“Almost,” said Willem slowly, “almost I could wish to have this same news of Kik. It would be good for him to be with Betsie and Father.” They had had no word of this tall blonde son since his deportation to Germany. I remembered his hand on my shoulder, guiding me on our bicycles through the blacked-out streets to Pickwick’s. Remembered his patient coaching: “You have no cards, Tante Corrie! There are no Jews.” Kik! Are the young and brave as vulnerable as the old and slow?
I spent two weeks in Hilversum, trying to adjust to what my eyes had told me that first moment. Willem was dying. Only he seemed unaware of it as he hobbled along the halls of his home, bringing comfort and counsel to the sick people in his care. They had over fifty patients at the moment, but what I could not get over was the number of young women in help: nurses’ aides, kitchen helpers, secretaries. It was several days before I perceived that most of these “girls” were young men in hiding from the forced-labor conscription, which had grown more ruthless than ever.
And still something in me could not rest until I got back to Haarlem. Nollie was there, of course. But it was the Beje, too, something in the house itself that called me, beckoned me, told me to come home.
The problem, again, was getting there. Willem had the use of an official car for nursing-home business, but only within a radius of Hilversum. Finally, after many relayed phone calls, he told me the trip had been arranged.
The roads were deserted as we set out; we passed only two other cars all the way to the rendezvous spot with the car from Haarlem. Ahead, pulled off onto the snow at the side of the road, we saw it, a long black limousine with official government plates and curtained rear windows. I kissed Willem good-bye and then stepped quickly, as instructed, into the rear of the limousine. Even in the curtained gloom the ungainly bulk beside me was unmistakable.
“Oom Herman!” I cried.
“My dear Cornelia.” His great hand closed around both of mine. “God permits me to see you again.”
I had last seen Pickwick sitting between two soldiers on the prison bus in The Hague, his poor bald head bruised and bleeding. Now here he was, waving aside my sympathy as though that had been an incident too trivial to recall.
He seemed as well informed as ever about everything that went on in Haarlem, and as the uniformed driver sped us along the empty roads, he filled me in on all the details I ached to know. All of our Jews were safe except for Mary Itallie, who had been sent to Poland following her arrest in the street. Our group was still operating, although many of the young men were in hiding.
He warned me to expect changes at the Beje. After the police guard had been removed, a series of homeless families had been housed there, although at the moment he believed the living quarters above the shop were empty. Even before the house was unsealed, loyal Toos had returned from Scheveningen and reopened the watch business. Mr. Beukers, the optician next door, had given her space in his shop from which she had taken orders to give to our repairmen in their homes.
As my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I made out my friend’s face more clearly. There was perhaps an extra knob or two on the misshapen head, teeth were missing—but to that vast, kindly ugliness the beating had made no real difference at all.
Now the limousine was threading the narrow streets of Haarlem. Over the bridge on the Spaarne. Across the Grote Markt in the shadow of St. Bavo’s, into the Barteljorisstraat. I was out of the car almost before it stopped, running down the alley, through the side door, and into Nollie’s embrace. She and her girls had been there all morning, sweeping, washing windows, airing sheets for my homecoming. Over Nollie’s shoulder, I saw Toos standing in the rear door to the shop, laughing and sobbing both at once. Laughing because I was home; crying because Father and Betsie, the only two people she had ever allowed herself to love, would never be.
Together we trooped through the house and shop, looking, stroking—“ Remember how Betsie would set out these cups?” “Remember how Meta would scold Eusie for leaving his pipe here?” I stood on the landing outside the dining room and ran my hand over the smooth wood of the Frisian clock. I could see Father stopping here, Kapteyn at his heels.
“We mustn’t let the clock run down. . . .”
I opened the glass face, moved the hands to agree with my wristwatch, and slowly drew up the weights. I was home. Life, like the clock, started again: mornings repairing watches in the workshop, noons most often bumping on my tireless bicycle out to Bos en Hoven Straat.
And yet . . . in a strange way, I was not home. I was still waiting, still looking for something. I spent days prowling the alleys and canal banks nearby, calling Maher Shalal Hashbaz by name. The elderly vegetable lady three stores down told me that the cat had mewed at her door the night of our arrest and she had taken him in. For months, she said, the small children of the neighborhood had banded together to bring food to “Opa’s kitty.” They had brought scraps from garbage pails and even tidbits from their own scanty plates smuggled past watchful mothers, and Mr. Hashbaz had remained sleek and fat.
It was mid-December, she said, when he had not appeared one night to her call, nor had she seen him since. And so I searched, but with a sinking heart: in this winter of Holland’s hunger, all my searching brought not one single cat or dog to my call.
I missed more than the cat; the Beje needed people to fill its rooms. I remembered Father’s words to the Gestapo chief in The Hague: “I will open my door to anyone in need. . . .” No one in the city was in greater need than its feeble-minded. Since the start of the Nazi occupation, they had been sequestered by their families in back rooms, their schools and training centers shut down, hidden from a government that had decided they were not fit to live. Soon a group of them was living at the Beje. They still could not go out on the streets, but here at least they had new surroundings and a program of sorts with the time I could take from the shop.
And still my restlessness continued. I was home, I was working and busy—or was I? Often I would come to with a start at my workbench to realize that I had sat for an hour staring into space. The repairmen Toos had found—trained under Father—were excellent. I spent less and less time in the shop; whatever or whoever I was looking for was not there.
Nor upstairs. I loved the gentle people in my care, but the house itself had ceased to be home. For Betsie’s sake I bought plants for every windowsill, but I forgot to water them and they died.
Maybe I missed the challenge of the underground. When the national group approached me with a request, I agreed eagerly. They had false release papers for a prisoner in the Haarlem jail. What could be simpler than to carry this document around the corner and through those familiar wooden doors.
But as the doors closed behind me my heart began to race. What if I couldn’t get out? What if I was trapped?
“Yes?” A young police lieutenant with bright orange hair stepped from behind the reception desk. “You had an appointment?”
It was Rolf. Why was he being so stiff with me? Was I under arrest? Were they going to put me in a cell? “Rolf!” I said. “Don’t you know me?”
He peered at me as though trying to refresh his memory. “Of course!” he said smoothly. “The lady at the watch shop! I heard you were closed down for a while.”
I gaped at him. Why, Rolf knew perfectly—and then I recalled where we were. In the central foyer of the police station with half a dozen German soldiers looking on. And I had greeted one of our group by name, practically admitted a special relationship between us, when the cardinal rule of the underground was . . . I ran my tongue over my lips. How could I have been so stupid?
Rolf took the forged papers from my shaking hands and glanced through them. “These must be passed upon by the police chief and the military overcommand together,” he said. “Can you return with them tomorrow afternoon at four? The chief will be in a meeting until—”
I heard no more. After the words “tomorrow afternoon,” I had bolted for the door. I stood thankfully on the sidewalk until my knees stopped knoc
king. If I had ever needed proof that I had no boldness or cleverness of my own, I had it now. Whatever bravery or skill I had ever shown were gifts of God—sheer loans from Him of the talent needed to do a job. And it was clear, from the absence of such skills now, that this was no longer His work for me.
I crept meekly back to the Beje. And it was at that moment, as I stepped into the alley, that I knew what it was I was looking for.
It was Betsie.
It was Betsie I had missed every moment of every day since I ran to the hospital window and found that she had left Ravensbruck forever. It was Betsie I had thought to find back here in Haarlem, here in the watch shop and in the home she loved.
But she was not here. And now for the first time since her death, I remembered. “We must tell people, Corrie. We must tell them what we learned. . . .”
THAT VERY WEEK I began to speak. If this was God’s new work for me, then He would provide the courage and the words. Through the streets and suburbs of Haarlem, I bumped on my bicycle rims, bringing the message that joy runs deeper than despair.
It was news that people needed to hear that cheerless spring of 1945. No Bride of Haarlem tree filled the air with fragrance; only the stump had been too big to haul off for firewood. No tulips turned fields into carpets of color: the bulbs had all been eaten. No family was without its tragedy. In churches and club rooms and private homes in those desperate days, I told the truths Betsie and I had learned in Ravensbruck.
And always at these meetings I spoke of Betsie’s first vision: of a home here in Holland where those who had been hurt could learn to live again unafraid. At the close of one of these talks, a slender, aristocratic lady came up to me. I knew her by sight: Mrs. Bierens de Haan whose home in the suburb of Bloemendaal was said to be one of the most beautiful in Holland. I had never seen it, only the trees at the edge of the huge park in which it was set, and so I was astonished when this elegantly dressed lady asked me if I were still living in the ancient little house on the Barteljorisstraat.
“How did you—yes, I do. But—”
“My mother often told me about it. She went there frequently to see an aunt of yours who, I believe, was in charitable work?”
In a rush it all came back. Opening the side door to let in a swish of satin and rustle of feathers. A long gown and a plumed hat brushing both sides of the narrow stairs. Then Tante Jans standing in her doorway with a look that froze in the bones the thought of bouncing a ball.
“I am a widow,” Mrs. Bierens de Haan was saying, “but I have five sons in the Resistance. Four are still alive and well. The fifth we have not heard from since he was taken to Germany. As you spoke just now, something in me kept saying, ‘Jan will come back and in gratitude you will open your home for this vision of Betsie ten Boom.’”
It was two weeks later that a small boy delivered a scented envelope to the side door; inside in slanted purple letters was a single line, “Jan is home.”
Mrs. Bierens de Haan herself met me at the entrance to her estate. Together we walked up an avenue of ancient oaks meeting above our heads. Rounding the final bend, we saw it, a fifty-six room mansion in the center of a vast lawn. Two elderly gardeners were poking about the flowerbeds.
“We’ve let the gardens go,” Mrs. Bierens de Haan said. “But I thought we might put them back in shape. Don’t you think released prisoners might find therapy in growing things?”
I didn’t answer. I was staring up at the gabled roof and the leaded windows. Such tall, tall windows. . . .
“Are there—” my throat was dry. “Are there inlaid wood floors inside, and a grand gallery around a central hall, and—and bas-relief statues set along the walls?”
Mrs. Bierens de Haan looked at me in surprise. “You’ve been here then! I don’t recall—”
“No,” I said, “I heard about it from—”
I stopped. How could I explain what I did not understand?
“From someone who’s been here,” she finished simply, not understanding my perplexity.
“Yes,” I said. “From someone who’s been here.”
THE SECOND WEEK in May the Allies retook Holland. The Dutch flag hung from every window and the “Wilhelmus” was played on the liberated radio day and night. The Canadian army rushed to the cities the food they had stockpiled along the borders.
In June the first of many hundreds of people arrived at the beautiful home in Bloemendaal. Silent or endlessly relating their losses, withdrawn or fiercely aggressive, every one was a damaged human being. Not all had been in concentration camps; some had spent two, three, even four years hidden in attic rooms and back closets here in Holland.
One of the first of these was Mrs. Kan, widow of the watch-shop owner up the street. Mr. Kan had died at the underground address; she came to us alone, a stooped, white-haired woman who startled at every sound. Others came to Bloemendaal, scarred body and soul by bombing raids or loss of family or any of the endless dislocations of war. In 1947 we began to receive Dutch people who had been prisoners of the Japanese in Indonesia.
Though none of this was by design, it proved to be the best possible setting for those who had been imprisoned in Germany. Among themselves they tended to live and relive their special woes; in Bloemendaal they were reminded that they were not the only ones who had suffered. And for all these people alike, the key to healing turned out to be the same. Each had a hurt he had to forgive: the neighbor who had reported him, the brutal guard, the sadistic soldier.
Strangely enough, it was not the Germans or the Japanese that people had most trouble forgiving; it was their fellow Dutchmen who had sided with the enemy. I saw them frequently in the streets, NSBers with their shaved heads and furtive eyes. These former collaborators were now in pitiful condition, turned out of homes and apartments, unable to find jobs, hooted at in the streets.
At first it seemed to me that we should invite them, too, to Bloe-mendaal, to live side by side with those they had injured, to seek a new compassion on both sides. But it turned out to be too soon for people working their way back from such hurt: the two times I tried it, it ended in open fights. And so as soon as homes and schools for the feeble-minded opened again around the country, I turned the Beje over to these former NSBers.
This was how it went, those years after the war, experimenting, making mistakes, learning. The doctors, psychiatrists, and nutritionists who came free of charge to any place that cared for war victims, sometimes expressed surprise at our loose-run ways. At morning and evening worship, people drifted in and out, table manners were atrocious, one man took a walk into Haarlem every morning at 3:00 a.m. I could not bring myself to sound a whistle or to scold, or to consider gates or curfews.
And, sure enough, in their own time and their own way, people worked out the deep pain within them. It most often started, as Betsie had known it would, in the garden. As flowers bloomed or vegetables ripened, talk was less of the bitter past, more of tomorrow’s weather. As their horizons broadened, I would tell them about the people living in the Beje, people who never had a visitor, never a piece of mail. When mention of the NSBers no longer brought on a volley of self-righteous wrath, I knew the person’s healing was not far away. And the day he said, “Those people you spoke of—I wonder if they’d care for some homegrown carrots,” then I knew the miracle had taken place.
I CONTINUED to speak, partly because the home in Bloemendaal ran on contributions, partly because the hunger for Betsie’s story seemed to increase with time. I traveled all over Holland, to other parts of Europe, to the United States.
But the place where the hunger was greatest was Germany. Germany was a land in ruin, cities of ashes and rubble, but more terrifying still, minds and hearts of ashes. Just to cross the border was to feel the great weight that hung over that land.
It was at a church service in Munich that I saw him, the former S.S. man who had stood guard at the shower room door in the processing center at Ravensbruck. He was the first of our actual jailers that I had seen
since that time. And suddenly it was all there—the roomful of mocking men, the heaps of clothing, Betsie’s pain-blanched face.
He came up to me as the church was emptying, beaming and bowing. “How grateful I am for your message, Fraulein.” he said. “To think that, as you say, He has washed my sins away!”
His hand was thrust out to shake mine. And I, who had preached so often to the people in Bloemendaal the need to forgive, kept my hand at my side.
Even as the angry, vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. Jesus Christ had died for this man; was I going to ask for more? Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me to forgive him.
I tried to smile, I struggled to raise my hand. I could not. I felt nothing, not the slightest spark of warmth or charity. And so again I breathed a silent prayer. Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give Your forgiveness. As I took his hand the most incredible thing happened. From my shoulder along my arm and through my hand, a current seemed to pass from me to him, while into my heart sprang a love for this stranger that almost overwhelmed me.
And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on His. When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives, along with the command, the love itself.
It took a lot of love. The most pressing need in postwar Germany was homes; nine million people were said to be without them. They were living in rubble heaps, half-standing buildings, and abandoned army trucks. A church group invited me to speak to a hundred families living in an abandoned factory building. Sheets and blankets had been hung between the various living quarters to make a pretense of privacy. But there was no insulating the sounds: the wail of a baby, the din of radios, the angry words of a family quarrel. How could I speak to these people of the reality of God and then go back to my quiet room in the church hostel outside the city? No, before I could bring a message to them, I would have to live among them.
And it was during the months that I spent in the factory that a director of a relief organization came to see me. They had heard of my rehabilitation work in Holland, he said, and they wondered—I was opening my mouth to say that I had no professional training in such things, when his next words silenced me.
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