The Hiding Place

by Corrie ten Boom

  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!”

  I sat 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 The Hidi ng Place 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!” I 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 I 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 mens’ 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 trustee tossed a package wrapped in brown paper onto the floor. I picked it up, hefted it, turned 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 writi
ng 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 gotten 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 pass-through 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 that 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 opened 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 censors—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.

  “I 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 sedative.”

  “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.

  11

  The Lieutenant

  I was walking with a guard—behind and a little to the right of her so my feet would not touch the sacrosanct mat—down a corridor I had not seen before. A turn to the right, a few steps down, right again . . . what an endless labyrinth this prison was. At last we stepped out into a small interior courtyard. A drizzle of rain was falling. It was a chill raw morning in late May: after three months in prison I had been called for my first hearing.

  Barred windows stared from tall buildings on three sides of the courtyard, along the fourth was a high wall and against this stood a row of small huts. So these were where the infamous interrogations took place. My breath came short and hard as I thought back to the reports I had passed on, the night of Hitler’s birthday.

  Lord Jesus, You were called to a hearing too. Show me what to do.

  And then I saw something. Whoever used the fourth of the huts had planted a row of tulips along the side. They were wilted now, only tall stems and yellowing leaves, but . . . Dear Lord, let me go to hut number four!

  The guard had paused to unstrap a long military cape fastened to the shoulder of her uniform. Protected from the rain, she crunched up the gravel path. Past the first hut, the second, the third. She halted in front of the hut with the flowerbed and rapped on the door.

  “Ja! Herrein!” called a man’s voice.

  The guard pushed open the door, gave a straight-armed salute, and marched smartly off. The man wore a gun in a leather holster and a beribboned uniform. He removed his hat and I was staring into the face of the gentle-mannered man who had visited me in my cell.

  “I am Lieutenant Rahms,” he said, stepping to the door to close it behind me. “You’re shivering! Here, let me get a fire going.”

  He filled a pot-bellied stove from a small coal scuttle, for all the world a kindly German householder entertaining a guest. What if this were all a subtle trap? This kind, human manner—perhaps he had simply found it more effective than brutality in tricking the truth from affection-starved people. Oh Lord, let no weak gullibility on my part endanger another’s life.

  “I hope,” the officer was saying, “we won’t have many more days this spring as cold as this one.” He drew out a chair for me to sit on.

  Warily I accepted it. How strange after three months, to feel a chair-back behind me, chair-arms for my hands! The heat from the stove was quickly warming the little room. In spite of myself, I began to relax. I ventured a timid comment about the tulips: “So tall, they must have been beautiful.”

  “Oh, they were!” he seemed ridiculously pleased. “The best I’ve ever grown. At home we always have Dutch bulbs.”

  We talked about flowers for a while and then he said, “I would like to help you, Miss ten Boom. But you must tell me everything. I may be able to do something, but only if you do not hide anything from me.”

  So there it was already. All the friendliness, the kindly concern that I had half-believed in—all a device to elicit information. Well, why not? This man was a professional with a job to do. But I, too, in a small way, was a professional.

  For an hour he questioned me, using every psychological trick that the young men of our group had drilled me in. In fact, I felt like a student who has crammed for a difficult exam and then is tested on only the most elementary material. It soon became clear that they believed the Beje had been a headquarters for raids on food ration offices around the coun
try. Of all the illegal activities I had on my conscience, this was probably the one I knew least about. Other than receiving the stolen cards each month and passing them on, I knew no details of the operation. Apparently my real ignorance began to show; after a while Lieutenant Rahms stopped making notes of my hopelessly stupid answers.

  “Your other activities, Miss ten Boom. What would you like to tell me about them?”

  “Other activities? Oh, you mean—you want to know about my church for mentally retarded people!” And I plunged into an eager account of my efforts at preaching to the feeble-minded.

  The lieutenant’s eyebrows rose higher and higher. “What a waste of time and energy!” he exploded at last. “If you want converts, surely one normal person is worth all the half-wits in the world!”

  I stared into the man’s intelligent blue-gray eyes: true National-Socialist philosophy, I thought, tulip bed or no. And then to my astonishment I heard my own voice saying boldly, “May I tell you the truth, Lieutenant Rahms?”

  “This hearing, Miss ten Boom, is predicated on the assumption that you will do me that honor.”

  “The truth, sir,” I said, swallowing, “is that God’s viewpoint is sometimes different from ours—so different that we could not even guess at it unless He had given us a Book which tells us such things.”

  I knew it was madness to talk this way to a Nazi officer. But he said nothing so I plunged ahead. “In the Bible I learned that God values us not for our strength or our brains but simply because He has made us. Who knows, in His eyes a half-wit may be worth more than a watchmaker. Or—a lieutenant.”

  Lieutenant Rahms stood up abruptly. “That will be all for today.” He walked swiftly to the door. “Guard!”

  I heard footsteps on the gravel path.

  “The prisoner will return to her cell.”

  Following the guard through the long cold corridors, I knew I had made a mistake. I had said too much. I had ruined whatever chance I had that this man might take an interest in my case.