Corrie ten Boom, Her Story (continued)
10. Scheveningen
OUTSIDE HAARLEM THE bus took the south road, paralleling the sea. On our right rose the low sandy hills of the dune country, soldiers silhouetted on the ridges. Clearly we were not being taken to Amsterdam.
A two-hour drive brought us instead into the streets of The Hague. The bus stopped in front of a new, functional building; word was whispered back that this was Gestapo headquarters for all of Holland. We were marched—all but Pickwick, who seemed unable to rise out of his seat—into a large room where the endless process of taking down names, addresses, and occupations began all over again.
On the other side of the high counter running the length of the room I was startled to see both Willemse and Kapteyn. As each of the prisoners from Haarlem reached the desk, one or the other would lean forward and speak to a man seated at a typewriter and there would be a clatter of sound from the machine.
Suddenly the chief interrogator's eye fell on Father. "That old man!" he cried. "Did he have to be arrested? You, old man!"
Willem led Father up to the desk. The Gestapo chief leaned forward. "I'd like to send you home, old fellow," he said. "I'll take your word that you won't cause any more trouble."
I could not see Father's face, only the erect carriage of his shoulders and the halo of white hair above them. But I heard his answer.
"If I go home today," he said evenly and clearly, "tomorrow I will open my door again to any man in need who knocks."
The amiability drained from the other man's face. "Get back inline!" he shouted.
"Schnell! This court will tolerate no more delays!"
But delays seemed all that this court existed for. As we inched along the counter there were endless repetitions of questions, endless consulting of papers, endless coming and going of officials. Outside the windows the short winter day was fading. We had not eaten since the rolls and water at dawn.
Ahead of me in line, Betsie answered, "Unmarried," for the twentieth time that day.
"Number of children?" droned the interrogator.
"l''m unmarried," Betsie repeated. The man did not even look up from his papers. "Number of children!" he snapped.
"No children," said Betsie resignedly. Toward nightfall a stout little man wearing the yellow star was led past us to the far end of the room. A sound of scuffling made us all look up. The wretched man was attempting to hold onto something clutched in his hands.
"It's mine!" he kept shouting. "You can't take it! You-can't take my purse!" What madness possessed him? What good did he imagine money would do him now? But he continued to struggle, to the obvious glee of the men around him.
"Here Jew!" I heard one of them say. He lifted his booted foot and kicked the small man in the back of his knees. "This is how we take things from a Jew."
It made so much noise. That was all I could think as they continued to kick him. I clutched the counter to keep from falling myself as the sounds continued. Wildly, unreasonably, I hated the man being kicked, hated him for being so helpless and so hurt. At last I heard them drag him out.
Then all at once I was standing in front of the chief questioner. I looked up and met Kapteyn's eyes, just behind him.
"This woman was the ringleader," he said. Through the turmoil inside me I realized it was important for the other man to believe him. "What Mr. Kapteyn says is true," I said. "These others—they know nothing about it. It was all my < "Name?" the interrogator inquired Bee nears "Cornelia ten Boom, and I'm the—" "Age?" "Fifty-two. The rest of these people had nothing to do "Occupation?" "But I've told you a dozen times!" | burst out in desperation. "Occupation?" he repeated.
It was dark night when we were marched at last out of the building. The green bus was gone. Instead we made out the bulk of a large canvas-roofed army truck. Two soldiers had to lift Father over the tailgate. There was no sign of Pickwick.
Father, Betsie, and I found places to sit on a narrow bench that ran around the sides.
THE HIDING PLACE
The truck had no springs and bounced roughly over the bomb-pitted streets of The Hague. I slipped my arm behind Father's back to keep him from striking the edge. Willem, standing near the back, whispered back what he could see of the blacked-out city. We had left the downtown section and seemed to be headed west toward the suburb of Scheveningen. That was our destination then, the federal penitentiary named after this seaside town.
The truck jerked to a halt; we heard a screech of iron. We bumped forward a few feet and stopped again. Behind us massive gates clanged shut.
We climbed down to find ourselves in an enormous courtyard surrounded by a high brick wall. The truck had backed up to a long low building; soldiers prodded us inside. I blinked in the white glare of bright ceiling lights.
"Nasen gegen Mauer!"—"Noses to the wall!" I felt a shove from behind and found myself staring at cracked plaster. I turned my eyes as far as I could, first left and then right. There was Willem. Two places away from him, Betsie. Next to me on the other side was Toos. All like me standing with their faces to the wall. Where was Father?
There was an endless wait while the scars on the wall before my eyes became faces, landscapes, animal shapes. Then somewhere to the right a door opened.
"Women prisoners follow me!" The matron's voice sounded as metallic as the squealing door. As I stepped away from the wall I glanced swiftly round the room for Father. There he was—a few feet out from the wall, seated in a straight-backed chair. One of the guards must have brought it for him.
Already the matron was starting down the long corridor that I could see through the door. But I hung back, gazing desperately at Father, Willem, Peter, all our brave underground workers.
"Father!" I cried suddenly. "God be with you!" His head turned toward me. The harsh overhead light flashed from his glasses.
"And with you, my daughters," he said. I turned and followed the others. Behind me the door slammed closed. And with you! And with you! Oh Father, when will I see you next?
Betsie's hand slipped around mine. A strip of coconut-palm matting ran down the center of the wide hall. We stepped onto it off the damp concrete.
"Prisoners walk to the side." It was the bored voice of the guard behind us.
"Prisoners must not step on the matting."
Guiltily we stepped off the privileged path. Ahead of us in the corridor was a desk, behind it a woman in uniform. As each prisoner reached this point she gave her name for the thousandth time that day and placed on the desk whatever she was wearing of value. Nollie, Betsie, and I unstrapped our beautiful wristwatches. As I handed mine to the officer, she pointed to the simple gold ring that had belonged to Mama. I wriggled it from my finger and laid it on the desk along with my wallet and paper guilders.
The procession down the corridor continued. The walls on both sides of us were lined with narrow metal doors. Now the column of women halted: the matron was fitting a key into one of them. We heard the thud of a bolt drawn back, the screech of hinges. The matron consulted a list in her hand, then called the name of a lady I didn't even know, one of those who had been at Willem's prayer meeting.
Was it possible that that had been only yesterday? Was this only Thursday night? Already the events at the Beje seemed part of another lifetime. The door banged shut; the column moved on. Another door unlocked, another human being closed behind it. No two from Haarlem in the same cell.
Among the very first names read from the list was Betsie's. She stepped through the door; before she could turn or say goodbye, it had closed. Two cells farther on, Nollie left me. The clang of those two doors rang in my ears as the slow march continued.
Now the corridor branched and we turned left. Then right, then left again, an endless world of steel and concrete.
"Ten Boom, Cornelia." Another door rasped open. The cell was deep and narrow, scarcely wider than the door. A woman lay on the single cot, three others on straw ticks on the floor.
"Give this one the cot," the matron said. "She's sick."
And indeed, even as the door slammed behind me a spasm of coughing seized my chest and throat.
"We don't want a sick woman in here!" someone shouted. They were stumbling to their feet, backing as far from me as the narrow cubicle would allow.
"Pm... Im so very sorry " | began, but another voice interrupted me. "Don't be. It isn't your fault. Come on, Frau Mikes, give her the cot." The young woman turned to me. "Let me hang up your hat and coat."
Gratefully I handed her my hat, which she added to a row of clothes hanging from hooks along one wall. But I kept my coat wrapped tight around me. The cot had been vacated and I moved shakily toward it, trying not to sneeze or breathe as I squeezed past my cell-mates. I sank down on the narrow bed, then went into a fresh paroxysm of coughs as a cloud of choking black dust rose from the filthy straw mattress. At last the attack passed and I lay down. The sour straw smell filled my nostrils. I felt each slat of wood through the thin pallet.
"T will never be able to sleep on such a bed," I thought, and the next thing | knew it was morning and there was a clattering at the door "Food call," my cellmates told me. I struggled to my feet. A square of metal had dropped open in the door, forming a small shelf. Onto this someone in the hall was placing tin plates filled with a steaming gruel.
"There's a new one here!" the woman called Frau Mikes called through the aperture. "We get five portions!" Another tin plate was slammed onto the shelf.
"If you're not hungry," Frau Mikes added, "I'll help you with it."
I picked up my plate, stared at the watery gray porridge and handed it silently to her. In a little while the plates were collected and the pass-through in the door slammed shut.
Later in the morning a key grated in the lock, the bolt banged, and the door opened long enough for the sanitary bucket to be passed out. The wash basin was also emptied and returned with clean water. The women picked up their straw pallets from the floor and piled them in a corner, raising a fresh storm of dust which started me coughing helplessly again.
Then a prison boredom—which I soon learned to fear above all else—settled over the cell. At first I attempted to relieve it by talking with the others, but though they were as courteous as people can be who are living literally on top of one another, they turned aside my questions and I never learned much about them.
The young woman who had spoken kindly to me the night before, I did discover, was a baroness, only seventeen years old. This young girl paced constantly, from morning until the overhead light bulb went off at night, six steps to the door, six steps back, dodging those sitting on the floor, back and forth like an animal in a cage.
Frau Mikes turned out to be an Austrian woman who had worked as a charwoman in an office building. She often cried for her canary. "Poor little thing! What will become of him! They'!I never think to feed him."
This would start me thinking of our cat. Had Maher Shalal Hashbaz made his escape into the street—or was he starving inside the sealed house? I would picture him prowling among the chairlegs in the dining room, missing the shoulders he loved to walk on. I tried not to let my mind venture higher in the house, not to let it climb the stairs to see if Thea, Mary, Eusie—no! I could do nothing for them here in this cell. God knew they were there.
One of my cellmates had spent three years here in Scheveningen. She could hear the rattle of the meal cart long before the rest of us and tell by the footstep who was passing in the corridor. "That's the trusty from medical supply. Someone's sick." ... "This is the fourth time someone in 316 has gone for a hearing."
Her world consisted of this cubicle and the corridor outside—and soon I began to see the wisdom of this narrowed vision, and why prisoners instinctively shied away from questions about their larger lives. For the first days of my imprisonment I stayed in a frenzy of anxiety about Father, Betsie, Willem, Pickwick. Was Father able to eat this food? Was Betsie's blanket as thin as this one?
But these thoughts led to such despair that I soon learned not to give in to them.
In an effort to fix my mind on something I asked Frau Mikes to teach me the card game that she played hour after hour. She had made the cards herself with the squares of toilet paper that were issued two a day to each prisoner; all day she sat onacorner of the cot endlessly laying them out in front of her and gathering them up again. ; I was a slow learner, since no cards of any kind had been played at the Beje.
Now as I began to grasp the solitaire game I wondered what Father's resistance to them had been—surely nothing could be more innocent than this succession of shapes called clubs, spades, diamonds... . But as the days passed I began to discover a subtle danger. When the cards went well my spirits rose. It was an omen: someone from Haarlem had been released! But if I lost... . Maybe someone was ill. The people in the secret room had been found....
At last I had to stop playing. In any case I was finding it hard to sit up so long. Increasingly I was spending the days as I did the nights, tossing on the thin straw pallet trying in vain to find a position in which all aches at once were eased. My head throbbed continually, pain shot up and down my arms, my cough brought up blood.
I was thrashing feverishly on the cot one morning when the cell door opened and there stood the steel-voiced matron I had seen the night I entered the cell two weeks before.
"Ten Boom, Cornelia."
I struggled to my feet.
"Bring your hat and your coat and come with me."
I looked around at the others for a hint as to what was happening. "You're going to the outside," our prison expert said. "When you take your hat you always go outside."
My coat I was wearing already, but I took my hat from its hook and stepped out into the corridor. The matron relocked the door then set off so rapidly that my heart hammered as I trotted after her, careful to stay off the precious matting.
I stared yearningly at the locked doors on either side of us; I could not remember behind which ones my sisters had disappeared.
At last we stepped out into the broad, high-walled courtyard. Sky! For the first time in two weeks, blue sky! How high the clouds were, how inexpressibly white and clean. I remembered suddenly how much sky had meant to Mama.
"Quick!" snapped the matron.
I hurried to the shiny black automobile beside which she was standing. She opened the rear door and I got in. Two others were already in the back seat, a soldier and a woman with a gaunt gray face. In front next to the driver slumped a desperately illlooking man whose head lolled strangely on the seat back. As the car started up the woman beside me lifted a blood-stained towel to her mouth and coughed into it. I understood: the three of us were ill. Perhaps we were going to a hospital!
The massive prison gate opened and we were in the outside world, spinning along broad city streets. I stared in wonderment through the window. People walking, looking in store windows, stopping to talk with friends. Had I truly been as free as that only two weeks ago?
The car parked before an office building; it took both the soldier and the driver to get the sick man up three flights of stairs. We entered a waiting room jammed with people and sat down under the watchful eyes of the soldier. When nearly an hour had passed I asked permission to use the lavatory. The soldier spoke to the trim white-uniformed nurse behind the reception desk.
"This way," she said crisply. She took me down a short hall, stepped into the bathroom with me and shut the door. "Quick! Is there any way I can help?"
I blinked at her. "Yes. Oh yes! A Bible! Could you get me a Bible? And—a needle and thread! And a toothbrush! And soap!"
She bit her lip doubtfully. "So many patients today—and the soldier—but I'll do what I can." And she was gone.
But her kindness shone in the little room as brightly as the gleaming white tiles and shiny faucets. My heart soared as I scrubbed the grime off my neck and face; A man's voice at the door: "Come on! You've been in there long enough!" Hastily I rinsed off the soap and followed the soldier back to the waiting room. The nurse was back at her desk, coolly efficient as before; she did not look up. After another long wait my name was called. The doctor asked me to cough, took my temperature and blood pressure, applied his stethoscope, and announced that I had pleurisy with effusion, pre-tubercular.
He wrote something on a sheet of paper. Then with one hand on the doorknob he laid the other for an instant on my shoulder. "I hope," he said in a low voice, "that I am doing you a favor with this diagnosis."
In the waiting room the soldier was on his feet ready for me. As I crossed the room the nurse rose briskly from her desk and swished past me. In my hand I felt a small knobby something wrapped in paper.
I slid it into my coat pocket as I followed the soldier down the stairs. The other woman was already back in the car; the sick man did not reappear. All during the return ride my hand kept straying to the object in my pocket, stroking it, tracing the outline. "Oh Lord, it's so small, but still it could be—let it be a Bible!"
The high walls loomed ahead, the gate rang shut behind us. At last, at the end of the long echoing corridors, I reached my cell and drew the package from my pocket. My cellmates crowded round me as I unwrapped the newspaper with trembling hands. Even the baroness stopped her pacing to watch.
As two bars of precious prewar soap appeared, Frau Mikes clapped her hand over her mouth to suppress her yelp of triumph. No tooth-brush or needle but— unheard-of wealth—a whole packet of safety pins! And, most wonderful of all, not indeed a whole Bible, but in four small booklets, the four Gospels.
I shared the soap and pins among the five of us but, though I offered to divide the books as well, they refused. "They catch you with those," the knowledgeable one said, "and it's double sentence and kalte kost as well." Kalte kost—the bread ration alone without the daily plate of hot food—was the punishment constantly held over our heads. If we made too much noise we'd have kalte kost. If we were slow with the bucket it would be kalte kost. But even kalte kost would be a small price to pay, I thought as I stretched my aching body on the foul straw, for the precious books I clutched between my hands.
It was two evenings later, near the time when the light bulb usually flickered
off, that the cell door banged open and a guard strode in.
"Ten Boom, Cornelia," she snapped. "Get your things." I stared at her, an insane hope rising in me. "You mean "Silence! No talking!"
It did not take long to gather my "things": my hat and an undervest that was drying after a vain attempt to get it clean in the much-used basin water. My coat with the precious contents of its pockets had never yet been off my back. Why such strict silence, | wondered. Why should I not be allowed even a goodbye to my cellmates? Would it be so very wrong for a guard to smile now and then, or give a few words of explanation?
I said farewell to the others with my eyes and followed the stiff-backed woman into the hall. She paused to lock the door, then marched off down the corridor. But—the wrong way! We were not heading toward the outside entrance at all, but deeper into the maze of prison passageways.
Still without a word she halted in front of another door and opened it with a key. I stepped inside. The door clanged behind me. The bolt slammed shut.
The cell was identical with the one I had just left, six steps long, two wide, a single cot at the back. But this one was empty. As the guard's footsteps died away down the corridor I leaned against the cold metal of the door. Alone. Alone behind these walls. ...
I must not let my thoughts run wildly; I must be very mature and very practical.
Six steps. Sit down on the cot. This one reeked even worse than the other: the straw seemed to be fermenting. I reached for the blanket: someone had been sick on it.
I thrust it away but it was too late. I dashed for the bucket near the door and leaned weakly over it.
At that moment the light bulb in the ceiling went out. I groped back to the cot and huddled there in the dark, setting my teeth against the stink of the bedding, wrapping my coat tighter about me. The cell was bitter cold, wind hammered against the wall. This must be near the outside edge of the prison: the wind had never shrieked so in the other one.
What had I done to be separated from people this way? Had they discovered the conversation with the nurse at the doctor's office? Or perhaps some of the prisoners from Haarlem had been interrogated and the truth about our group was known. Maybe my sentence was solitary confinement for years and years... .
In the morning my fever was worse. I could not stand even long enough to get my food from the shelf in the door and after an hour or so the plate was taken away untouched.
Toward evening the pass-through dropped open again and the hunk of coarse prison bread appeared. By now I was desperate for food but less able to walk than ever. Whoever was in the hall must have seen the problem. A hand picked up the bread and hurled it toward me. It landed on the floor beside the cot where I clawed for it and gnawed it greedily.
For several days while the fever raged my supper was delivered in this manner. Mornings the door squealed open and a woman in a blue smock carried the plate of hot gruel to the cot. I was as starved for the sight of a human face as for the food and tried in a hoarse croak to start a conversation. But the woman, obviously a fellow prisoner, would only shake her head with a fearful glance toward the hall.
The door also opened once a day to let in the trusty from Medical Supply with a dose of some stinging yellow liquid from a very dirty bottle. The first time he entered the cell I clutched at his sleeve. "Please!" I rasped. "Have you seen an eightyfour-year-old man—white hair, a long beard? Casper ten Boom! You must have taken medicine to him
The man tugged loose. "I don't know! I don't know anything!" The cell door slammed back against the wall, framing the guard. "Solitary prisoners are not permitted to talk! If you say another word to one of the work-duty prisoners it will be kalte kost for the duration of your sentence!" And the door banged behind the two of them.
This same trusty was also charged with recording my temperature each time he came. I had to take off my shirt and place the thermometer between my arm and the side of my body. It did not look to me like an accurate system: sure enough, by the end of the week an irritable voice called through the food slot, "Get up and get the food yourself! Your fever's gone—you won't be waited on again!"
I felt sure that the fever had not gone, but there was nothing for it but to creep, trembling, to the door for my plate. When [had replaced it I would lie down again on the smelly straw, steeling myself for the bawling out I knew would come. "Look at the great lady, back in bed again! Are you going to lie there all day long?" Why lying down was such a crime I could never understand. Nor indeed what one was supposed to accomplish if one got up....
Thoughts, now that I was alone, were a bigger problem than ever. I could no longer even pray for family and friends by name, so great was the fear and longing wrapped round each one. "Those I love, Lord," I would say. "You know them. You see them. Oh—bless them all!"
Thoughts were enemies. That prison bag. . . how many times I opened it in my mind and pawed through all the things I had left behind. A fresh blouse. Aspirin, a whole bottle of them. Toothpaste with a kind of pepperminty taste, and Then I would catch myself. How ridiculous, such thoughts! If I had it to do again would I really put these little personal comforts ahead of human lives? Of course is CORRIE TEN BOOM not. But in the dark nights, as the wind howled and the fever pulsed, I would draw that bag out of some dark corner of my mind and root through it once again. A towel to lay on this scratchy straw. An aspirin...
In only one way was this new cell an improvement over the first one. It had a window. Seven iron bars ran across it, four bars up and down. It was high in the wall, much too high to look out of, but through those twenty-eight squares I could see the sky.
All day I kept my eyes fixed on that bit of heaven. Sometimes clouds moved across the squares, white or pink or edged with gold, and when the wind was from the west I could hear the sea. Best of all, for nearly an hour each day, gradually lengthening as the spring sun rose higher, a shaft of checkered light streamed into the dark little room. As the weather turned warmer and I grew stronger I would stand up to catch the sunshine on my face and chest, moving along the wall with the moving light, climbing at last onto the cot to stand on tiptoe in the final rays.
As my health returned, I was able to use my eyes longer. I had been sustaining myself from my Scriptures a verse at a time; now like a starving man I gulped entire Gospels at a reading, seeing whole the magnificent drama of salvation.
And as I did, an incredible thought prickled the back of my neck. Was it possible that this—all of this that seemed so wasteful and so needless—this war, Scheveningen prison, this very cell, none of it was unforeseen or accidental? Could it be part of the pattern first revealed in the Gospels? Hadn't Jesus—and here my reading became intent indeed—hadn't Jesus been defeated as utterly and unarguably as our little group and our small plans had been?
But . .. if the Gospels were truly the pattern of God's activity, then defeat was only the beginning. I would look around at the bare little cell and wonder what conceivable victory could come from a place like this.
The prison expert in the first cell had taught me to make a kind of knife by rubbing a corset stay against the rough cement floor. It seemed to me strangely important not to lose track of time. And so with a sharp-honed stay I scratched a calendar on the wall behind the cot. As each long featureless day crawled to a close, I checked off another square. I also started a record of special dates beneath the calendar: February 28,1944 Arrest February 29, 1944 Transport to Scheveningen March 16, 1944 Beginning of Solitary
And now a new date:
April 15, 1944 My Birthday in Prison
A birthday had to mean a party, but I searched in vain for a single cheerful object. At least in the other cell there had been bright bits of clothing: the baroness' red hat, Frau Mikes' yellow blouse. How I regretted now my own lack of taste in clothes.
At least I would have a song at my party! I chose one about the Bride of Haarlem tree—she would be in full bloom now. The child's song brought it all close: the bursting branches, the petals raining like snow on the brick sidewalk "Quiet in there!" A volley of blows sounded on my iron door. "Solitary prisoners are to keep silent!"
Isat on the cot, opened the Gospel of John, and read until the ache in my heart went away.
Two days after my birthday I was taken for the first time to the big, echoing shower room. A grim-faced guard marched beside me, her scowl forbidding me to take pleasure in the expedition. But nothing could dim the wonder of stepping into that wide corridor after so many weeks of close confinement.
At the door to the shower room several women were waiting. Even in the strict silence this human closeness was joy and strength. I scanned the faces of those coming out, but neither Betsie nor Nollie was there, nor anyone else from Haarlem. And yet, I thought, they are all my sisters. How rich is anyone who can simply see human faces!
The shower too was glorious: warm clean water over my festering skin, streams of water through my matted hair. I went back to my cell with a new resolve: the next time I was permitted a shower I would take with me three of my Gospels. Solitary was teaching me that it was not possible to be rich alone.
And I was not alone much longer: into my solitary cell came a small busy black ant. I had almost put my foot where he was one morning as I carried my bucket to the door when I realized the honor being done me. I crouched down and admired the marvelous design of legs and body. I apologized for my size and promised I would not so thoughtlessly stride about again.
After a while he disappeared through a crack in the floor. But when my evening piece of bread appeared on the door shelf, I scattered some crumbs and to my joy he popped out almost at once. He picked up a heroic piece, struggled down the hole with it and came back for more. It was the beginning of a relationship.
Now in addition to the daily visit of the sun I had the company of this brave and handsome guest—in fact soon of a whole small committee. If I was washing out clothes in the basin or sharpening the point on my homemade knife when the ants appeared, I stopped at once to give them my full attention. It would have been unthinkable to squander two activities on the same bit of time!
One evening as I was crossing another long, long day from the calendar scratched on my wall, I heard shouts far down the corridor. They were answered closer by. Now noisy voices came from every direction. How unusual for the prisoners to be making a racket! Where were the guards?
The shelf in my door had not been closed since the bread came two hours ago.
I pressed my ear to it and listened but it was hard to make sense of the tumult outside. Names were being passed from cell to cell. People were singing, others pounding on their doors. The guards must all be away!
"Please! Let's be quiet!" a voice nearby pleaded. "Let's use this time before they get back!"
"What's happening?" I cried through the open slot. "Where are the guards?" "At the party," the same voice answered me. "It's Hitler's birthday." Then—these must be their own names people were shouting down the corridor. This was our chance to tell where we were, to get information.
"I'm Corrie ten Boom!" I called through the food shelf. "My whole family is here somewhere! Oh, has anyone seen Casper ten Boom! Betsie ten Boom! Nollie van Woerden! Willem ten Boom!" J shouted names until I was hoarse and heard them repeated from mouth to mouth down the long corridor. I passed names too, to the right and left, as we worked out a kind of system.
After a while answers began to filter back. "Mrs. van der Elst is in Cell 228... ."
"Pietje's arm is much better. . . ." Some of the messages I could hardly bear to relay: "The hearing was very bad: he sits in the cell without speaking." "To my husband
Joost: our baby died last week... ."
Along with personal messages were rumors about the world outside, each more wildly optimistic than the last.
"There is a revolution in Germany!" "The Allies have invaded Europe!" "The war cannot last three weeks longer!" At last some of the names J had shouted out began to return. "Betsie ten Boom is in cell 312. She says to tell you that God is good."
Oh, that was Betsie! That was every inch Betsie! Then: "Nollie van Woerden was in cell 318, but she was released more than a month ago." Released! Oh, thank God!
Toos, too, released! News from the men's section was longer returning, but as it did my heart leapt higher and higher: Peter van Woerden. Released! Herman Sluring. Released! Willem ten Boom. Released! As far as I could discover, every single one taken in the raid on the Beje—with the exception of Betsie and me—had been freed. Only about Father could I discover no news at all, although I called his name over and over into the murmuring hall. No one seemed to have seen him. No one seemed to know... .
It was perhaps a week later that my cell door opened and a prison trusty tossed a package wrapped in brown paper onto the floor. I picked it up, hefted it, turned
THE HIDING PLACE tals it over and over. The wrapping paper had been torn open and carelessly retied, but even through the disarray I could spot Nollie's loving touch. I sat on the cot and opened it.
There, familiar and welcoming as a visit from home, was the light blue embroidered sweater. As I put it on I seemed to feel Nollie's arms circling my shoulders. Also inside the package were cookies and vitamins, needle and thread, and a bright red towel. How Nollie understood the gray color-hunger of prison! She had even wrapped the cookies in gay red cellophane.
I was biting into the first one when an inspiration came to me. I dragged the cot out from the wall to stand under the naked overhead bulb. Climbing on it I fashioned a lampshade with the paper: a cheery red glow at once suffused the bleak little room.
I was rewrapping the cookies in the brown outer paper when my eyes fell on the address written in Nollie's careful hand, slanting upward toward the postage stamp. But—Nollie's handwriting did not slant... .The stamp! Hadn't a message once come to the Beje under a stamp, penciled in the tiny square beneath? Laughing at my own overwrought imagination I moistened the paper in the basin water and worked the stamp gently free.
Words! There was definitely writing there—but so tiny I had to climb again onto the cot and hold the paper close to the shaded bulb.
"All the watches in your closet are safe."
Safe. Then—then Eusie, and Henk, and Mary, and—they'd got out of the secret room! They'd escaped! They were free!
I burst into racking sobs, then heard heavy footsteps bearing down the corridor. Hastily I jumped down from the cot and shoved it back to the wall. The passthrough clattered open.
"What's the commotion in here!"
"It's nothing. I—won't do it again." The slot in the door snapped shut. How had they managed it? How had they got past the soldiers? Never mind, dear Lord, You were there, and that was all that mattered. .
The cell door opened to let in a German officer followed by the head matron herself. My eyes ran hungrily over the well-pressed uniform with its rows of brilliant-colored battle ribbons.
"Miss ten Boom," the officer began in excellent Dutch, "I have a few questions
I believe you can help me with."
The matron was carrying a small stool which she leapt to set down for the officer.
I stared at her. Was this obsequious creature the terrible-voiced terror of the women's wing?
The officer sat down, motioning me to take the cot. There was something in that gesture that belonged to the world outside the prison. As he took out a small notebook and began to read names from it I was suddenly conscious of my rumpled clothes, my long, ragged fingernails.
To my relief I honestly did not know any of the names he read—now I understood the wisdom of the ubiquitous "Mr. Smit." The officer stood up. "Will you be feeling well enough to come for your hearing soon?"
Again that ordinary human manner. "Yes—I—I hope so." The officer stepped out into the hall, the matron bobbing and scurrying after him with the stool.
It was the third of May; I was sitting on my cot sewing. Since Nollie's package had been delivered I had a wonderful new occupation: one by one I was pulling the threads from the red towel and with them embroidering bright figures on the pajamas that I had only recently stopped wearing beneath my clothes. A window with ruffled curtains. A flower with an impossible number of petals and leaves. I had just started work on the head of a cat over the right pocket when the food shelf in the door banged open and shut with a single motion.
And there on the floor of the cell lay a letter.
I dropped the pajamas and sprang forward. Nollie's writing. Why should my hand tremble as I picked it up?
The letter had been opened by the censor—held by them too: the postmark was over a week old. But it was a letter, a letter from home—the very first one! Why this sudden fear?
I unfolded the paper. "Corrie, can you be very brave?" No! No, I couldn't be brave! I forced my eyes to read on.
"T have news that is very hard to write you. Father survived his arrest by only ten days. He is now with the Lord....
I stood with the paper between my hands so long that the daily shaft of sunlight entered the cell and fell upon it. Father ... Father ... the letter glittered in the criss-cross light as I read the rest. Nollie had no details, not how or where he had died, not even where he was buried.
Footsteps were passing on the coconut matting. I ran to the door and pressed my face to the closed pass-through. "Please! Oh please!"
The steps stopped. The shelf dropped open. "What's the matter?"
"Please! I've had bad news—oh please, don't go away!" "Wait a minute." The footsteps retreated, then returned with a jangle of keys. The cell door opened.
"Here." The young woman handed me a pill with a glass of water. "It's a sedatives" "This letter just came," I explained. "It says that my father—it says my father has died."
The girl stared at me. "Your father!" she said in astonished tones.
I realized how very old and decrepit I must look to this young person. She stood in the doorway a while, obviously embarrassed at my tears. "Whatever happens," she said at last, "you brought it on yourself by breaking the laws!"
Dear Jesus, I whispered as the door slammed and her footsteps died away, how foolish of me to have called for human help when You are here. To think that Father sees You now, face to face! To think that he and Mama are together again, walking those bright streets.
I pulled the cot from the wall and below the calendar scratched another date: March 9, 1944 Father. Released.