It must have been 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning that the train at last began to move. We pressed our faces to the glass, but no lights showed and clouds covered the moon. The thought uppermost in every mind was: is it Germany? At one point we made out a tower that Betsie was sure was the cathedral at Delft. An hour or more later the clack of the train changed pitch: we were crossing a trestle. But—a very long one! As the minutes passed and still we had not reached the other side, Betsie and I exchanged looks. The Moerdijk Bridge! Then we were headed south. Not east into Germany, but south to Brabant. For the second time that night we wept tears of joy.
I leaned my head back against the wooden slats of the seat and shut my eyes, reliving another train trip to Brabant. Mama’s hand had gripped Father’s, then, as the train swayed. Then, too, it was June—the June of the first sermon, of the garden back of the manse, of Karel. . . .
I must have fallen asleep, back in that other June, for when I opened my eyes the train had stopped. Voices were shouting at us to move: “Schneller! Aber schnell!” An eerie glare lit the windows. Betsie and I stumbled after the others along the aisle and down the iron steps. We seemed to have stopped in the middle of a woods. Floodlights mounted in trees lit a broad rough-cleared path lined by soldiers with leveled guns.
Spurred by the shouts of the guards, Betsie and I started up the path between the gun barrels. “Schneller! Close ranks! Keep up! Five abreast!” Betsie’s breath was coming short and hard and still they yelled at us to go faster. It had rained hard here, for there were deep puddles in the path. Ahead of us, a white-haired woman stepped to the side to avoid one; a soldier struck her in the back with a gun butt. I took Betsie’s pillowcase along with mine, hooked my other arm through hers, and hauled her along beside me.
The nightmare march lasted a mile or more. At last we came to a barbed-wire fence surrounding a row of wooden barracks. There were no beds in the one we entered, only long tables with backless benches pulled up to them. Betsie and I collapsed onto one of these. Under my arm I could feel the irregular flutter of her heart. We fell into an exhausted sleep, our heads on the table.
The sun was streaming through the barracks windows when we woke up. We were thirsty and hungry: we had had nothing to eat or drink since the early meal at Scheveningen the morning before. But all that day no guard or any official person appeared inside the barracks. At last, when the sun was low in the sky, a prisoner crew arrived with a great vat of some thick steamy substance that we gobbled ravenously.
And so began our stay in this place that, we learned, was named Vught after the nearest small village. Unlike Scheveningen, which had been a regular Dutch prison, Vught had been constructed by the occupation especially as a concentration camp for political prisoners. We were not yet in the camp proper but in a kind of quarantine compound outside. Our biggest problem was idleness, wedged together as we were around the long rows of tables with nothing to do. We were guarded by the same young women who had patrolled the corridors at Scheveningen. They had been adequate enough as long as we were behind locked doors; here they seemed at a loss. Their only technique for maintaining discipline was to shriek obscenities and hand out punishments to all alike. Half rations for the entire barracks. An extra roll call at rigid attention. A ban on talking for twenty-four hours.
Only one of our overseers never threatened or raised her voice. This was the tall, silent head matron from Scheveningen. She appeared in Vught the third morning during the predawn roll call and at once something like order seized our rebellious and untidy ranks. Lines straightened, hands were clamped to sides, whispers ceased as those cold blue eyes swept across us.
Among ourselves we nicknamed her “the General.” During one long roll call a pregnant woman at our table slumped to the floor, striking her head against the edge of the bench. The General did not so much as pause in her expressionless reading of names.
We had been in this outer camp at Vught almost two weeks when Betsie and I, along with a dozen others, were called out by name during morning roll call. When the rest had been dismissed, the General distributed typewritten forms among us and instructed us to present them at the administration barracks at 9:00.
A worker on the food crew—a long-term prisoner from the main camp—smiled encouragingly as he ladled out our breakfast. “You’re free!” he whispered. “Those pink forms mean release!”
Betsie and I stared disbelievingly at the sheets of paper in our hands. Free? Free to leave—free to go home? Others crowded around, congratulating us, embracing us. The women from Betsie’s cell at Scheveningen wept unabashedly. How cruel to have to leave all these behind!
“Surely the war will be over very soon,” we told them. We emptied our pillowcases passing out our few belongings among those who had to stay.
Long before 9:00 we were standing in the big wooden anteroom of Administration. At last we were summoned to an inner office where our forms were examined, stamped, and handed over to a guard. We followed this man down a corridor into another office. For hours the process continued as we were shuttled from one room and official to another, questioned, fingerprinted, sent on to the next post. The group of prisoners grew until there were forty or fifty of us standing in line beside a high anchor-chain fence topped with barbed wire. On the other side of the fence was a white birch woods, above our heads the blue Brabant sky. We too belonged to that wide free world.
The next barracks we entered held a row of desks with women clerks seated behind them. At one of these I was handed a brown paper envelope. I emptied it into my hand and the next moment was staring in disbelief at my Alpina watch. Mama’s ring. Even my paper guilders. I had not seen these things since the night we arrived at Scheveningen. Money . . . why, that belonged to the world of shops and trolley cars. We could go to a train station with this money. Two fares to Haarlem, please. . . .
We marched along a path between twisted rolls of barbed wire and through a wide gate into a compound of low tin-roofed barracks. There were more lines, more waits, more shuffling from desk to desk, but already the camp and its procedures had become unreal to me.
Then we were standing before a high counter and a young male clerk was saying, “Leave all personal effects at the window marked C.”
“But they just gave them back to me!”
“Watches, purses, jewelry . . .”
Mechanically, like a machine with no will of its own, I handed watch, ring, and money through the small barred window. A uniformed woman swept them into a metal box. “Move along! Next!”
Then—were we not to be released? Outside this building a florid-faced officer formed us into a double column and marched us across a broad parade ground. At one end of it, a crew of men with shaved heads and striped overalls were digging a ditch. What did it mean? What did any of it mean, this whole long day of lines and waits? Betsie’s face was gray with weariness, and she stumbled as we marched.
Through another fence we arrived in a yard surrounded on three sides by low concrete buildings. A young woman in a military cape was waiting for us.
“Prisoners halt!” barked the red-faced officer. “Explain to the newcomers, Fraulein, the function of the bunkers.”
“The bunkers,” the girl began in the bored voice of a museum guide, “are for the accommodation of those who fail to cooperate with camp rules. The rooms are cozy, if a bit small: about the size of a gym locker. To hasten the educational process the hands are tied above the head. . . .”
Even as the horrid recital continued, two guards came out of the bunkers, carrying between them the form of a man. He was alive, for his legs were moving, but he seemed to have no conscious control over them. His eyes were sunken and rolled back in his head.
“Not everyone,” the girl observed in the same detached drawl, “seems to appreciate the accommodations at the bunkers.”
I seized Betsie’s arm as the command to march came again, more to steady myself than her. It was Father’s traincase once again. Such cruelty was too much to gra
sp, too much to bear. Heavenly Father, carry it for me!
We followed the officer down a wide street lined with barracks on either side and halted at one of the gray, featureless sheds. It was the end of the long day of standing, waiting, hoping: we had simply arrived in the main camp at Vught.
The barracks appeared almost identical with the one we had left this morning, except that this one was furnished with bunks as well as tables and benches. And still we were not allowed to sit: there was a last wait while the matron with maddening deliberateness checked off our documents against a list.
“Betsie!” I wailed, “how long will it take?”
“Perhaps a long, long time. Perhaps many years. But what better way could there be to spend our lives?”
I turned to stare at her. “Whatever are you talking about?”
“These young women. That girl back at the bunkers. Corrie, if people can be taught to hate, they can be taught to love! We must find the way, you and I, no matter how long it takes. . . .”
She went on, almost forgetting in her excitement to keep her voice to a whisper, while I slowly took in the fact that she was talking about our guards. I glanced at the matron seated at the desk ahead of us. I saw a gray uniform and a visored hat; Betsie saw a wounded human being.
And I wondered, not for the first time, what sort of a person she was, this sister of mine . . . what kind of road she followed while I trudged beside her on the all-too-solid earth.
A FEW DAYS later Betsie and I were called up for work assignments. One glance at Betsie’s pallid face and fragile form, and the matron waved her contemptuously back inside the barracks where the elderly and infirm spent the day sewing prison uniforms. The women’s uniform here in Vught was a blue overall with a red stripe down the side of the leg, practical and comfortable, and a welcome change after our own clothes that we had worn since the day of our arrest.
Apparently I looked strong enough for harder work; I was told to report to the Phillips factory. This “factory” turned out to be no more than another large barracks inside the camp complex. Early in the morning though it was, the tar beneath the shingled roof was beginning to bubble in the hot July sun. I followed my escort into the single large room where several hundred men and women sat at long plank tables covered with thousands of tiny radio parts. Two officers, one male, one female, were strolling the aisle between the benches while the prisoners bent to their tasks.
I was assigned a seat at a bench near the front and given the job of measuring small glass rods and arranging them in piles according to lengths. It was monotonous work. The heat from the roof pressed like a weight on my head. I longed to exchange at least names and home towns with my neighbors on either side, but the only sound in the room was the clink of metal parts and the squeak of the officers’ boots. They reached the door across from where I sat.
“Production was up again last week,” the male officer said in German to a tall slender man with a shaved head and a striped uniform. “You are to be commended for this increase. However we continue to receive complaints of defective wiring. Quality control must improve.”
The shaved-headed man made an apologetic gesture. “If there were more food, Herr Officier,” he murmured. “Since the cutback in rations, I see a difference. They grow sleepy, they have trouble concentrating. . . .” His voice reminded me a little of Willem’s, deep, cultivated, the German with only a trace of Dutch accent.
“Then you must wake them up! Make them concentrate on the penalties! If the soldiers on the front can fight on half-rations, then these lazy—”
At a terrible look from the woman officer, he stopped and ran his tongue over his lips. “Ah—that is—I speak of course merely as an example. There is naturally no truth in the rumor that rations at the front are reduced. So! I—I hold you responsible!” And together they stalked from the building.
For a moment the prisoner-foreman watched them from the doorway. Slowly he raised his left hand, then dropped it with a slap to his side. The quiet room exploded. From under tables appeared writing paper, books, knitting yarn, tins of biscuits. People left their benches and joined little knots of chattering friends all over the room. Half a dozen crowded around me: Who was I? Where was I from? Did I have any news of the war?
After perhaps half an hour of visiting among the tables, the foreman reminded us that we had a day’s quota to meet and people drifted back to their places. The foreman’s name, I learned, was Moorman and he had been headmaster of a Roman Catholic boys’ school. He himself came over to my workbench the third day I was there; he had heard that I had followed the entire assembly line through the barracks, tracing what became of my dull little piles of rods. “You’re the first woman worker,” he said, “who has ever shown any interest in what we are making here.”
“I am very interested,” I said. “I’m a watchmaker.”
He stared at me with new interest. “Then I have work you will enjoy more.” He took me to the opposite end of the huge shed where the final assembly of relay switches was done. It was intricate and exacting work, though not nearly so hard as watch repair, and Mr. Moorman was right. I enjoyed it and it helped make the eleven-hour workday go faster.
Not only to me but to all the Phillips workers, Mr. Moorman acted more as a kindly older brother than a crew boss. I would watch him, ceaselessly moving among his hundreds of charges, counseling, encouraging, finding a simpler job for the weary, a harder one for the restless. We had been at Vught more than a month before I learned that his twenty-year-old son had been shot here at the camp the week Betsie and I arrived.
No trace of this personal tragedy showed in his care for the rest of us. He stopped frequently at my bench, the first weeks, more to check my frame of mind than my work. But eventually his eyes would travel to the row of relay switches in front of me.
“Dear watch lady! Can you not remember for whom you are working? These radios are for their fighter planes!” And reaching across me he would yank a wire from its housing or twist a tiny tube from an assembly.
“Now solder them back wrong. And not so fast! You’re over the day’s quota and it’s not yet noon.”
Lunchtime would have been the best time of day if I could have spent it with Betsie. However, Phillips workers were not allowed to leave the factory compound until the workday ended at 6:00. Prisoners on kitchen detail lugged in great buckets of gruel made of wheat and peas, tasteless but nourishing. Apparently there had been a cutback in rations recently: still the food was better and more plentiful than at Scheveningen where there had been no noonday meal at all.
After eating we were free for a blessed half hour to stroll about within the Phillips compound in the fresh air and the glorious Brabant sun. Most days I found a spot along the fence and stretched out on the warm ground to sleep (the days started with roll call at 5:00 a.m.). Sweet summer smells came in the breezes from the farms around the camp; sometimes I would dream that Karel and I were walking hand in hand along a country lane.
At 6:00 in the evening there was another roll call, then we marched back to our various sleeping barracks. Betsie always stood in the doorway of ours waiting for me; each evening it was as though a week had passed, there was so much to tell one another.
“That Belgian boy and girl at the bench next to mine? This noon they became engaged!”
“Mrs. Heerma—whose granddaughter was taken to Germany— today she let me pray with her.”
One day Betsie’s news touched us directly. “A lady from Ermelo was transferred to the sewing detail today. When I introduced myself, she said, ‘Another one!’”
“What did she mean?”
“Corrie, do you remember, the day we were arrested, a man came to the shop? You were sick and I had to wake you up.”
I remembered very well. Remembered the strange roving eyes, the uneasiness in the pit of my stomach that was more than fever.
“Apparently everyone in Ermelo knew him. He worked with the Gestapo from the first day of occupation. He
reported this woman’s two brothers for Resistance work, and finally herself and her husband, too.” When Ermelo had finally caught on to him, he had come to Haarlem and teamed up with Willemse and Kapteyn. His name was Jan Vogel.
Flames of fire seemed to leap around that name in my heart. I thought of Father’s final hours, alone and confused, in a hospital corridor. Of the underground work so abruptly halted. I thought of Mary Itallie arrested while walking down a street. And I knew that if Jan Vogel stood in front of me now, I could kill him.
Betsie drew the little cloth bag from beneath her overalls and held it out to me, but I shook my head. Betsie kept the Bible during the day, since she had more chance to read and teach from it here than I did at the Phillips barracks. In the evenings we held a clandestine prayer meeting for as many as could crowd around our bunk.
“You lead the prayers tonight, Betsie. I have a headache.”
More than a headache. All of me ached with the violence of my feelings about the man who had done us so much harm. That night I did not sleep and the next day at my bench scarcely heard the conversation around me. By the end of the week I had worked myself into such a sickness of body and spirit that Mr. Moorman stopped at my bench to ask if something were wrong.
“Wrong? Yes, something’s wrong!” And I plunged into an account of that day. I was only too eager to tell Mr. Moorman and all Holland how Jan Vogel had betrayed his country.
What puzzled me all this time was Betsie. She had suffered everything I had and yet she seemed to carry no burden of rage. “Betsie!” I hissed one dark night when I knew that my restless tossing must be keeping her awake. Three of us now shared this single cot as the crowded camp daily received new arrivals. “Betsie, don’t you feel anything about Jan Vogel? Doesn’t it bother you?”
“Oh yes, Corrie! Terribly! I’ve felt for him ever since I knew—and pray for him whenever his name comes into my mind. How dreadfully he must be suffering!”