And Father’s face would light up with a kind of pleased surprise as it always did on those rare occasions when he thought about the business side of watchmaking. “But Corrie, people will save money when they buy from him!” And then he would always add, “I wonder how he does it.”
Father was as innocent of business know-how as his father had been before him. He would work for days on a difficult repair problem and then forget to send a bill. The more rare and expensive a watch, the less he was able to think of it in terms of money. “A man should pay for the privilege of working on such a watch!” he would say.
As for merchandising methods, for the first eighty years of the shop’s history the shutters on the streets had been closed each evening promptly at 6:00. It was not until I myself had come into the business twenty years ago that I had noticed the throngs of strollers crowding the narrow sidewalks each evening and had seen how the other stores kept their windows lighted and open. When I pointed this out to Father, he was as delighted as though I had made a profound discovery. “And if people see the watches it might make them want to buy one! Corrie, my dear, how very clever you are!”
Mr. Kan was making his way toward me now, full of cake and compliments. Guilty for the jealous thoughts I harbored, I took advantage of the crowd and made my escape downstairs. The workroom and shop were even more crowded with well-wishers than the upstairs rooms. Hans was passing cakes in the back room, as was Toos in the front, wearing the nearest thing to a smile that her perpetually down-drawn lips would permit. As for Christoffels, he had simply and astonishingly expanded. It was impossible to recognize that stooped and shabby little man in the glorious figure at the door, greeting newcomers with a formal welcome followed by a relentless tour of the shop. Quite obviously it was the greatest day of his life.
All through the short winter afternoon they kept coming, the people who counted themselves Father’s friends. Young and old, poor and rich, scholarly gentlemen and illiterate servant girls—only to Father did it seem that they were all alike. That was Father’s secret: not that he overlooked the differences in people; that he didn’t know they were there.
And still Willem was not here. I said good-bye to some guests at the door and stood for a moment gazing up and down the Barteljorisstraat. Although it was only 4:00 in the afternoon, the lights in the shops were coming on against the January dusk. I still had a great deal of little-sister worship for this big brother, five years older than I, an ordained minister and the only ten Boom who had ever been to college. Willem saw things, I felt. He knew what was going on in the world.
Oftentimes, indeed, I wished that Willem did not see quite so well, for much that he saw was frightening. A full ten years ago, way back in 1927, Willem had written in his doctoral thesis, done in Germany, that a terrible evil was taking root in that land. Right at the university, he said, seeds were being planted of a contempt for human life such as the world had never seen. The few who had read his paper had laughed.
Now of course, well, people weren’t laughing about Germany. Most of the good clocks came from there, and recently several firms with whom we had dealt for years were simply and mysteriously “out of business.” Willem believed it was part of a deliberate and large-scale move against Jews; every one of the closed businesses was Jewish. As head of the Dutch Reformed Church’s program to reach Jews, Willem kept in touch with these things.
Dear Willem, I thought, as I stepped back inside and closed the door, he was about as good a salesman of the church as Father was of watches. If he’d converted a single Jew in twenty years, I hadn’t heard about it. Willem didn’t try to change people, just to serve them. He had scrimped and saved enough money to build a home for elderly Jews in Hilversum—for the elderly of all faiths, in fact, for Willem was against any system of segregation. But in the last few months, the home had been deluged with younger arrivals—all Jews and all from Germany. Willem and his family had given up their own living quarters and were sleeping in a corridor. And still the frightened, homeless people kept coming, and with them tales of a mounting madness.
I went up to the kitchen where Nollie had just brewed a fresh pot of coffee, picked it up, and continued with it upstairs to Tante Jans’s rooms. “What does he want?” I asked a group of men gathered around the cake table as I set down the pot. “This man in Germany, does he want war?” I knew it was poor talk for a party, but somehow thoughts of Willem always set my mind on hard subjects.
A chill of silence fell over the table and spread swiftly around the room.
“What does it matter?” a voice broke into it. “Let the big countries fight it out. It won’t affect us.”
“That’s right!” from a watch salesman. “The Germans let us alone in the Great War. It’s to their advantage to keep us neutral.”
“Easy for you to talk,” cried a man from whom we bought clock parts. “Your stock comes from Switzerland. What about us? What do I do if Germany goes to war? A war could put me out of business!”
And at that moment Willem entered the room. Behind him came Tine, his wife, and their four children. But every eye in the room had settled on the figure whose arm Willem held in his. It was a Jew in his early thirties in the typical broad-brimmed black hat and long black coat. What glued every eye to this man was his face. It had been burned. In front of his right ear dangled a gray and frazzled ringlet, like the hair of a very old man. The rest of his beard was gone, leaving only a raw and gaping wound.
“This is Herr Gutlieber,” Willem announced in German. “He just arrived in Hilversum this morning. Herr Gutlieber, my father.”
“He got out of Germany on a milk truck,” Willem told us rapidly in Dutch. “They stopped him on a streetcorner—teen-aged boys in Munich—set fire to his beard.”
Father had risen from his chair and was eagerly shaking the newcomer’s hand. I brought him a cup of coffee and a plate of Nollie’s cookies. How grateful I was now for Father’s insistence that his children speak German and English almost as soon as Dutch.
Herr Gutlieber sat down stiffly on the edge of a chair and fixed his eyes on the cup in his lap. I pulled up a chair beside him and talked some nonsense about the unusual January weather. And around us conversation began again, a hum of party talk rising and falling.
“Hoodlums!” I heard the watch salesman say. “Young hooligans! It’s the same in every country. The police’ll catch up with ’em—you’ll see. Germany’s a civilized country.”
AND SO THE shadow fell across us that winter afternoon in 1937, but it rested lightly. Nobody dreamed that this tiny cloud would grow until it blocked out the sky. And nobody dreamed that in this darkness each of us would be called to play a role: Father and Betsie and Mr. Kan and Willem—even the funny old Beje with its unmatching floor levels and ancient angles.
In the evening after the last guest had gone I climbed the stairs to my room thinking only of the past. On my bed lay the new maroon dress; I had forgotten to put it back on. I never did care about clothes, I thought. Even when I was young. . . .
Childhood scenes rushed back at me out of the night, strangely close and urgent. Today I know that such memories are the key not to the past, but to the future. I know that the experiences of our lives, when we let God use them, become the mysterious and perfect preparation for the work He will give us to do.
I didn’t know that then—nor, indeed, that there was any new future to prepare for in a life as humdrum and predictable as mine. I only knew, as I lay in my bed at the top of the house, that certain moments from long ago stood out in focus against the blur of years. Oddly sharp and near they were, as though they were not yet finished, as though they had something more to say.
2
Full Table
It was 1898 and I was six years old. Betsie stood me in front of the wardrobe mirror and gave me a lecture.
“Just look at your shoes! You’ve missed every other button. And those old torn stockings your very first day at school? See how nice Nollie looks!”
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Nollie and I shared this bedroom at the top of the Beje. I looked at my eight-year-old sister: sure enough, her high-buttoned shoes were neatly fastened. Reluctantly I pulled off mine while Betsie rummaged in the wardrobe.
At thirteen, Betsie seemed almost an adult to me. Of course Betsie had always seemed older because she couldn’t run and roughhouse the way other children did. Betsie had been born with pernicious anemia. And so while the rest of us played tag or bowl-the-hoop or had skate races down frozen canals in winter, Betsie sat and did dull grown-up things like embroidery. But Nollie played as hard as anyone and wasn’t much older than I and it didn’t seem fair that she should always do everything right.
“Betsie,” she was saying earnestly, “I’m not going to wear that great ugly hat to school just because Tante Jans paid for it. Last year it was that ugly gray one—and this year’s is even worse!”
Betsie looked at her sympathetically. “Well, but . . . you can’t go to school without a hat. And you know we can’t afford another one.”
“We don’t have to!”
With an anxious glance at the door, Nollie dropped to her knees, reached beneath the single bed, which was all our tiny room would hold, and drew out a little round hat box. Inside nestled the smallest hat I had ever seen. It was of fur, with a blue satin ribbon for under the chin.
“Oh, the darling thing!” Betsie lifted it reverently from the box and held it up to the patch of light that struggled into the room over the surrounding rooftops. “Where did you ever—”
“Mrs. van Dyver gave it to me.” The van Dyvers owned the millinery shop two doors down. “She saw me looking at it and later she brought it here, after Tante Jans picked out . . . that.”
Nollie pointed to the top of the wardrobe. A deep-rimmed brown bonnet with a cluster of lavender velvet roses proclaimed in every line the personage who had picked it out. Tante Jans, Mama’s older sister, had moved in with us when her husband died to spend, as she put it, “what few days remain to me,” though she was still only in her early forties.
The Ten Boom family in 1895. Top row: Cor (Mama), Casper (Father), family friend. Middle row: Tante Jans, Tante Bep, Tante Anna. Bottom row: Willem, Corrie, Nollie, and Betsie.
Her coming had greatly complicated life in the old house—already crowded by the earlier arrivals of Mama’s other two sisters, Tante Bep and Tante Anna—since along with Tante Jans had come quantities of furniture, all of it too large for the little rooms at the Beje.
For her own use Tante Jans took the two second-story rooms of the front house, directly over the watch shop and workroom. In the first room she wrote the flaming Christian tracts for which she was known all over Holland, and in the second received the well-to-do ladies who supported this work. Tante Jans believed that our welfare in the hereafter depended on how much we could accomplish here on earth. For sleep she partitioned off a cubicle from her writing room just large enough to hold a bed. Death, she often said, was waiting to snatch her from her work, and so she kept her hours of repose as brief and businesslike as possible.
I could not remember life in the Beje before Tante Jans’s arrival, nor whose these two rooms had been before. Above them was a narrow attic beneath the steep, sloping roof of the first house. For as long as I could recall, this space had been divided into four truly miniature rooms. The first one, looking out over the Barteljorisstraat—and the only one with a real window—was Tante Bep’s. Behind it, strung like railroad compartments off a narrow aisle, were Tante Anna’s, Betsie’s, and our brother Willem’s. Five steps up from these rooms, in the second house behind, was Nollie’s and my small room, beneath our Mama and Father’s room, and beneath theirs the dining room with the kitchen tacked like an afterthought to the side of it.
If Tante Jans’s share in this crowded house was remarkably large, it never seemed so to any of us living there. The world just naturally made place for Tante Jans. All day long the horse-drawn trolley clopped and clanged past our house to stop at the Grote Markt, the central town square half a block away. At least that was where it stopped for other people. When Tante Jans wished to go some-where, she stationed herself on the sidewalk directly in front of the watch-shop door and, as the horses thundered close, held up a single gloved finger. It looked to me more possible to stop the sun in the sky than to halt the charge of that trolley before its appointed place. But it stopped for Tante Jans, brakes squealing, horses nearly falling over one another, and the driver tipped his tall hat as she swept aboard.
And this was the commanding eye past which Nollie had to get the little fur hat. Tante Jans had bought most of the clothing for us three girls since coming to live with us, but her gifts had a price. To Tante Jans, the clothes in fashion when she was young represented God’s final say on human apparel; all change since then came from the stylebook of the devil. Indeed, one of her best-known pamphlets exposed him as the inventor of the mutton sleeve and the bicycle skirt.
“I know!” I said now as the buttonhook in Betsie’s swift fingers sped up my shoes, “you could fit the fur hat right inside the bonnet! Then when you get outside, take the bonnet off!”
“Corrie!” Nollie was genuinely shocked. “That wouldn’t be honest!” And with a baleful glance at the big brown hat, she picked up the little fur one and started after Betsie round the stairs down to breakfast.
I picked up my own hat—the despised gray one from last year— and trailed after them, one hand clinging to the center post. Let Tante Jans see the silly hat then. I didn’t care. I never could understand all the fuss over clothes.
What I did understand, what was awful and alarming, was that this was the day I was to start school. To leave this old house above the watch shop, leave Mama and Father and the aunts, in fact leave behind everything that was certain and well-loved. I gripped the post so tight that my palm squeaked as I circled around. The elementary school was only a block and a half away, it was true, and Nollie had gone there two years without difficulty. But Nollie was different from me; she was pretty and well-behaved and always had her handkerchief.
And then, as I rounded the final curve, the solution came to me, so clear and simple that I laughed out loud. I just wouldn’t go to school! I’d stay here and help Tante Anna with the cooking and Mama would teach me to read and I’d never go into that strange ugly building at all. Relief and comfort flooded me and I took the last three steps in a bound.
“Shhh!” Betsie and Nollie were waiting for me outside the dining room door. “For heaven’s sake, Corrie, don’t do anything to get Tante Jans started wrong,” Betsie said. “I’m sure,” she added doubtfully, “that Father and Mama and Tante Anna will like Nollie’s hat.”
“Tante Bep won’t,” I said.
“She never likes anything,” Nollie said, “so she doesn’t count.”
Tante Bep, with her perpetual, disapproving scowl, was the oldest of the aunts and the one we children liked least. For thirty years she had worked as a governess in wealthy families and she continually compared our behavior with that of the young ladies and gentlemen she was used to.
Betsie pointed to the Frisian clock on the stair wall, and with a finger on her lips silently opened the dining room door. It was 8:12: breakfast had already begun.
“Two minutes late!” cried Willem triumphantly.
“The Waller children were never late,” said Tante Bep.
“But they’re here!” said Father. “And the room is brighter!”
The three of us hardly heard: Tante Jans’s chair was empty.
“Is Tante Jans staying in bed today?” asked Betsie hopefully as we hung our hats on their pegs.
“She’s making herself a tonic in the kitchen,” said Mama. She leaned forward to pour our coffee and lowered her voice. “We must all be specially considerate of dear Jans today. This is the day her husband’s sister died some years ago—or was it his cousin?”
“I thought it was his aunt,” said Tante Anna.
“It was a cousin and it was a mer
cy,” said Tante Bep.
“At any rate,” Mama hurried on, “you know how these anniversaries upset dear Jans, so we must all try to make it up to her.”
Betsie cut three slices from the round loaf of bread while I looked around the table trying to decide which adult would be most enthusiastic about my decision to stay at home. Father, I knew, put an almost religious importance on education. He himself had had to stop school early to go to work in the watch shop, and though he had gone on to teach himself history, theology, and literature in five languages, he always regretted the missed schooling. He would want me to go—and whatever Father wanted, Mama wanted too.
Tante Anna then? She’d often told me she couldn’t manage without me to run errands up and down the steep stairs. Since Mama was not strong, Tante Anna did most of the heavy housework for our family of nine. She was the youngest of the four sisters, with a spirit as generous as Mama’s own. There was a myth in our family, firmly believed in by all, that Tante Anna received wages for this work—and indeed every Saturday, Father faithfully paid her one guilder. But by Wednesday when the greengrocer came he often had to ask for it back, and she always had it, unspent and waiting. Yes, she would be my ally in this business.
“Tante Anna,” I began, “I’ve been thinking about you working so hard all day when I’m in school and—”
A deep dramatic intake of breath made us all look up. Tante Jans was standing in the kitchen doorway, a tumbler of thick brown liquid in her hand. When she had filled her chest with air, she closed her eyes, lifted the glass to her lips, and drained it down. Then with a sigh she let out the breath, set the glass on the sideboard, and sat down.
“And yet,” she said, as though we had been discussing the subject, “what do doctors know? Dr. Blinker prescribed this tonic—but what can medicine really do? What good does anything do when one’s Day arrives?”