, and—and bas-relief statues set along the walls?"
Mrs. Bierens de Haan looked at me in surprise. "You've been here then! I don't recall é "No," I said. "I heard about it from I stopped. How could I explain what I did not understand? "From someone who's been here," she finished simply, not understanding my perplexity.
"Yes," I said. "Fromm someone who's been here."
The second week in May the Allies retook Holland. The Dutch flag hung from every window and the "Wilhelmus" was played on the liberated radio day and night. The Canadian army rushed to the cities the food they had stockpiled along the borders.
In June the first of many hundreds of people arrived at the beautiful home in Bloemendaal. Silent or endlessly relating their losses, withdrawn or fiercely aggressive, every one was a damaged human being. Not all had been in concentration camps; some had spent two, three, even four years hidden in attic rooms and back closets here in Holland.
THE HIDING PLACE 17s}
One of the first of these was Mrs. Kan, widow of the watch-shop owner up the street. Mr. Kan had died at the underground address; she came to us alone, a stooped, white-haired woman who startled at every sound. Others came to Bloemendaal, scarred body and soul by bombing raids or loss of family or any of the endless dislocations of war. In 1947 we began to receive Dutch people who had been prisoners of the Japanese in Indonesia.
Though none of this was by design, it proved to be the best possible setting for those who had been imprisoned in Germany. Among themselves they tended to live and relive their special woes; in Bloemendaal they were reminded that they were not the only ones who had suffered. And for all these people alike, the key to healing turned out to be the same. Each had a hurt he had to forgive: the neighbor who had reported him, the brutal guard, the sadistic soldier.
Strangely enough, it was not the Germans or the Japanese that people had most trouble forgiving; it was their fellow Dutchmen who had sided with the enemy. I saw them frequently in the streets, NSBers with their shaved heads and furtive eyes. These former collaborators were now in pitiful condition, turned out of homes and apartments, unable to find jobs, hooted at in the streets.
At first it seemed to me that we should invite them too to Bloemendaal, to live side by side with those they had injured, to seek a new compassion on both sides. But it turned out to be too soon for people working their way back from such hurt: the two times I tried it, it ended in open fights. And so as soon as homes and schools for the feeble-minded opened again around the country I turned the Beje over to these former NSBers.
This was how it went, those years after the war, experimenting, making mistakes, learning. The doctors, psychiatrists, and nutritionists who came free of charge to any place that cared for war victims, sometimes expressed surprise at our loose-run ways. At morning and evening worship people drifted in and out, table manners were atrocious, one man took a walk into Haarlem every morning at 3:00 a.m. I could not bring myself to sound a whistle or to scold, or to consider gates or curfews.
And, sure enough, in their own time and their own way, people worked out the deep pain within them. It most often started, as Betsie had known it would, in the garden. As flowers bloomed or vegetables ripened, talk was less of the bitter past, more of tomorrow's weather. As their horizons broadened, I would tell them about the people living in the Beje, people who never had a visitor, never a piece of mail. When mention of the NSBers no longer brought on a volley of self-righteous wrath, I knew the person's healing was not far away. And the day he said, "Those people you spoke of—I wonder if they'd care for some homegrown carrots," then I knew the miracle had taken place.
I continued to speak, partly because the home in Bloemendaal ran on contributions, partly because the hunger for Betsie's story seemed to increase with time. I traveled all over Holland, to other parts of Europe, to the United States.
But the place where the hunger was greatest was Germany. Germany was a land in ruins, cities of ashes and rubble, but more terrifying still, minds and hearts of ashes. Just to cross the border was to feel the great weight that hung over that land. .
It was at a church service in Munich that I saw him, the former $.S. man who had stood guard at the shower room door in the processing center at Ravensbruck. He was the first of our actual jailers that I had seen since that time. And suddenly it was all there—the roomful of mocking men, the heaps of clothing, Betsie's painblanched face.
He came up to me as the church was emptying, beaming and bowing. "How grateful I am for your message, Fraulein," he said. "To think that, as you say, He has washed my sins away!"
His hand was thrust out to shake mine. And I, who had preached so often to the people in Bloemendaal the need to forgive, kept my hand at my side.
Even as the angry, vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. Jesus Christ had died for this man; was I going to ask for more? Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me to forgive him.
I tried to smile, I struggled to raise my hand. I could not. I felt nothing, not the slightest spark of warmth or charity. And so again I breathed a silent prayer. Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me Your forgiveness.
As I took his hand the most incredible thing happened. From my shoulder along my arm and through my hand a current seemed to pass from me to him, while into my heart sprang a love for this stranger that almost overwhelmed me.
And so | discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world's healing hinges, but on His. When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives, along with the command, the love itself.
It took a lot of love. The most pressing need in postwar Germany was homes; nine million people were said to be without them. They were living in rubble heaps, half-standing buildings, and abandoned army trucks. A church group invited me to speak to a hundred families living in an abandoned factory building. Sheets and blankets had been hung between the various living quarters to make a pretense of privacy. But there was no insulating the sounds: the wail of a baby, the din of radios, the angry words of a family quarrel. How could I speak to these people of the reality of God and then go back to my quiet room in the church hostel outside the city? No, before I could bring a message to them, I would have to live among them.
And it was during the months that I spent in the factory that a director of a relief organization came to see me. They had heard of my rehabilitation work in Holland, he said, and they wondered—I was opening my mouth to say that I had no professional training in such things, when his next words silenced me.
"We've located a place for the work," he said. "It was a former concentration camp that's just been released by the government."
THE HIDING PLACE U7S
We drove to Darmstadt to look over the camp. Rolls of rusting barbed wire still surrounded it. I walked slowly up a cinder path between drab gray barracks. I pushed open a creaking door; I stepped between rows of metal cots.
"Windowboxes" I said. "We'll have them at every window. The barbed wire must come down, of course, and then we'll need paint. Green paint. Bright yellow-green, the color of things coming up new in the spring... . "
Since Then
TOGETHER WITH A committee of the German Lutheran Church, Corrie opened the camp in Darmstadt in 1946 as a home and place of renewal. It functioned in this way until 1960 when it was torn down to make room for new construction in a thriving new Germany.
The home in Bloemendaal served ex-prisoners and other war victims exclusively until 1950, when it also began to receive people in need of rest and care from the population at large. It is still in operation today, in its own new building, with patients from many parts of Europe. Since 1967 it has been governed by the Dutch Reformed Church.
Willem died of tuberculosis of the spine in December 1946. His last book, a study of sacrifice in the Old Testament, was written standing because the pain of his illness would not allow him to sit at a desk.
Just before his death Willem opened his eyes to tell Tine: "It is well—it is very well—with Kik." It was not until 1953 that the family learned definitely that his twenty-year-old son had died in 1944 at the concentration camp in Bergen-Belsen. Today a "ten Boom Street" in Hilversum honors Kik.
As a result of his wartime experiences, Peter van Woerden dedicated his musical gifts to God's service. He has composed many devotional songs, including a musical setting for the Psalms and Proverbs. Today Peter, his wife, and their five children travel all over Europe and the Near East as a family singing group with a message of God's love.
Well into her eighties, Corrie continued her indefatigable travels in obedience to Betsie's certainty that they must "tell people," working and teaching in sixty-
THE HIDING PLACE IE
one countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain. To whomever she spoke—African students on the shores of Lake Victoria, farmers in a Cuban sugar field, prisoners in an English penitentiary, factory workers in Uzbekistan—she brought the truth they learned in Ravensbruck: Jesus can turn loss into glory.
When failing health brought an end to her missionary journeys, friends provided Corrie a house in Orange County, California. There, unable to walk and, at the end, even to speak, Corrie continued to minister. Friends who came to cheer the bedridden old lady reported that it was invariably they who went away uplifted.
At 11 o'clock at night on her ninety-first birthday—April 15, 1983—Corrie, in her own phrase, went home at last. The co-author of The Hiding Place recalls her reaction to the news: | tried to be glad for Corrie when the phone call came from California: she'd waited for her "homecoming" so long. But death, from the perspective of earth, means saying goodbye. Missing her already, I roamed our house, touching one by one the physical objects she'd given us over the years. An antique brass kettle. A small square picture frame. An even smaller round one.
Little things that recalled big truths our friend had shared... . The kettle reminded me about priorities. It was Betsie who spied it, dented and soot-encrusted, in a junkyard one morning on her way to the market. She bought it with the meat money.
"Betsie!" cried Corrie, coming upstairs from the watch shop. "What are we going to do with that old thing? Look, it won't even hold water!"
"Tt's not meant to hold water," said Betsie with dignity. "Well, what's it for, then?"
"It's not 'for' anything. Oh, Corrie, wait till I get the grime off! Can't you just see the morning sun glowing on this spout? I got stew meat instead of a roast,"
Betsie went on. "You know stew is really easier for Father to chew, and I'm not hungry today. Oh, Corrie, this kettle will go on shining long after we've forgotten what we had for dinner tonight!"
And so it did. It shone for the hunted people who found shelter in the Beje. It shone for Corrie when she returned there alone from the concentration camp, and from her tireless trips to Russia, China, Vietnam. It shines in our home today, saying: What feeds the soul matters as much as what feeds the body.
In the square frame is a piece of yellow cloth cut in the shape of a six-pointed star. Across the star are four black letters: JOOD, the Dutch word for "Jew." When John and I were in Holland doing research for The Hiding Place, Corrie took us to the home of Meyer Mossel—"Eusebius" during the Nazi occupation. We sipped tea while Corrie and Eusie reminisced.
"You'd take your pipe with you," Corrie reminded him, recalling the practice drills, "but you'd forget your ashtray, and I'd have to come running after Eusie set down his cup and crossed the room to a massive antique sideboard. From the bottom drawer, buried beneath a pile of table linen, he drew out a scrap of yellow cloth cut in the shape of a star.
"All these years I wondered why I saved this thing," he said. "Now I know it was to give to you, Corrie."
We picked out the frame for Eusie's star that very afternoon: For years it hung on Corrie's wall as it hangs now on ours—a symbol bittersweet as a cross. To me the star says: Whatever in our life is hardest to bear, love can transform into beauty.
And the little round frame? It holds a piece of cloth too—ordinary white cotton, the kind underwear is made of. In fact, it is underwear, a fragment of the undershirt Corrie was wearing when the Gestapo raid came.
In prison, in solitary confinement, idleness was eroding Corrie's courage. Nollie smuggled a needle and thread to her, but soon the thread was used up. Then Corrie remembered the undershirt. She unraveled a hem. And now! Animals, houses, faces—she covered the undershirt with embroidery. The design in the round frame is a flower, with elegant curling edges and six leaves on a graceful stem.
You have to look close to see the flower (the thread, of course, is the same color as the cloth). And underwear—even a dear friend's—well, it isn't the most costly of the things Corrie gave us. But it was the one that spoke most clearly, now that she was gone.
The circle of white cotton told me that when we're feeling poorest—when we've lost a friend, when a dream has failed, when we seem to have nothing left in the world to make life beautiful—that's when God says: You're richer than you think.
Elizabeth Sherrill Chappaqua, New York
April, 1983
Tramp for the Lord
Contents
Foreword—Jamie Buckingham Introduction: The World Is My Classroom
183 185 189 1
A Strange Place to Hope Witnesses Unto Me Release! A Song in the Night A Great Discovery Music From Broken Chords Love Your Enemy In the Power of the Spirit Conny Authority Over Demons Lights From Darkest Africa God Will Provide A Place to Be Obedience The Real Corrie ten Boom Checkpoint Charlie Facing Death Saved by a Newborn Infant Miracles Every Day God's Word, the Sword—God's Perfect Weapon Where Is Heaven? When You Are Tempted to Quit
1935 201 204 Dee pall 249 220 226 Zon 237 244 254 252 262 266 270 Dee ZS IS) 281
T'll Go Where You Want Me to Go, Dear Lord... but Not Up Ten Flights of Stairs
To All the World—Beginning With One Leaving My First Love Walking in the Light Secure in Jesus I Have Much People in This City The Blessing Box Closing the Circle One Finger for His Glory
CONTENTS
The Ding-Dong Principle The Blacks and Whites of Forgiveness Getting Ready for the End
Little Witness for Christ
a8)
Foreword
My wife, Jackie, and I met Tante (Aunt) Corrie and her pretty, blond secretary, Ellen de Kroon, at the airport in Melbourne, Florida. Ellen had called the night before saying they were flying in, but that Corrie had been having some severe heart pains. At eighty years of age, that's serious business.
We met the plane and whisked them to our house which is just minutes from the airport. "I'm very tired," Tante Corrie said. "I like to rest a while."
Moments later she was stretched out on our daughter's lavender bedspread. I opened the window so the soft, tropical breeze could blow in from the lake behind the house. Gently closing the door, I cautioned the children to speak in whispers, and tiptoed into the kitchen to join Jackie and Ellen.
Ellen had brought us some Gouda cheese and we sliced it, reminiscing over my first meal in Corrie's house in Holland. Ellen couldn't wait to tell Jackie about the expression on my face when Corrie informed me I had a choice of two dishes for lunch: raw mullet dipped in onion, or smoked eel.
Talking softly and munching on cheese and crackers, I glanced up to see Tante Corrie coming down the hall, her eyes sparkling.
"Aren't you going to rest?" I asked. "Oh, I have already a good sleep,' "Ten minutes is all you need when God gives the sleep." bd she answered in her thick, Dutch accent.
It is this remarkable power of recuperation which has allowed Tante Corrie, at more than eighty years of age, to tramp the world for the Lord. I saw that same power at work in her life a year later in Pittsburgh. We were both on the program for a Bible conference at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. She had spoken three times that day to a congregation made up of everybody from bearded Jesus People to university professors. I was out late that night and, when I returned to the dormitory, I saw Ellen running down the hall. "Tante Corrie is having a heart attack," she said.
I raced to Corrie's room. She was stretched out on her bed, her face gray from the pain. "God has told me my time is not yet up," she whispered. "I have sent for a minister to pray that I may be healed."
Moments later, as the young minister arrived and laid his hands on her, I saw her features relax and the color return to her cheeks. "Thank You, Lord," she said softly, "for taking away the pain." Then, signifying she was ready for us to leave, she said, "I go to sleep now."
The next morning at eight o'clock she was behind the pulpit speaking to a thousand persons in the great auditorium—as though nothing extraordinary had happened.
I am convinced that the secret of Tante Corrie's great recuperative power, as well as the secret of her popularity as a speaker, lies im her childlikeness. As a little girl believes her Daddy can do anything, so Corrie ten Boom trusts in God—even more. She is living proof of what happens when a woman—when amy person—is filled with the Holy Spirit.
JAMIE BUCKINGHAM
I will teach you, and guide you in the way you should go. I will keep you under my eye.
Psalms 32:8 NEB
Introduction: The World Is My Classroom
THE SCHOOL OF life offers some difficult courses, but it is in the difficult class that one learns the most—especially when your teacher is the Lord Jesus Himself.
The hardest lessons for me were in a cell with four walls. The cell in the prison at Scheveningen, Holland, was six paces in length, two paces in breadth, with a door that could be opened only from the outside. Later there were four barbedwire fences, charged with electricity, enclosing a concentration camp in Germany. The gates were manned by guards with loaded machine guns. It was there in Ravensbruck that more than ninety-six thousand women died.
After that time in prison, the entire world became my classroom. Since World War II, I have traveled-around it twice, speaking in more than sixty countries on all continents. During these three decades I have become familiar with airports, bus stations, and passport offices. Under me have been wheels of every description: wheels of automobiles, trains, jinrikishas, horse-drawn wagons, and the landing gear of airplanes. Wheels, wheels, wheels! Even the wheels of wheelchairs.
I have enjoyed the hospitality in a great number of homes and have slept in many times more than a thousand beds. Sometimes I have slept in comfortable beds with foam rubber mattresses in the United States, and sometimes on straw mats on dirt floors in India. There have been clean rooms and dirty rooms.
One bathroom in Hollywood had a view of exotic plants and flowers from the sunken Roman bathtub; while a bathroom in Borneo was simply a mud hut equipped with nothing but a barrel of cold water. Once, while staying with a group of young Jewish girls in Israel, I had to climb over a mountain of building materials, and walk through a junk-filled field to make my way to a tiny outhouse which was nothing more than a hole in the ground. Such a place would have been impossible to find at night.
Always in my travels, even now that I am in my ninth decade of life, I have carried in my hand and in my heart the Bible—the very Word of Life which is almost bursting with Good News. And there has been plenty for everyone. I often feel as the disciples must have felt as they fed more than five thousand with five loaves and two fishes. The secret was that they had received it from the blessed hand of the Master. There was abundance for all and twelve basketfuls of fragments left over.
There has been plenty for the dying ones in the concentration camps—plenty for the thousands gathered in universities, in town halls, and in churches all over the world. Sometimes I have spoken to a few men in prison who stood behind bars and listened hungrily. Once to a group of six missionaries in Japan who offered me hospitality during a twenty-eight-hour rainstorm in which more than a thousand persons perished around us. Groups of hundreds and crowds of thousands have listened under pandals in India and in theaters in South America. I have spoken to tens of thousands at one time in the giant stadiums of America and retreated to the mountains of North Carolina to spend time with a small group of girls in a summer camp.
"God so loved the world .. ." (John 3:16) Jesus said. And that is why I keep going, even into my eightieth years, because we've a story to tell to the nations, a story of love and light.
God has plans—not problems—for our lives. Before she died in the concentration camp in Ravensbruck, my sister Betsie said to me, "Corrie, your whole life has been a training for the work you are doing here in prison—and for the work you will do afterward."
The life of a Christian is an education for higher service. No athlete complains when the training is hard. He thinks of the game, or the race. As the Apostle Paul wrote: In my opinion, whatever we may have to go through now is less than nothing compared with the magnificent future God has planned for us. The whole creation is on tiptoe to see the wonderful sight of the sons of God coming into their own. The world of creation cannot as yet see reality, not because it chooses to be blind, but because in God's purpose it has been so limited—yet it has been given hope. And the hope is that in the end the whole of created life will be rescued from the tyranny of change and decay and have its share in that magnificent liberty which can only belong to the children of God!
It is plain to anyone with eyes to see that at the present time all created life groans in a sort of universal travail. And it is plain, too, that we who have a foretaste of the Spirit are in a state of painful tension, while we wait for that redemption of our bodies which will mean that at last we have realized our full sonship in him.
Romans 8:18-23 PHILLIPS
TRAMP FOR THE LORD 187
Looking back across the years of my life, I can see the working of a divine pattern which is the way of God with His children. When I was in a prison camp in Holland during the war, I often prayed, "Lord, never let the enemy put me in a German concentration camp." God answered no to that prayer. Yet in the German camp, with all its horror, I found many prisoners who had never heard of Jesus Christ. If God had not used my sister Betsie and me to bring them to Him, they would never have heard of Him. Many died, or were killed, but many died with the Name of Jesus on their lips. They were well worth all our suffering. Faith is like radar which sees through the fog—the reality of things at a distance that the human eye cannot see.
My life is but a weaving, between my God and me, I do not choose the colors, He worketh steadily, Oftimes He weaveth sorrow, and I in foolish pride, Forget He sees the upper, and I the underside. Not till the loom is silent, and shuttles cease to fly, Will God unroll the canvas and explain the reason why. The dark threads are as needful in the skillful Weaver's hand, As the threads of gold and silver in the pattern He has planned.
ANONYMOUS
Although the threads of my life have often seemed knotted, I know, by faith, that on the other side of the embroidery there is a crown. As I have walked the world— a tramp for the Lord—I have learned a few lessons in God's great classroom. Even as I share these things with those of you who read this book, I pray the Holy Spirit will reveal something of the divine pattern in God's plan for you also.
CORRIE TEN BOOM
Baarn, Holland