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 the doors. 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 good-bye, 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.
“I’m . . . I’m so very sorry—” I 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 cellmates. 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.
I will never be able to sleep on such a bed, I thought, and the next thing I 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 lightbulb 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’ll 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 trustee 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 on a corner 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 ill-looking 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 around 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 toothbrush 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 lightbulb 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? I wondered. Why should I not be allowed even a good-bye 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 lightbulb 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 trustee 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 eighty-four-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 trustee 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 I had replaced it I would lie down agai
n 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 around 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 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 warm 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.
The Hiding Place Page 16
