I tore it open. Inside, on the police chief’s stationery, was a handwritten note. I read it silently, then aloud.
“You will come to my office this afternoon at three o’clock.”
For twenty minutes we tried to analyze that note. Some felt it was not a prelude to arrest. Why would the police give you a chance to escape? Still, it was safest to prepare for search and imprisonment. Workers slipped out of the house, one at a time. Boarders emptied wastebaskets and picked up scraps of sewing in preparation for a quick flight to the secret room. I burned incriminating papers in the long-empty coal hearth in the dining room. The cat caught the tension in the air and sulked beneath the sideboard.
Then I took a bath, perhaps the last for months, and packed a prison bag according to what Nollie and others had learned: a Bible, a pencil, needle and thread, soap—or what we called soap these days—toothbrush, and comb. I dressed in my warmest clothes with several sets of underwear and a second sweater beneath the top one. Just before 3:00, I hugged Father and Betsie tight, and walked through the gray slush to the Smedestraat.
The policeman on duty was an old acquaintance. He looked at the letter, then at me with a curious expression. “This way,” he said.
He knocked at the door marked chief. The man who sat behind the desk had red-gray hair combed forward over a bald spot. A radio was playing. The chief reached over and twisted the volume knob not down but up.
“Miss ten Boom,” he said. “Welcome.”
“How do you do, sir.”
The chief had left his desk to shut the door behind me. “Do sit down,” he said. “I know all about you, you know. About your work.”
“The watchmaking you mean. You’re probably thinking more about my father’s work than my own.”
The chief smiled. “No, I mean your ‘other’ work.”
“Ah, then you’re referring to my work with retarded children? Yes. Let me tell you about that—”
“No, Miss ten Boom,” the chief lowered his voice. “I am not talking about your work with retarded children. I’m talking about still another work, and I want you to know that some of us here are in sympathy.”
The chief was smiling broadly now. Tentatively I smiled back. “Now, Miss ten Boom,” he went on, “I have a request.”
The chief sat down on the edge of his desk and looked at me steadily. He dropped his voice until it was just audible. He was, he said, working with the underground himself. But an informer in the police department was leaking information to the Gestapo. “There’s no way for us to deal with this man but to kill him.”
A shudder went down my spine.
“What alternative have we?” the chief went on in a whisper. “We can’t arrest him—there are no prisons except those controlled by the Germans. But if he remains at large many others will die. That is why I wondered, Miss ten Boom, if in your work you might know of someone who could—”
“Kill him?”
“Yes.”
I leaned back. Was this all a trap to trick me into admitting the existence of a group, into naming names?
“Sir,” I said at last, seeing the chief’s eyes flicker impatiently, “I have always believed that it was my role to save life, not destroy it. I understand your dilemma, however, and I have a suggestion. Are you a praying man?”
“Aren’t we all, these days?”
“Then let us pray together now that God will reach the heart of this man so that he does not continue to betray his countrymen.”
There was a long pause. Then the chief nodded. “That I would very much like to do.”
And so there in the heart of the police station, with the radio blaring out the latest news of the German advance, we prayed. We prayed that this Dutchman would come to realize his worth in the sight of God and the worth of every other human being on earth.
At the end of the prayer, the chief stood up. “Thank you, Miss ten Boom.” He shook my hand. “Thank you again. I know now that it was wrong to ask you.”
Still clutching my prison bag, I walked through the foyer and around the corner to the Beje.
Upstairs, people crowded around wanting to know everything. But I did not tell them. Not everything—I did not want Father and Betsie to know that we had been asked to kill. It would have been an unnecessary burden for them to bear.
THE EPISODE WITH the chief of police should have been encouraging. Apparently we had friends in high places. As a matter of fact, the news had the opposite effect upon us. Here was one more illustration of how our secret was no secret at all. All of Haarlem seemed to know what we were up to.
We knew we should stop the work, but how could we? Who would keep open the network of supplies and information on which the safety of hundreds depended? If a hideaway had to be abandoned, as happened all the time, who would coordinate the move to another address? We had to go on, but we knew that disaster could not be long in coming.
As a matter of fact, it came first to Jop, the seventeen-year-old apprentice who had sought a safe home at the Beje.
Late one afternoon near the end of January 1944, Rolf stepped stealthily into the workshop. He glanced at Jop. I nodded: Jop was party to everything that went on in the house.
“There’s an underground home in Ede that is going to be raided this evening. Do you have anyone who can go?”
But I did not. Not a single courier or escort person was at the Beje this late in the day.
“I’ll go,” Jop said.
I opened my mouth to protest that he was inexperienced, and liable to the factory transport himself if stopped on the street. Then I thought of the unsuspecting people at Ede. We had a wardrobe of girls’ scarves and dresses upstairs. . . .
“Then quickly, boy,” Rolf said. “You must leave immediately.” He gave Jop the details and hurried away. In a few moments Jop reappeared, making a very pretty brunette in long coat and kerchief, a fur muff hiding his hands. Did the lad have some kind of premonition? To my astonishment he turned at the door and kissed me.
Jop was supposed to be back by the 7:00 p.m. curfew. Seven came and went. Perhaps he had been delayed and would return in the morning.
We did have a visitor early the next day but it was not Jop. I knew the minute Rolf stepped through the door that bad news was weighing him down.
“It’s Jop, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
Rolf had learned the story from the sergeant at the night desk. When Jop got to the address in Ede, the Gestapo was already there. Jop had rung the bell; the door opened. Pretending to be the owner of the house, the S.D. man had invited Jop in.
“And Corrie,” Rolf said, “we must face it. The Gestapo will get information out of Jop. They have already taken him to Amsterdam. How long will he be able to hold his tongue?”
Once again we considered stopping the work. Once again we discovered we could not.
That night Father and Betsie and I prayed long after the others had gone to bed. We knew that in spite of daily mounting risks we had no choice but to move forward. This was evil’s hour: we could not run away from it. Perhaps only when human effort had done its best and failed, would God’s power alone be free to work.
9
The Raid
At the sound of someone in my room, I opened my eyes painfully. It was Eusie, carrying up his bedding and night clothes to store in the secret room. Behind him came Mary and Thea with their bundles.
I shut my eyes again. It was the morning of February 28, 1944. For two days I had been in bed with influenza. My head throbbed, my joints were on fire. Every little sound, Mary’s wheeze, the scrape of the secret panel, made me want to shriek. I heard Henk and Meta come in, then Eusie’s laugh as he handed the day things out to the others through the low door.
Go away all of you! Leave me alone! I bit my lip to keep from saying it.
At last they collected their clothes and belongings and trooped out, closing the door behind them. Where was Leendert? Why hadn’t he
come up? Then I remembered that Leendert was away for a few days setting up electrical warning systems like ours in several of our host homes. I drifted back into a feverish sleep.
The next thing I knew, Betsie was standing at the foot of the bed, a steaming cup of herb tea in her hand. “I’m sorry to wake you, Corrie. But there’s a man down in the shop who insists he will talk only to you.”
“Who is he?”
“He says he’s from Ermelo. I’ve never seen him before.”
I sat up shakily. “That’s all right. I have to get up anyway. Tomorrow the new ration cards come.”
I sipped the scalding tea, then struggled to my feet. There by the bed lay my prison bag, packed and ready as it had been since the summons from the chief of police. In fact I’d been adding to it. Besides the Bible, clothing, and toilet things, it now held vitamins, aspirins, iron pills for Betsie’s anemia, and much else. It had become a kind of talisman for me, a safeguard against the terrors of prison.
I got slowly into my clothes and stepped out onto the landing. The house seemed to reel around me. I crept down, clinging to the handrail. At the door to Tante Jans’s rooms, I was surprised to hear voices. I looked in. Of course, I’d forgotten. It was Wednesday morning, people were gathering for Willem’s weekly service. I saw Nollie passing around “occupation coffee” as we called the current brew of roots and dried figs. Peter was already at the piano, as he was most weeks, to provide the music. I continued down around the stairs, passing new arrivals streaming up.
As I arrived, wobble-kneed, in the shop, a small sandy-haired man sprang forward to meet me. “Miss ten Boom!”
“Yes?” There was an old Dutch expression: you can tell a man by the way he meets your eyes. This man seemed to concentrate somewhere between my nose and my chin. “Is it about a watch?” I asked.
“No, Miss ten Boom, something far more serious!” His eyes seemed to make a circle around my face. “My wife has just been arrested. We’ve been hiding Jews, you see. If she is questioned, all of our lives are in danger.”
“I don’t know how I can help,” I said.
“I need six hundred guilders. There’s a policeman at the station in Ermelo who can be bribed for that amount. I’m a poor man—and I’ve been told you have certain contacts.”
“Contacts?”
“Miss ten Boom! It’s a matter of life and death! If I don’t get it right away, she’ll be taken to Amsterdam and then it will be too late.”
Something about the man’s behavior made me hesitate. And yet how could I risk being wrong? “Come back in half an hour. I’ll have the money,” I said.
For the first time the man’s eyes met mine.
“I’ll never forget this,” he said.
The amount was more than we had at the Beje so I sent Toos to the bank with instructions to hand the man the money, but not to volunteer any information.
Then I struggled back up the stairs. Where ten minutes earlier I’d been burning with fever, now I was shaking with cold. I stopped at Tante Jans’s rooms just long enough to take a briefcase of papers from the desk. Then with apologies to Willem and the others, I continued to my room. I undressed again, refilled the vaporizer where it was hissing on its small spirit-stove, and climbed back into bed. For a while I tried to concentrate on the names and addresses in the briefcase. Five cards needed this month in Zandvoort. None in Overveen. We would need eighteen in . . . The flu roared behind my eyes, the papers swam in front of me. The briefcase slipped from my hand and I was asleep.
IN MY FEVERED dream a buzzer kept ringing. On and on it went. Why wouldn’t it stop? Feet were running, voices whispering. “Hurry! Hurry!”
I sat bolt upright. People were running past my bed. I turned just in time to see Thea’s heels disappear through the low door. Meta was behind her, then Henk.
But—I hadn’t planned a drill for today! Who in the world—unless—unless it wasn’t a drill. Eusie dashed past me, white-faced, his pipe rattling in the ashtray that he carried in shaking hands.
And at last it penetrated my numbed brain that the emergency had come. One, two, three people already in the secret room; four as Eusie’s black shoes and scarlet socks disappeared. But Mary—where was Mary? The old woman appeared in the bedroom door, mouth open, gasping for air. I sprang from my bed and half-pulled, half-shoved her across the room.
I was sliding the secret panel down behind her when a slim white-haired man burst into the room. I recognized him from Pickwick’s, someone high in the national Resistance. I’d had no idea he was in the house. He dived after Mary. Five, six. Yes, that was right with Leendert away.
The man’s legs vanished and I dropped the panel down and lept back into bed. Below I heard doors slamming, heavy footsteps on the stairs. But it was another sound that turned my blood to water: the strangling, grating rasp of Mary’s breathing.
“Lord Jesus!” I prayed. “You have the power to heal! Heal Mary now!”
And then my eye fell on the briefcase, stuffed with names and addresses. I snatched it up, yanked up the sliding door again, flung the case inside, shoved the door down, and pushed my prison bag up against it. I had just reached the bed again when the bedroom door flew open.
“What’s your name?”
I sat up slowly and—I hoped—sleepily.
“What?”
“Your name!”
“Cornelia ten Boom.” The man was tall and heavy-set with a strange, pale face. He wore an ordinary blue business suit. He turned and shouted down the stairs, “We’ve got one more up here, –Willemse.” He turned back to me. “Get up! Get dressed!”
As I crawled out from under the covers, the man took a slip of paper from his pocket and consulted it. “So you’re the ring leader!” He looked at me with new interest. “Tell me now, where are you hiding the Jews?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The man laughed. “And you don’t know anything about an underground ring, either. We’ll see about that!”
He had not taken his eyes off me, so I began to pull on my clothes over my pajamas, ears straining for a sound from the secret room.
“Let me see your papers!”
I pulled out the little sack that I wore around my neck. When I took out my identification folder, a roll of bills fell out with it. The man stooped, snatched up the money from the floor, and stuffed it into his pocket. Then he took my papers and looked at them. For a moment the room was silent. Mary Itallie’s wheeze—why wasn’t I hearing it?
The man threw the papers back at me. “Hurry up!”
But he was not in half the hurry I was to get away from that room. I buttoned my sweater all wrong in my haste and stuffed my feet into my shoes without bothering to tie them. Then I was about to reach for my prison bag.
Wait.
It stood where I had shoved it in my panic: directly in front of the secret panel. If I were to reach down under the shelf to get it now, with this man watching my every move, might not his attention be attracted to the last place on earth I wanted him to look?
It was the hardest thing I had ever done to turn and walk out of that room, leaving the bag behind.
I stumbled down the stairs, my knees shaking as much from fear as from flu. A uniformed soldier was stationed in front of Tante Jans’s rooms; the door was shut. I wondered if the prayer meeting had ended, if Willem and Nollie and Peter had gotten away. Or were they all still in there? How many innocent people might be involved?
The man behind me gave me a little push and I hurried on down the stairs to the dining room. Father, Betsie, and Toos were sitting on chairs pulled back against the wall. Beside them sat three underground workers who must have arrived since I had gone upstairs. On the floor beneath the window, broken in three pieces, lay the alpina sign. Someone had managed to knock it from the sill.
A second Gestapo agent in plain clothes was pawing eagerly through a pile of silver rijksdaalders and jewelry heaped on the dining room table. It was the cache from the
space behind the corner cupboard: it had been indeed the first place they looked.
“Here’s the other one listed at the address,” said the man who had brought me down. “My information says she’s the leader of the whole outfit.”
The man at the table, the one called Willemse, glanced at me, then turned back to the loot in front of him. “You know what to do, Kapteyn.”
Kapteyn seized me by the elbow and shoved me ahead of him down the remaining five steps and into the rear of the shop. Another soldier in uniform stood guard just inside this door. Kapteyn prodded me through to the front room and pushed me against the wall.
“Where are the Jews?”
“There aren’t any Jews here.”
The man struck me hard across the face.
“Where do you hide the ration cards?”
“I don’t know what you’re—”
Kapteyn hit me again. I staggered up against the astronomical clock. Before I could recover he slapped me again, then again, and again, stinging blows that jerked my head backward.
“Where are the Jews?”
Another blow.
“Where is your secret room?”
I tasted blood in my mouth. My head spun, my ears rang—I was losing consciousness. “Lord Jesus,” I cried out, “protect me!”
Kapteyn’s hand stopped in midair.
“If you say that name again I’ll kill you!”
But instead his arm slowly dropped to his side. “If you won’t talk, that skinny one will.”
I stumbled ahead of him up the stairs. He pushed me into one of the chairs against the dining room wall. Through a blur, I saw him lead Betsie from the room.
Above us hammer blows and splintering wood showed where a squad of trained searchers was probing for the secret room. Then down in the alley the doorbell rang. But the sign! Didn’t they see the alpina sign was gone and . . . ? I glanced at the window and caught my breath. There on the sill, the broken pieces fitted carefully together, sat the wooden triangle.
Too late I looked up to see Willemse staring intently at me. “I thought so!” he said. “It was a signal, wasn’t it?”