The Hiding Place

by Corrie ten Boom

  “I’m sorry, but the child’s watch you left with us is not repairable. Do you have the receipt?” (A Jewish child has died in one of our houses. We need a burial permit.)

  One morning in the middle of June the telephone rang with this message. “We have a man’s watch here that’s giving us trouble. We can’t find anyone to repair it. For one thing, the face is very old-fashioned. . . .”

  So, a Jew whose features gave him away. This was the hardest kind of person to place. “Send the watch over and I’ll see what we can do in our own shop,” I said.

  Promptly at 7:00 that evening the side doorbell rang. I glanced at the mirror in the window of the dining room where we were still sitting over tea of rose leaves and cherry stems. Even from the side of his head I could tell that this was our old-fashioned watch. His form, his clothes, his very stance were music-hall-comedy Jewish.

  I ran down to the door. “Do come in.”

  The smiling slender man in his early thirties, with his protruding ears, balding head, and minuscule glasses, gave an elaborate bow.

  I liked him instantly.

  Once the door was closed he took out a pipe. “The very first thing I must ask,” he said, “is whether or not I should leave behind my good friend the pipe? Meyer Mossel and his pipe are not easily separated. But for you, kind lady, should the smell get into your drapes, I would gladly say good-bye to my friend nicotine.”

  I laughed. Of all the Jews who had come to our house this was the first to enter gaily and with a question about our own comfort.

  “Of course you must keep your pipe!” I said. “My father smokes a cigar—when he can get one these days.”

  “Ah! These days!” Meyer Mossel raised arms and shoulders in an enormous shrug. “What do you expect, when the barbarians have overrun the camp?”

  I took him up to the dining room. There were seven seated at the table, a Jewish couple waiting placement and three underground workers in addition to Father and Betsie. Meyer Mossel’s eyes went straight to Father.

  “But,” he cried, “one of the Patriarchs!”

  It was exactly the right thing to say to Father. “But,” he returned with equal good humor, “a brother of the Chosen People!”

  “Can you recite the 166th Psalm, Opa?” Meyer said.

  Father beamed. Of course there is no Psalm 166; the Psalter stops with 150. It must be a joke, and nothing could please Father better than a scriptural joke. “The 166th Psalm?”

  “Shall I recite it for you?” Meyer asked.

  Father gave a bow of assent and Meyer plunged into verse.

  “But that’s Psalm 100!” Father interrupted. And then his face lit up. Of course! Psalm 66 started with the identical words. Meyer had asked for the 100th and the 66th Psalm. For the rest of the evening I could hear Father chuckling, “Psalm 166!”

  At 8:45 Father took the old brass-bound Bible from its shelf. He opened to the reading in Jeremiah where we had left off the night before, then with sudden inspiration passed the Bible across the table to Meyer.

  “I would consider it an honor if you would read for us tonight,” Father said.

  Lifting the Book lovingly, Meyer rose to his feet. From a pocket came a small prayer cap, and then, from deep in this throat, half-sung, half-pleaded, came the words of the ancient prophet, so feelingly and achingly that we seemed to hear the cry of the Exile itself.

  Meyer Mossel, he told us afterward, had been cantor in the synagogue in Amsterdam. For all his lightheartedness he had suffered much. Most of his family had been arrested; his wife and children were in hiding on a farm in the north which had declined to accept Meyer—“for obvious reasons,” he said with a grimace at his own unmistakable features.

  And gradually it dawned on all of us that this endearing man was at the Beje to stay. It was certainly not an ideal place, but for Meyer nothing could be ideal right now.

  “At least,” I told him one evening, “your name doesn’t have to give you away too.” Ever since the days when Willem was studying church history, I had remembered the venerable fourth-century church father, Eusebius.

  “I think we’ll call you Eusebius,” I decided. We were sitting in Tante Jans’s front room with Kik and some other young men, who had made us a delivery of forged travel-permits too late to get home by curfew.

  Meyer leaned back and stared at the ceiling pensively. He took his pipe out of his mouth. “Eusebius Mossel,” he said, tasting the words.

  “No, it doesn’t sound quite right. Eusebius Gentile Mossel.”

  We all laughed. “Don’t be a goose,” Betsie said. “You must change both names!”

  Kik looked slyly at Father. “Opa! How about Smit? That seems a popular name these days.”

  “It does seem so!” said Father, not catching the joke. “Extraordinarily popular!”

  And Eusebius Smit it became.

  Changing Meyer’s name was easy—at once he became “Eusie.” But getting Eusie to eat non-kosher food was something else. The problem, of course, was that we were grateful for food of any kind: we stood in line for hours, this third year of the occupation, to get whatever was available.

  One day the paper announced that coupon number four was good for pork sausage. It was the first meat we’d had in weeks. Lovingly Betsie prepared the feast, saving every drop of fat for flavoring other foods later.

  “Eusie,” Betsie said as she carried the steaming casserole of pork and potatoes to the table, “the day has come.”

  Eusie knocked the ashes out of his pipe and considered his plight out loud. He, who had always eaten kosher, he, the oldest son of an oldest son of a respected family, in fact, he Meyer Mossel Eusebius Smit, was seriously being asked to eat pork.

  Betsie placed a helping of sausage and potato before him. “Bon appetit.”

  The tantalizing odor reached our meat-starved palates. Eusie wet his lips with his tongue. “Of course,” he said, “there’s a provision for this in the Talmud.” He speared the meat with his fork, bit hungrily, and rolled his eyes heavenward in pure pleasure. “And I’m going to start hunting for it, too,” he said, “just as soon as dinner’s over.”

  As if Eusie’s arrival had broken down a last hesitation, within a week there were three new permanent additions to the household. First there was Jop, our current apprentice, whose daily trip from his parents’ home in the suburbs had twice nearly ended in seizure for the factory transport. The second time it happened his parents asked if he could stay at the Beje and we agreed. The other two were Henk, a young lawyer, and Leendert, a schoolteacher. Leendert made an especially important contribution to the secret life of the Beje. He installed our electric warning system.

  By now I had learned to make the nighttime trip out to Pickwick’s almost as skillfully as could Kik. One evening when I had gratefully accepted a cup of coffee, my wall-eyed friend sat me down for a lecture.

  “Cornelia,” he said, settling his bulk on a velvet chair too small for him, “I understand you have no alarm system in your house. This is purest folly. Also I am given to believe that you are not carrying on regular drills for your guests.”

  I was always amazed at how well Pickwick knew what went on at the Beje.

  “You know that a raid may come any day,” Pickwick continued. “I don’t see how you can avoid one. Scores of people in and out—and an NSB agent living over Kan’s up the street.

  “Your secret room is no good to you if people can’t get to it in time. I know this Leendert. He’s a good man and a very passable electrician. Get him to put a buzzer in every room with a door or a window on the street. Then hold practice drills until your people can disappear in that room without a trace in less than a minute. I’ll send someone to get you started.”

  Leendert did the electrical work that weekend. He installed a buzzer near the top of the stairs—loud enough to be heard all over the house but not outside. Then he placed buttons to sound the buzzer at every vantage point where trouble might first be spotted. One button went beneath
the dining room windowsill, just below the mirror which gave onto the side door. Another went in the downstairs hall just inside that door and a third inside the front door on the Barteljorisstraat. He also put a button behind the counter in the shop and one in each workbench as well as beneath the windows in Tante Jans’s rooms.

  We were ready for our first trial run. The four unacknowledged members of our household were already climbing up to the secret room two times a day: in the morning to store their night clothes, bedding, and toilet articles, and in the evening to put away their day things. Members of our group, too, who had to spend the night, kept raincoats, hats, anything they had brought with them, in that room. Altogether that made a good deal of traffic in and out of my small bedroom—smaller now indeed by nearly a yard. Many nights my last waking sight would be Eusie in long robe and tasseled nightcap, handing his day clothes through the secret panel.

  But the purpose of the drills was to see how rapidly people could reach the room at any hour of the day or night without prior notice. A tall sallow-faced young man arrived from Pickwick one morning to teach me how to conduct the drills.

  “Smit!” Father exclaimed when the man introduced himself. “Truly it’s most astonishing! We’ve had one Smit after another here lately. Now you bear a great resemblance to . . .”

  Mr. Smit disentangled himself gently from Father’s genealogical inquiries and followed me upstairs.

  “Mealtimes,” he said. “That’s a favorite hour for a raid. Also the middle of the night.” He strode from room to room, pointing everywhere to evidence that more than three people lived in the house. “Watch wastebaskets and ashtrays.”

  He paused in a bedroom door. “If the raid comes at night they must not only take their sheets and blankets but get the mattress turned. That’s the S.D.’s favorite trick—feeling for a warm spot on a bed.”

  © Hans Poley/Nederlands fotomuseum, Rotterdam

  Two Jewish women during an actual drill of the hiding place in 1943.

  Mr. Smit stayed for lunch. There were eleven of us at the table that day, including a Jewish lady who had arrived the night before and a Gentile woman and her small daughter, members of our underground, who acted as “escorts.” The three of them were leaving for a farm in Brabant right after lunch.

  Betsie had just passed around a stew so artfully prepared you scarcely missed the meat when, without warning, Mr. Smit leaned back in his chair and pushed the button below the window.

  Above us the buzzer sounded. People sprang to their feet, snatching up glasses and plates, scrambling for the stairs, while the cat clawed halfway up the curtain in consternation. Cries of “Faster!” “Not so loud!” and “You’re spilling it!” reached us as Father, Betsie, and I hastily rearranged table and chairs to look like a lunch for three in progress.

  “No, leave my place,” Mr. Smit instructed. “Why shouldn’t you have a guest for lunch? The lady and the little girl could have stayed, too.”

  At last we were seated again and silence reigned upstairs.

  The whole process had taken four minutes.

  A little later we were all gathered again around the dining room table. Mr. Smit set out before him the incriminating evidence he had found: two spoons and a piece of carrot on the stairs, pipe ashes in an “unoccupied” bedroom. Everyone looked at Eusie who blushed to the tips of his large ears.

  “Also those,” he pointed to the hats of mother and daughter still dangling from the pegs on the dining room wall. “If you have to hide, stop and think what you arrived with. Besides which, you’re all simply too slow.”

  The next night I sounded the alarm again and this time we shaved a minute thirty-three seconds off our run. By our fifth trial we were down to two minutes. We never did achieve Pickwick’s ideal of under a minute, but with practice we learned to jump up from whatever we were doing and get those who had to hide in the secret room in seventy seconds. Father, Toos, and I worked on “stalling techniques,” which we would use if the Gestapo came through the shop door; Betsie invented a similar strategy for the side door. With those delaying tactics we hoped we could gain a life-saving seventy ticks of a second hand.

  Because the drills struck so close to the fear that haunted each of our guests—never spoken, always present—we tried to keep these times from becoming altogether serious. “Like a game!” we’d tell each other: “a race to beat our own record!” One of our group owned the bakery in the next street. Early in the month I would deposit a supply of sugar coupons with him. Then when I decided it was time for a drill, I would go to him for a bag of cream puffs—an inexpressible treat in those sweetless days—to be secreted in my workbench and brought out as a reward for a successful practice.

  Each time the order of cream puffs was larger. For by now, in addition to the workers whom we wanted to initiate into the system, we had three more permanent boarders: Thea Dacosta, Meta Monsanto, and Mary Itallie.

  Mary Itallie, at seventy-six the oldest of our guests, was also the one who posed the greatest problem. The moment Mary stepped through our door I heard the asthmatic wheezing which had made other hosts unwilling to take her in.

  Since her ailment compromised the safety of the others, we took up the problem in caucus. The seven most concerned—Eusie, Jop, Henk, Leendert, Meta, Thea, and Mary herself—joined Father, Betsie, and me in Tante Jans’s front room.

  “There is no sense in pretending,” I began. “Mary has a difficulty—especially after climbing stairs—that could put you all in danger.”

  In the silence that followed, Mary’s labored breathing seemed especially loud.

  “Can I speak?” Eusie asked.

  “Of course.”

  “It seems to me that we’re all here in your house because of some difficulty or other. We’re the orphan children—the ones nobody else wanted. Any one of us is jeopardizing all the others. I vote that Mary stay.”

  “Good,” said lawyer Henk, “let’s put it to the vote.”

  Hands began rising but Mary was struggling to speak. “Secret ballots,” she brought out at last. “No one should be embarrassed.”

  Henk brought a sheet of paper from the desk in the next room and tore it into nine small strips. “You too,” he said, handing ballots to Betsie, Father, and me. “If we’re discovered, you suffer the same as us.”

  He handed around pencils. “Mark ‘No’ if it’s too great a risk, ‘Yes’ if you think she belongs here.”

  For a moment pencils scratched, then Henk collected the folded ballots. He opened them in silence, then reached over and dropped them into Mary’s lap.

  Nine little scraps of paper, nine times the word, “Yes.”

  AND SO OUR “family” was formed. Others stayed with us a day or a week, but these seven remained, the nucleus of our happy household.

  That it could have been happy, at such a time and in such circumstances, was largely a tribute to Betsie. Because our guests’ physical lives were so very restricted, evenings under Betsie’s direction became the door to the wide world. Sometimes we had concerts, with Leendert on the violin, and Thea, a truly accomplished musician, on the piano. Or Betsie would announce “an evening of Vondel” (the Dutch Shakespeare), with each of us reading a part. One night a week she talked Eusie into giving Hebrew lessons, another night Meta taught Italian.

  © Hans Poley/Nederlands fotomuseum, Rotterdam

  The Beje family in 1943, consisting of Corrie, Father, Betsie (third from right), Jewish guests, and Dutch underground workers.

  The evening’s activity had to be kept brief because the city now had electricity only a short while each night, and candles had to be hoarded for emergencies. When the lamps flickered and dimmed, we would wind back down to the dining room where my bicycle was set up on its stand. One of us would climb onto it, and others taking chairs, and then while the rider pedaled furiously to make the headlight glow bright, someone would pick up the chapter from the night before. We changed cyclist and reader often as legs or voice grew tired, reading o
ur way through histories, novels, plays.

  Father always went upstairs after prayers at 9:15, but the rest of us lingered, reluctant to break the circle, sorry to see the evening end. “Oh well,” Eusie would say hopefully as we started at last to our rooms. “Maybe there’ll be a drill tonight! I haven’t had a cream puff in nearly a week.”

  8

  Storm Clouds Gather

  If evenings were pleasant, daytimes grew increasingly tense. We were too big; the group was too large, the web too widespread. For a year and a half now we had gotten away with our double lives. Ostensibly we were still an elderly watchmaker living with his two spinster daughters above his tiny shop. In actuality the Beje was the center of an underground ring that spread now to the farthest corners of Holland. Here daily came dozens of workers, reports, appeals. Sooner or later we were going to make a mistake.

  It was mealtimes especially when I worried. There were so many now for every meal that we had to set the chairs diagonally around the dining room table. The cat loved this arrangement. Eusie had given him the Hebrew name Maher Shalal Hashbaz, meaning appropriately enough, “hastening to the spoils, hurrying to the prey.” With the chairs set so close, M. S. Hashbaz could circle the entire table on our shoulders, purring furiously, traveling round and round.

  But I was uneasy at being so many. The dining room was only five steps above street-level; a tall passerby could see right in the window. We’d hung a white curtain across it providing a kind of screen while letting in light. Still, only when the heavy blackout shades were drawn at night did I feel truly private.

  At lunch one day, looking through the thin curtain, I thought I saw a figure standing just outside in the alley. When I looked again a minute later it was still there. There was no reason for anyone to linger there unless he was curious about what went on in the Beje. I got up and parted the curtain an inch.

  Standing a few feet away, seemingly immobilized by some terrible emotion, was old Katrien from Nollie’s house!

  I bolted down the stairs, threw open the door, and pulled her inside. Although the August day was hot, the old lady’s hands were cold as ice. “Katrien! What are you doing here? Why were you just standing there?”