The Hiding Place (14 page)

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 friendships 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.”

S
O 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

P
eter 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.

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.

“Where are they now?” the soldier persisted.

Cocky leaned down and began gathering up the broken bits of cup. The man jerked her upright. “Where are your brothers?”

“The oldest one is at the Theological College. He doesn't get home most nights because—”

“What about the other two?”

Cocky did not miss a breath.

“Why, they're under the table.”

Motioning us all away from it with his gun, the solider seized a corner of the cloth. At a nod from him, the taller man crouched with his rifle cocked. Then he flung back the cloth.

At last the pent-up tension exploded: Cocky burst into spasms of high hysterical laughter. The soldiers whirled around. Was this girl laughing at them?

“Don't take us for fools!” the short one snarled. Furiously he strode from the room and minutes later the entire squad trooped out—not, unfortunately, before the silent soldier had spied and pocketed our precious packet of tea.

It was a strange dinner party that evening, veering as it did from heartfelt thanksgiving to the nearest thing to a bitter argument our close-knit family had ever had. Nollie stuck by Cocky, insisting she would have answered the same way. “God honors truth-telling with perfect protection!”

Peter and Bob, from the viewpoint of the trapdoor, weren't so sure. And neither was I. I had never had Nollie's bravery—no, nor her faith either. But I could spot illogic. “And it isn't logical to
say
the truth and
do
a lie! What about Annaliese's false papers—and that maid's uniform on Katrien?”

“‘Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth,'” Nollie quoted. “‘Keep the door of my lips.' Psalm 141!” she finished triumphantly.

“All right, what about the radio? I had to lie with my lips to keep that!”

“And yet whatever came from your lips, Corrie, I am sure it was spoken in love!” Father's kindly voice reproached my flushed face.