“None at all, Corrie. Those cards have to be accounted for a dozen ways. They’re checked and double-checked.”
The hope that had begun to mount in me tumbled. But Fred was frowning.
“Unless—” he began.
“Unless?”
“Unless there should be a hold-up. The Food Office in Utrecht was robbed last month—but the men were caught.”
He was silent a while. “If it happened at noon,” he said slowly, “when just the record clerk and I are there . . . and if they found us tied and gagged . . .” He snapped his fingers. “And I know just the man who might do it! Do you remember the—”
“Don’t!” I said, remembering Willem’s warning. “Don’t tell me who. And don’t tell me how. Just get the cards if you possibly can.”
Fred stared at me a moment. “How many do you need?”
I opened my mouth to say, “Five.” But the number that unexpectedly and astonishingly came out instead was, “One hundred.”
WHEN FRED OPENED the door to me just a week later, I gasped at the sight of him. Both eyes were a greenish purple, his lower lip cut and swollen.
“My friend took very naturally to the part,” was all he would say.
But he had the cards. On the table in a brown manila envelope were one hundred passports to safety. Fred had already torn the “continuing coupon” from each one. This final coupon was presented at the Food Office the last day of each month in exchange for the next month’s card. With these coupons Fred could “legally” continue to issue us one hundred cards.
We agreed that it would be risky for me to keep coming to his house each month. What if he were to come to the Beje instead, dressed in his old meterman uniform?
The meter in the Beje was in the back hall at the foot of the stairs. When I got home that afternoon, I pried up the tread of the bottom step, as Peter had done higher to hide the radio, and found a hollow space inside. Peter would be proud of me, I thought as I worked—and was flooded by a wave of lonesomeness for that brave and cocksure boy. But even he would have to admit, I concluded as I stepped back at last to admire the completed hideaway, that a watchmaker’s hand and eye were worth something. The hinge was hidden deep in the wood, the ancient riser undisturbed. I was ridiculously pleased with it.
We had our first test of the system on July 1. Fred was to come in through the shop as he always had, carrying the cards beneath his shirt. He would come at 5:30, when Betsie would have the back hall free of callers. To my horror at 5:25 the shop door opened and in stepped a policeman.
He was a tall man with close-cropped orange-red hair whom I knew by name—Rolf van Vliet—but little else. He had come to the Hundredth Birthday Party, but so had half the force. Certainly he was not one of Betsie’s “regulars” for winter morning coffee.
Rolf had brought in a watch that needed cleaning, and he seemed in a mood to talk. My throat had gone dry, but Father chatted cheerfully as he took off the back of Rolf’s watch and examined it. What were we going to do? There was no way to warn Fred Koornstra. Promptly at 5:30 the door of the shop opened and in he walked, dressed in his blue workclothes. It seemed to me that his chest was too thick by a foot at least.
With magnificent aplomb Fred nodded to Father, the policeman, and me. “Good evening.” Courteous but a little bored.
He strode through the door at the rear of the shop and shut it behind him. My ears strained to hear him lift the secret lid. There! Surely Rolf must have heard it too.
The door behind us opened again. So great was Fred’s control that he had not ducked out the alleyway exit, but came strolling back through the shop.
“Good evening,” he said again.
“Evening.”
He reached the street door and was gone. We had got away with it this time, but somehow, someway, we were going to have to work out a warning system.
For meanwhile, in the weeks since Mrs. Kleermaker’s unexpected visit, a great deal had happened at the Beje. Supplied with ration cards, Mrs. Kleermaker and the elderly couple and the next arrivals and the next had found homes in safer locations. But still the hunted people kept coming, and the needs were often more complicated than rations cards and addresses. If a Jewish woman became pregnant, where could she go to have her baby? If a Jew in hiding died, how could he be buried?
“Develop your own sources,” Willem had said. And from the moment Fred Koornstra’s name had popped into my mind, an uncanny realization had been growing in me. We were friends with half of Haarlem! We knew nurses in the maternity hospital. We knew clerks in the Records Office. We knew someone in every business and service in the city.
We didn’t know, of course, the political views of all these people. But—and here I felt a strange leaping of my heart—God did! My job was simply to follow His leading one step at a time, holding every decision up to Him in prayer. I knew I was not clever or subtle or sophisticated; if the Beje was becoming a meeting place for need and supply, it was through some strategy far higher than mine.
A few nights after Fred’s first “meterman” visit the alley bell rang long after curfew. I sped downstairs expecting another sad and stammering refugee. Betsie and I had already made up beds for four new overnight guests that evening: a Jewish woman and her three small children.
But to my surprise, close against the wall of the dark alley, stood Kik. “Get your bicycle,” he ordered with his usual young abruptness. “And put on a sweater. I have some people I want you to meet.”
“Now? After curfew?” But I knew it was useless to ask questions. Kik’s bicycle was tireless too, the wheel rims swathed in cloth. He wrapped mine also to keep down the clatter, and soon we were pedaling through the blacked-out streets of Haarlem at a speed that would have scared me even in daylight.
“Put a hand on my shoulder,” Kik whispered. “I know the way.”
We crossed dark side streets, crested bridges, wheeled round invisible corners. At last we crossed a broad canal and I knew we had reached the fashionable suburb of Aerdenhout.
We turned into a driveway beneath shadowy trees. To my astonishment, Kik picked up my bicycle and carried both his and mine up the front steps. A serving girl with starched white apron and ruffled cap opened the door. The entrance hall was jammed with bicycles.
Then I saw him. One eye smiling at me, the other at the door, his vast stomach hastening ahead of him. Pickwick!
He led Kik and me into the drawing room where, sipping coffee and chatting in small groups, was the most distinguished-looking group of men and women I had ever seen. But all my attention, that first moment, was on the inexpressibly fragrant aroma in that room. Surely, was it possible, they were drinking real coffee?
Pickwick drew me a cup from the silver urn on the sideboard. It was coffee. After two years, rich, black, pungent Dutch coffee. He poured himself a cup too, dropping in his usual five lumps of sugar as though rationing had never been invented. Another starched and ruffled maid was passing a tray heaped high with cakes.
Gobbling and gulping I trailed about the room after Pickwick, shaking the hands of the people he singled out. They were strange introductions for no names were mentioned, only, occasionally, an address, and “Ask for Mrs. Smit.” When I had met my fourth Smit, Kik explained with a grin, “It’s the only last name in the underground.”
So this was really and truly the underground! But—where were these people from? I had never laid eyes on any of them. A second later I realized with a shiver down my spine that I was meeting the national group.
Their chief work, I learned from bits of conversation, was liaison with England and the Free Dutch forces fighting elsewhere on the continent. They also maintained the underground route through which downed Allied plane crews reached the North Sea coast.
But they were instantly sympathetic with my efforts to help Haarlem’s Jews. I blushed to my hair roots to hear Pickwick describe me as “the head of an operation here in this city.” A hollow space under the stairs and some haphazard friend
ships were not an operation. The others here were obviously competent, disciplined, and professional.
But they greeted me with grave courtesy, murmuring what they had to offer as we shook hands. False identity papers. The use of a car with official government plates. Signature forgery.
In a far corner of the room Pickwick introduced me to a frail-appearing little man with a wispy goatee. “Our host informs me,” the little man began formally, “that your headquarters building lacks a secret room. This is a danger for all, those you are helping as well as yourselves and those who work with you. With your permission I will pay you a visit in the coming week. . . .”
Years later I learned that he was one of the most famous architects in Europe. I knew him only as Mr. Smit.
Just before Kik and I started our dash back to the Beje, Pickwick slipped an arm through mine. “My dear, I have good news. I understand that Peter is about to be released.”
SO HE WAS, three days later, thinner, paler, and not a whit daunted by his two months in a concrete cell. Nollie, Tine, and Betsie used up a month’s sugar ration baking cakes for his welcome-home party.
And one morning soon afterward the first customer in the shop was a small thin-bearded man named Smit. Father took his jeweler’s glass from his eye. If there was one thing he loved better than making a new acquaintance, it was discovering a link with an old one.
“Smit,” he said eagerly. “I know several Smits in Amsterdam. Are you by any chance related to the family who—”
“Father,” I interrupted, “this is the man I told you about. He’s come to, ah, inspect the house.”
“A building inspector? Then you must be the Smit with offices in the Grote Hout Straat. I wonder that I haven’t—”
“Father!” I pleaded, “he’s not a building inspector, and his name is not Smit.”
“Not Smit?”
Together Mr. Smit and I attempted to explain, but Father simply could not understand a person’s being called by a name not his own. As I led Mr. Smit into the back hall, we heard him musing to himself, “I once knew a Smit on Koning Straat. . . .”
Mr. Smit examined and approved the hiding place for ration cards beneath the bottom step. He also pronounced acceptable the warning system we had worked out. This was a triangle-shaped wooden sign advertising alpina watches that I had placed in the dining room window. As long as the sign was in place, it was safe to enter.
But when I showed him a cubby hole behind the corner cupboard in the dining room, he shook his head. Some ancient redesigning of the house had left a crawl space in that corner and we’d been secreting jewelry, silver coins, and other valuables there since the start of the occupation. Not only the rabbi had brought us his library but other Jewish families had brought their treasures to the Beje for safekeeping. The space was large enough that we had believed a person could crawl in there if necessary, but Mr. Smit dismissed it without a second glance.
“First place they’d look. Don’t bother to change it though. It’s only silver. We’re interested in saving people, not things.”
He started up the narrow corkscrew stairs, and as he mounted so did his spirits. He paused in delight at the odd-placed landings, pounded on the crooked walls, and laughed aloud as the floor levels of the two old houses continued out of phase.
“What an impossibility!” he said in an awestruck voice. “What an improbably, unbelievable, unpredictable impossibility! Miss ten Boom, if all houses were constructed like this one, you would see before you a less worried man.”
At last, at the very top of the stairs, he entered my room and gave a little cry of delight. “This is it!” he exclaimed.
“You want your hiding place as high as possible,” he went on eagerly. “Gives you the best chance to reach it while the search is on below.” He leaned out the window, craning his thin neck, the little faun’s beard pointed this way and that.
“But . . . this is my bedroom. . . .”
Mr. Smit paid no attention. He was already measuring. He moved the heavy, wobbly old wardrobe away from the wall with surprising ease and pulled my bed into the center of the room. “This is where the false wall will go!” Excitedly he drew out a pencil and drew a line along the floor thirty inches from the back wall. He stood up and gazed at it moodily.
“That’s as big as I dare,” he said. “It will take a cot mattress, though. Oh yes. Easily!”
I tried again to protest, but Mr. Smit had forgotten I existed. Over the next few days he and his workmen were in and out of our house constantly. They never knocked. At each visit each man carried in something. Tools in a folded newspaper. A few bricks in a briefcase. “Wood!” he exclaimed when I ventured to wonder if a wooden wall would not be easier to build. “Wood sounds hollow. Hear it in a minute. No, no. Brick’s the only thing for false walls.”
After the wall was up, the plasterer came, then the carpenter, finally the painter. Six days after he had begun, Mr. Smit called Father, Betsie, and me to see.
We stood in the doorway and gaped. The smell of fresh paint was everywhere. But surely nothing in this room was newly painted! All four walls had that streaked and grimy look that old rooms got in coal-burning Haarlem. The ancient molding ran unbroken around the ceiling, chipped and peeling here and there, obviously undisturbed for a hundred and fifty years. Old water stains streaked the back wall, a wall that even I who had lived half a century in this room, could scarcely believe was not the original, but set back a precious two-and-a-half feet from the true wall of the building.
Built-in bookshelves ran along this false wall, old, sagging shelves whose blistered wood bore the same water stains as the wall behind them. Down in the far lefthand corner, beneath the bottom shelf, a sliding panel, two feet high and two wide, opened into the secret room.
Mr. Smit stooped and silently pulled this panel up. On hands and knees Betsie and I crawled into the narrow room behind it. Once inside we could stand up, sit, or even stretch out one at a time on the single mattress. A concealed vent, cunningly let into the real wall, allowed air to enter from outside.
“Keep a water jug there,” said Mr. Smit, crawling in behind us. “Change the water once a week. Hardtack and vitamins keep indefinitely. Anytime there is anyone in the house whose presence is unofficial, all possessions except the clothes actually on his back must be stored in here.”
Dropping to our knees again, we crawled single file out into my bedroom. “Move back into this room,” he told me. “Everything exactly as before.”
With his fist he struck the wall above the bookshelves.
“The Gestapo could search for a year,” he said. “They’ll never find this one.”
7
Eusie
Peter was home, yet he was not safe, any more than any healthy young male was safe. In Germany the munitions factories were desperate for workers. Without warning, soldiers would suddenly surround a block of buildings and sweep through them, herding every male between sixteen and thirty into trucks for transport. This method of lightning search and seizure was called the razzia, and every family with young men lived in dread of it.
Flip and Nollie had rearranged their kitchen to give them an emergency hiding place as soon as the razzias started. There was a small potato cellar beneath the kitchen floor: they enlarged the trapdoor letting into it, put a large rug on top of it, and moved the kitchen table to stand on this spot.
Since Mr. Smit’s work at the Beje I realized that this hole under the kitchen floor was a totally inadequate hiding place. Too low in the house for one thing, and probably as Mr. Smit would say, “the first place they’d look.” However, it was not a sustained search by trained people it was intended for, but a swoop by soldiers, a place to get out of sight for half an hour. And for that, I thought, it was probably sufficient. . . .
It was Flip’s birthday when the razzia came to that quiet residential street of identical attached homes. Father, Betsie, and I had come early with a quarter-pound of real English tea from Pickwick.
br /> Nollie, Annaliese, and the two older girls were not yet back when we arrived. A shipment of men’s shoes had been announced by one of the department stores, and Nollie had determined to get Flip a pair “if I have to stand in line all day.”
We were chatting in the kitchen with Cocky and Katrien when all at once Peter and his older brother, Bob, raced into the room, their faces white. “Soldiers! Quick! They’re two doors down and coming this way!”
They jerked the table back, snatched away the rug, and tugged open the trapdoor. Bob lowered himself first, lying down flat, and Peter tumbled in on top of him. We dropped the door shut, yanked the rug over it, and pulled the table back in place. With trembling hands, Betsie, Cocky, and I threw a long tablecloth over it and started laying five places for tea.
There was a crash in the hall as the front door burst open and a smaller crash close by as Cocky dropped a teacup. Two uniformed Germans ran into the kitchen, rifles leveled.
“Stay where you are. Do not move.”
We heard boots storming up the stairs. The soldiers glanced around disgustedly at this room filled with women and one old man. If they had looked closer at Katrien, she would surely have given herself away: her face was a mask of terror. But they had other things on their minds.
“Where are your men?” the shorter soldier asked Cocky in clumsy, thick-accented Dutch.
“These are my aunts,” she said, “and this is my grandfather. My father is at his school, and my mother is shopping, and—”
“I didn’t ask about the whole tribe!” the man exploded in German. Then in Dutch: “Where are your brothers?”
Cocky stared at him a second, then dropped her eyes. My heart stood still. I knew how Nollie had trained her children—but surely, surely now of all times a lie was permissible!
“Do you have brothers?” the officer asked again.
“Yes,” Cocky said softly. “We have three.”
“How old are they?”
“Twenty-one, nineteen, and eighteen.”
Upstairs we heard the sounds of doors opening and shutting, the scrape of furniture dragged from walls.