The Hiding Place (20 page)

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?”

He ran down the stairs. Above us the hammering and the tramp of boots had stopped. I heard the alley door open and Willemse's voice, smooth and ingratiating.

“Come in, won't you?”

“Have you heard!” A woman's voice. “They've got Oom Herman!”

Pickwick? Not Pickwick!

“Oh?” I heard Willemse say. “Who was with him?” He pumped her as hard as he could, then placed her under arrest. Blinking with fright and confusion, the woman was seated with us along the wall. I recognized her only as a person who occasionally took messages for us about the city. I stared in anguish at the sign in the window announcing to the world that all was as usual at the Beje. Our home had been turned into a trap: how many more would fall into it before this day was over? And Pickwick! Had they really caught Pickwick?

Kapteyn appeared with Betsie in the dining room door. Her lips were swollen and puffy, a bruise was darkening on her cheek. She half fell into the chair next to mine.

“Oh Betsie! He hurt you!”

“Yes.” She dabbed at the blood on her mouth. “I feel so sorry for him.”

Kapteyn whirled, his white face even paler. “Prisoners will remain silent!” he shrieked. Two men were clumping down the stairs and into the dining room carrying something between them. They had discovered the old radio beneath the stairs.

“Law-abiding citizens, are you?” Kapteyn went on. “You! The old man there. I see you believe in the Bible.” He jerked his thumb at the well-worn book on its shelf. “Tell me, what does it say in there about obeying the government?”

“‘Fear God,'” Father quoted, and on his lips in that room the words came as blessing and reassurance. “‘Fear God and honor the queen.'”

Kapteyn stared at him. “It doesn't say that. The Bible doesn't say that.”

“No.” Father admitted. “It says, ‘Fear God, honor the king.' But in our case, that is the queen.”

“It's not king or queen!” roared Kapteyn. “We're the legal government now, and you're all lawbreakers!”

The doorbell rang again. Again there were the questions and the arrest. The young man—one of our workers—had barely been assigned a chair when again the bell sounded. It seemed to me that we had never had so many callers: the dining room was getting crowded. I felt sorriest for those who had come simply on social visits. An elderly retired missionary was brought in, jaw quivering with fear. At least, from the banging and thumping above, they had not yet discovered the secret room.

A new sound made me jump. The phone down in the hall was ringing.

“That's a telephone!” cried Willemse.

He glared around the room, then, grabbing me by the wrist, yanked me down the stairs behind him. He thrust the receiver up against my ear but kept his own hand on it.

“Answer!” he said with his lips.

“This is the ten Boom residence and shop,” I said as stiffly as I dared.

But the person on the other end did not catch the strangeness. “Miss ten Boom, you're in terrible danger! They've arrested Herman Sluring! They know everything! You've got to be careful!” On and on the woman's voice babbled, the man at my side hearing everything.

She had scarcely hung up when the phone rang again. A man's voice, and again the message, “Oom Herman's been taken to the police station. That means they're on to everything. . . .”

At last, the third time I repeated my formal and untypical little greeting, there was a click on the other end. Willemse snatched the earpiece from my hand.

“Hello! Hello!” he shouted. He jiggled the cradle on the wall. The line had gone dead. He shoved me back up the stairs and into my chair again. “Our friends wised up,” he told Kapteyn. “But I heard enough.”

Apparently Betsie had received permission to leave her chair: she was slicing bread at the sideboard. I was surprised to realize it was already lunchtime. Betsie passed the bread around the room but I shook my head. The fever was raging again. My throat ached and my head throbbed.

A man appeared in the doorway. “We've searched the whole place, Willemse,” he said. “If there's a secret room here, the devil himself built it.”

Willemse looked from Betsie to Father to me. “There's a secret room,” he said quietly. “And people are using it or they would have admitted it. All right. We'll set a guard around the house till they've turned to mummies.”

In the hush of horror that followed, there was a gentle pressure on my knees. Maher Shalal Hashbaz had jumped up into my lap to rub against me. I stroked the shining black fur. What would become of him now? I would not let myself think about the six people upstairs.

It had been half an hour since the doorbell had rung last. Whoever had caught my message over the phone must have spread the alarm. Word was out: no one else would walk into the trap at the Beje.

Apparently Willemse had come to the same conclusion because abruptly he ordered us on our feet and down to the hallway with our coats and hats. Father, Betsie, and me he held in the dining room till last. In front of us down the stairs came the people from Tante Jans's rooms. I held my breath scanning them. Apparently most of those at the prayer service had left before the raid. But by no means all. Here came Nollie, behind her, Peter. Last in the line came Willem.

The whole family then. Father, all four of his children, one grandchild. Kapteyn gave me a shove.

“Get moving.”

Father took his tall hat from the wall peg. Outside the dining room door, he paused to pull up the weights on the old Frisian clock.

“We mustn't let the clock run down,” he said.

Father! Did you really think we would be back home when next the chain ran out?

The snow had gone from the streets; puddles of dirty water stood in the gutters as we marched through the alley and into the Smedestraat. The walk took only a minute, but by the time we got inside the double doors of the police station, I was shaking with cold. I looked anxiously around the foyer for Rolf and the others we knew, but saw no one. A contingent of German soldiers seemed to be supplementing the regular police force.

We were herded along a corridor and through the heavy metal door where I had last seen Harry de Vries. At the end of this hall was a large room that had obviously been a gymnasium. Windows high in the walls were covered with wire mesh; rings and basketball hoops were roped to the ceiling. Now a desk stood in the center of the room with a German army officer seated behind it. Tumbling mats had been spread out to cover part of the floor and I collapsed onto one of them.

For two hours the officer took down names, addresses, and other statistics. I counted those who had been arrested with us: 35 people from the raid on the Beje.

People from previous arrests were sitting or lying about on the mats, too, some of them faces we knew. I looked for Pickwick but he was not among them. One of them, a fellow watchmaker who often came to the Beje on business, seemed especially distressed at what had happened to us. He came and sat down beside Father and me.

At last the officer left. For the first time since the alarm buzzer sounded, we could talk among ourselves. I struggled to sit up. “Quick!” I croaked. “We've got to agree on what to say! Most of us can simply tell the truth but—” My voice died in my throat. It seemed to my flu-addled brain that Peter was giving me the most ferocious frown I had ever seen.

“But if they learn that Uncle Willem was teaching this morning from the Old Testament, it could make trouble for him,” Peter finished for me.

He jerked his head to one side, and I clamored unsteadily to my feet. “Tante Corrie!” he hissed when we were on the other side of the room. “That man, the watchmaker! He's a Gestapo plant.” He patted my head as though I were a sick child. “Lie down again, Tante Corrie. Just for heaven's sake don't do any talking.”

I was waked by the heavy door of the gym slamming open. In strode Rolf.

“Let's have it quiet in here!” he shouted. He leaned close to Willem and said something I could not hear. “Toilets are out back,” he continued in a loud voice. “You can go one at a time under escort.”

Willem sat down beside me. “He says we can flush incriminating papers if we shred them fine enough.” I fumbled through my coat pockets. There were several scraps of papers and a billfold containing a few paper rijksdaalders. I went over each item, trying to think how I would explain it in a court process. Beside the row of outdoor toilets was a basin with a tin cup on a chain. Gratefully I took a long drink—the first since the tea Betsie had brought me that morning.

Toward evening a policeman carried into the gym a large basket of fresh hot rolls. I could not swallow mine. Only the water tasted good to me, though I grew embarrassed at asking again and again to be taken outside.

When I got back the last time, a group had gathered around Father for evening prayers. Every day of my life had ended like this: that deep steady voice, that sure and eager confiding of us all to the care of God. The Bible lay at home on its shelf, but much of it was stored in his heart. His blue eyes seemed to be seeing beyond the locked and crowded room, beyond Haarlem, beyond earth itself, as he quoted from memory: “Thou art my hiding place and my shield: I hope in thy word. . . . Hold thou me up, and I shall be safe. . . .”

None of us slept much. Each time someone left the room he had to step over a dozen others. At last light crept through the high, screened windows at the top of the room. The police again brought rolls. As the long morning wore on, I dozed with my back up against the wall; the worst pain now seemed to be in my chest. It was noon when soldiers entered the room and ordered us on our feet. Hastily we struggled into our coats and filed again through the cold corridors.

In the Smedestraat a wall of people pressed against police barricades set across the street. As Betsie and I stepped out with Father between us, a murmur of horror greeted the sight of “Haarlem's Grand Old Man” being led to prison. In front of the door stood a green city bus with soldiers occupying the rear seats. People were climbing aboard while friends and relatives in the crowd wept or simply stared. Betsie and I gripped Father's arms to start down the steps. Then we froze. Stumbling past us between two soldiers, hatless and coatless, came Pickwick. The top of his bald head was a welter of bruises, dried blood clung to the stubble on his chin. He did not look up as he was hauled onto the bus.

Father, Betsie, and I squeezed into a double seat near the front. Through the window I caught a glimpse of Tine standing in the crowd. It was one of those radiant winter days when the air seemed to shimmer with light. The bus shuddered and started up. Police cleared a path and we inched forward. I gazed hungrily out the window, holding onto Haarlem with my eyes. Now we were crossing the Grote Markt, the walls of the great cathedral glowing a thousand shades of gray in the crystal light. In a strange way it seemed to me that I had lived through this moment before.

Then I recalled.

The vision. The night of the invasion. I had seen it all. Willem, Nollie, Pickwick, Peter—all of us here—drawn against our wills across this square. It had all been in the dream—all of us leaving Haarlem, unable to turn back. Going where?

10
Scheveningen

O
utside Haarlem the bus took the south road, paralleling the sea. On our right rose the low sandy hills of the dune country, soldiers silhouetted on the ridges. Clearly we were not being taken to Amsterdam.