It was more than two weeks before I saw Kik again to ask him what had happened. He smiled at me, the broad, slow smile I had loved since he was a child.
“If you’re going to work with the underground, Tante Corrie, you must learn not to ask questions.”
That was all we ever learned of the Weils. But Kik’s words went round and round in my head. The underground. . . . If you’re going to work with the underground. Was Kik working with this secret and illegal group? Was Willem?
We knew, of course, that there was an underground in Holland—or suspected it. Most cases of sabotage were not reported in our controlled press, but rumors abounded. A factory had been blown up. A train carrying political prisoners had been stopped and seven, or seventeen, or seventy, had made it away. The rumors tended to get more spectacular with each repetition. But always they featured things we believed were wrong in the sight of God. Stealing, lying, murder. Was this what God wanted in times like these? How should a Christian act when evil was in power?
IT WAS ABOUT a month after the raid on the fur shop that Father and I, on our usual walk, saw something so very unusual that we both stopped in mid-stride. Walking toward us along the sidewalk, as so many hundreds of times before, came The Bulldog with his rolling short-legged gait. The bright yellow star had by now ceased to look extraordinary, so what—and then I knew what was wrong. The dogs. The dogs were not with him!
He passed without seeming to see us. With one accord Father and I turned around and walked after him. He turned a number of corners while we grew more and more embarrassed at following him without any real excuse. Although Father and he had tipped their hats to each other for years, we had never spoken and did not even know his name.
At last the man stopped in front of a small secondhand shop, took out a ring of keys, and let himself in. We looked through the window at the cluttered interior. Only a glance showed us that this was more than the usual hodgepodge of bric-a-brac and hollow-seated chairs. Someone who loved beautiful things had chosen everything here. “We must bring Betsie!” I said.
A little bell over the door jingled as we stepped in. Astonishing to see The Bulldog hatless and indoors, unlocking a cash drawer at the rear of the store.
“Permit an introduction, sir,” Father began. “I am Casper ten Boom and this is my daughter, Cornelia.”
The Bulldog shook hands and again I noticed the deep creases in the sagging cheeks. “Harry de Vries,” he said.
“Mr. de Vries, we’ve so often admired your—er—affection for your bulldogs. We hope they are well?”
The squat little man stared from one of us to the other. Slowly the heavy-rimmed eyes filled with tears. “Are they well?” he repeated. “I believe they are well. I hope that they are well. They are dead.”
“Dead!” we said together.
“I put the medicine in their bowl with my own hands and I petted them to sleep. My babies. My little ones. If you could only have seen them eat! I waited, you know, till we had enough coupons for meat. They used to have meat all the time.”
We stared at him dumbly. “Was it,” I ventured at last, “was it because of the rationing?”
With a gesture of his hands the little man invited us into a small room in back of the shop and gave us chairs. “Miss ten Boom, I am a Jew. Who knows when they will come to take me away? My wife too—although she is a Gentile—is in danger because of her marriage.”
The Bulldog raised his chin so high his jowls stretched taut. “It is not for ourselves we mind. We are Christians, Cato and I. When we die we will see Jesus, and this is all that matters.
“But I said to Cato, ‘What about the dogs? If we are taken away who will feed them? Who will remember their water and their walk? They will wait and we will not come and they will not understand.’ No! This way my mind is at ease.”
“My dear friend!” Father grasped The Bulldog’s hand in both of his. “Now that these dear companions may no longer walk with you, will you not do my daughter and me the great honor of accompanying us?”
But this The Bulldog would not do. “It would put you in danger,” he kept saying. He did, however, accept an invitation to come to visit us. “After dark, after dark,” he said.
And so one evening the following week, Mr. de Vries came to the alley door of the Beje bringing his sweet, shy wife, Cato, and soon she and Harry were almost nightly visitors in Tante Jans’s front room.
The Bulldog’s chief delight at the Beje, after talking with Father, were the tomes of Jewish theology now housed in Tante Jans’s big mahogany case. For he had become a Christian, some forty years earlier, without ceasing in the least to be a loyal Jew. “A completed Jew” he would tell us smilingly. “A follower of the one perfect Jew.”
The books belonged to the rabbi of Haarlem. He had brought them to Father more than a year before: “Just in case I should not be able to care for them—ah—indefinitely.” He had waved a bit apologetically at the procession of small boys behind him, each staggering under the weight of several huge volumes. “My little hobby. Book collecting. And yet, old friend, books do not age as you and I do. They will speak still when we are gone, to generations we will never see. Yes, the books must survive.”
The rabbi had been one of the first to vanish from Haarlem.
How often it is a small, almost unconscious event that marks a turning point. As arrests of Jews in the street became more frequent, I had begun picking up and delivering work for our Jewish customers myself so that they would not have to venture into the center of town. And so one evening in the early spring of 1942, I was in the home of a doctor and his wife. They were a very old Dutch family: the portraits on the walls could have been a textbook of Holland’s history.
The Heemstras and I were talking about the things that were discussed whenever a group of people got together in those days, rationing and the news from England, when down the stairs piped a childish voice.
“Daddy! You didn’t tuck us in!”
Dr. Heemstra was on his feet in an instant. With an apology to his wife and me, he hurried upstairs and in a minute we heard a game of hide-and-seek going and the shrill laughter of two children.
That was all. Nothing had changed. Mrs. Heemstra continued with her recipe for stretching the tea ration with rose leaves. And yet everything was changed. For in that instant, reality broke through the numbness that had grown in me since the invasion. At any minute there might be a rap on this door. These children, this mother and father, might be ordered to the back of a truck.
Dr. Heemstra came back to the living room and the conversation rambled on. But under the words, a prayer was forming in my heart.
Lord Jesus, I offer myself for Your people. In any way. Any place. Any time.
And then an extraordinary thing happened.
Even as I prayed, that waking dream passed again before my eyes. I saw again those four black horses and the Grote Markt. As I had on the night of the invasion, I scanned the passengers drawn so unwillingly behind them. Father, Betsie, Willem, myself—leaving Haarlem, leaving all that was sure and safe—going where?
6
The Secret Room
It was Sunday, May 10, 1942, exactly two years after the fall of Holland. The sunny spring skies, the flowers in the lamppost boxes, did not at all reflect the city’s mood. German soldiers wandered aimlessly through the streets, some looking as if they had not yet recovered from a hard Saturday night, some already on the lookout for girls, a few hunting for a place to worship.
Each month the occupation seemed to grow harsher, restrictions more numerous. The latest heartache for Dutchmen was an edict making it a crime to sing the “Wilhelmus,” our national anthem.
Father, Betsie, and I were on our way to the Dutch Reformed church in Velsen, a small town not far from Haarlem, where Peter had won the post of organist in competition against forty older and more experienced musicians. The organ at Velsen was one of the finest in the country; though the train seemed slower each time, we went fre
quently.
Peter was already playing, invisible in the tall organ loft, when we squeezed into the crowded pew. That was one thing the occupation had done for Holland; churches were packed.
After hymns and prayers came the sermon, a good one today, I thought. I wished Peter would pay closer attention. He regarded sermons as interesting only to venerable relics like his mother and me. I had reached fifty that spring, to Peter the age at which life had definitely passed by. I would beg him to remember that death and ultimate issues could come for any of us at any age—especially these days—but he would reply charmingly that he was too fine a musician to die young.
The closing prayers were said. And then, electrically, the whole church sat at attention. Without preamble, every stop pulled out to full volume, Peter was playing the “Wilhelmus”!
Father, at eight-two, was the first one on his feet. Now everyone was standing. From somewhere in back of us a voice sang out the words. Another joined in, and another. Then we were all singing together, the full voice of Holland singing her forbidden anthem. We sang at the top of our lungs, sang our oneness, our hope, our love for Queen and country. On this anniversary of defeat it seemed almost for a moment that we were victors.
Afterward we waited for Peter at the small side door of the church. It was a long time before he was free to come away with us, so many people wanted to embrace him, to shake his hand and thump his back. Clearly he was enormously pleased with himself.
But now that the moment had passed I was, as usual, angry with him. The Gestapo was certain to hear about it, perhaps already had: their eyes and ears were everywhere. I thought of Nollie, home fixing Sunday dinner for us all. I thought of Peter’s brothers and sisters. And Flip—what if he lost the principalship of the school for this? And for what had Peter risked so much? Not for people’s lives but for a gesture. For a moment’s meaningless defiance.
At Bos en Hoven Straat, however, Peter was a hero as one by one his family made us describe again what had happened. The only members of the household who felt as I did were the two Jewish women staying at Nollie’s. One of these was an elderly Austrian lady whom Willem had sent into hiding here. “Katrien,” as the family had rechristened her, was posing as the von Woerden’s housemaid—although Nollie confided to me that she had yet so much as to make her own bed. Probably she did not know how, as she came from a wealthy and aristocratic family.
The other woman was a young, blonde, blue-eyed Dutch Jew with flawless false identity papers supplied by the Dutch national underground itself. The papers were so good and Annaliese looked so unlike the Nazi stereotype of a Jew, that she went freely in and out of the house, shopping and helping out at the school, giving herself out to be a friend of the family whose husband had died in the bombing of Rotterdam. Katrien and Annaliese could not understand any more than I could Peter’s deliberately doing something that would attract the attention of the authorities.
I spent an anxious afternoon, tensing at the sound of every motor, for only the police, Germans, and NSBers had automobiles nowadays. But the time came to go home to the Beje and still nothing had happened.
I worried two more days, then decided either Peter had not been reported or that the Gestapo had more important things to occupy them. It was Wednesday morning just as Father and I were unlocking our workbenches that Peter’s little sister Cocky burst into the shop.
“Opa! Tante Corrie! They came for Peter! They took him away!”
“Who? Where?”
But she didn’t know and it was three days before the family learned that he had been taken to the federal prison in Amsterdam.
IT WAS 7:55 in the evening, just a few minutes before the new curfew hour of 8:00. Peter had been in prison for two weeks. Father and Betsie and I were seated around the dining room table, Father replacing watches in their pockets and Betsie doing needlework, our big, black, slightly-Persian cat curled contentedly in her lap. A knock on the alley door made me glance in the window mirror. There in the bright spring twilight stood a woman. She carried a small suitcase and—odd for the time of year—wore a fur coat, gloves, and a heavy veil.
I ran down and opened the door. “Can I come in?” she asked. Her voice was high-pitched in fear.
“Of course.” I stepped back. The woman looked over her shoulder before moving into the little hallway.
“My name is Kleermaker. I’m a Jew.”
“How do you do?” I reached out to take her bag, but she held onto it. “Won’t you come upstairs?”
Father and Betsie stood up as we entered the dining room. “Mrs. Kleermaker, my father and my sister.”
“I was about to make some tea!” cried Betsie. “You’re just in time to join us!”
Father drew out a chair from the table and Mrs. Kleermaker sat down, still gripping the suitcase. The “tea” consisted of old leaves which had been crushed and reused so often they did little more than color the water. But Mrs. Kleermaker accepted it gratefully, plunging into the story of how her husband had been arrested some months before, her son gone into hiding. Yesterday the S.D.—the political police who worked under the Gestapo—had ordered her to close the family clothing store. She was afraid now to go back to the apartment above it. She had heard that we had befriended a man on this street. . . .
“In this household,” Father said, “God’s people are always welcome.” “We have four empty beds upstairs, “ said Betsie. “Your problem will be choosing which one to sleep in!” Then to my astonishment she added, “First though, give me a hand with the tea things.”
I could hardly believe my ears. Betsie never let anyone help in her kitchen: “I’m just a fussy old maid,” she’d say.
But Mrs. Kleermaker had jumped to her feet with pathetic eagerness and was already stacking plates and cups. . . .
JUST TWO NIGHTS later the same scene was repeated. The time was again just before 8:00 on another bright May evening. Again there was a furtive knock at the side door. This time an elderly couple was standing outside.
“Come in!”
It was the same story: the same tight-clutched possessions, the same fearful glance and tentative tread. The story of neighbors arrested, the fear that tomorrow their turn would come.
That night after prayer-time the six of us faced our dilemma. “This location is too dangerous,” I told our three guests. “We’re half a block from the main police headquarters. And yet I don’t know where else to suggest.”
Clearly it was time to visit Willem again. So the next day I repeated the difficult trip to Hilversum. “Willem,” I said, “we have three Jews staying right at the Beje. Can you get places for them in the country?”
Willem pressed his fingers to his eyes and I noticed suddenly how much white was in his beard. “It’s getting harder,” he said. “Harder every month. They’re feeling the food shortage now even on the farms. I still have addresses, yes, a few. But they won’t take anyone without a ration card.”
“Without a ration card! But, Jews aren’t issued ration cards!”
“I know.” Willem turned to stare out the window. For the first time I wondered how he and Tine were feeding the elderly men and women in their care.
“I know,” he repeated. “And ration cards can’t be counterfeited. They’re changed too often and they’re too easy to spot. Identity cards are different. I know several printers who do them. Of course you need a photographer.”
A photographer? Printers? What was Willem talking about? “Willem, if people need ration cards and there aren’t any counterfeit ones, what do they do?”
Willem turned slowly from the window. He seemed to have forgotten me and my particular problem. “Ration cards?” He gestured vaguely. “You steal them.”
I stared at this Dutch Reformed clergyman. “Then, Willem, could you steal . . . I mean . . . could you get three stolen cards?”
“No, Corrie! I’m watched! Don’t you understand that? Every move I make is watched!”
He put an arm around my shoulder a
nd went on more kindly, “Even if I can continue working for a while, it will be far better for you to develop your own sources. The less connection with me—the less connection with anyone else—the better.”
Joggling home on the crowded train I turned Willem’s words over and over in my mind. Your own sources. That sounded so—so professional. How was I going to find a source of stolen ration cards?
Who in the world did I know . . .
And at that moment a name appeared in my mind.
Fred Koornstra.
Fred was the man who used to read the electric meter at the Beje. The Koornstras had a retarded daughter, now a grown woman, who attend the “church” I had been conducting for the feeble-minded for some twenty years. And now Fred had a new job working for the Food Office. Wasn’t it in the department where ration books were issued?
That evening after supper I bumped over the brick streets to the Koornstra house. The tires on my faithful old bicycle had finally given out and I had joined the hundreds clattering about town on metal wheel rims. Each bump reminded me jarringly of my fifty years.
Fred, a bald man with a military bearing, came to the door and stared at me blankly when I said I wanted to talk to him about the Sunday service. He invited me in, closed the door, and said, “Now Corrie, what is it you really came to see me about?”
Lord, I prayed silently, if it is not safe to confide in Fred, stop this conversation now before it is too late.
“I must first tell you that we’ve had some unexpected company at the Beje. First it was a single woman, then a couple, when I got back this afternoon, another couple.” I paused for just an instant. “They are Jews.”
Fred’s expression did not change.
“We can provide safe places for these people but they must provide something too. Ration cards.”
Fred’s eyes smiled. “So. Now I know why you came here.”
“Fred, is there any way you can give out extra cards? More than you report?”