The Hiding Place (18 page)

Taking a chance, I told the doctor that Nollie's crime had been hiding a Jew. I also told him that she was the mother of six children, who if left without aid could become a burden to the State. (I did not mention that the youngest of these children was now seventeen.)

“Well, we'll see.” He walked to the door of the sitting room. “You must excuse me now.”

I was more encouraged than at any time since Nollie's arrest as I rode the train back to Haarlem. But days, then a week, then two weeks passed and there was no further news. I went back to Amsterdam. “I've come to see how those Dobermans are,” I told the doctor.

He was not amused. “You mustn't bother me. I know that you have not come to talk about dogs. You must give me time.”

So there was nothing to do but wait.

It was a bright September noon when seventeen of us were squeezed around the dining room table. All of a sudden Nils, seated across from me, turned pale. Nils, one of our workers, had come to report old Katrien safely arrived at a farm north of Alkmaar. Now Nils spoke in a low normal voice.

“Do not turn around. Someone is looking over the curtain.”

Over the curtain! But—that was impossible He'd have to be ten feet high. The table fell silent.

“He's on a ladder, washing the window,” Nils said.

“I didn't order the windows washed,” said Betsie.

Whoever it was, we mustn't sit here in this frozen, guilty silence! Eusie had an inspiration. “Happy Birthday!” he sang. “Happy Birthday to you!” We all got the idea and joined in lustily. “Happy Birthday, dear Opa . . . ,” the song was still echoing through the Beje when I went out the side door and stood next to the ladder, looking up at the man holding bucket and sponge.

“What are you doing? We didn't want the windows washed.

Especially not during the party!”

The man took a piece of paper from his hip pocket and consulted it. “Isn't this Kuiper's?”

“They're across the street. But—anyhow, come in and help us celebrate.” The man shook his head. He thanked me, but he had work to do. I watched him crossing the Barteljorisstraat with his ladder to Kuiper's candy store.

“Did it work?” a clamor of voices asked when I got back to the dining room. “Do you think he was spying?”

I didn't answer. I didn't know.

T
HAT WAS
the hardest. Never knowing. And one of the biggest unknowns was my own performance under questioning. As long as I was awake, I felt fairly sure of myself. But if they should come at night . . . Over and over again the group worked with me—Nils, Henk, Leendert—bursting into my room without warning, shaking me awake, hurling questions at me.

The first time it happened I was sure the real raid had come. There was a terrific pounding on my door, then the beam of a flashlight in my eyes. “Get up! On your feet!” I could not see the man who was speaking.

“Where are you hiding your nine Jews?”

“We only have six Jews now.”

There was an awful silence. The room light came on to show Rolf clutching his head with his hands. “Oh no. Oh no,” he kept saying. “It can't be that bad.”

“Think now,” said Henk just behind him. “The Gestapo is trying to trap you. The answer is, ‘What Jews! We don't have Jews here.'”

“Can I try again?”

“Not now,” said Rolf. “You're wide-awake now.”

They tried again a few nights later. “The Jews you're hiding, where do they come from?”

I sat up groggily. “I don't know. They just come to the door.”

Rolf flung his hat to the floor. “No, no, no!” he shouted. “‘What Jews! There are no Jews!' Can't you learn?”

“I'll learn,” I promised. “I'll do better.”

And sure enough, the next time I woke a little more completely.

Half a dozen shadowy forms filled the room. “Where do you hide the ration cards?” a voice demanded.

Under the bottom stair, of course. But this time I would not be trapped into saying so. A crafty reply occurred to me: “In the Frisian clock on the stairwell!”

Kik sat down beside me on the bed and put an arm around me. “That was better, Tante Corrie,” he said. “You tried, this time. But remember—you
have
no cards except the three for you, Opa, and Tante Betsie. There
is
no underground activity here, you don't understand what they're talking about. . . .”

Gradually, with repeated drills, I got better. Still, when the time actually came, when they were real Gestapo agents really trained in getting the truth from people, how would I perform?

W
ILLEM'S UNDERGROUND WORK
brought him frequently to Haarlem. There was an expression of something like despair mingled now with the worry lines in his face. Twice soldiers had been to the nursing home, and although he had managed to deceive them about most of the Jews still in residence there, one sick blind old woman had been taken away.

“Ninety-one!” Willem kept saying. “She couldn't even walk—they had to carry her to the car.”

So far, Willem's position as a minister had prevented direct action against him and Tine, but he was watched, he said, more closely than ever. To provide an official reason for his visits to Haarlem, he started conducting a weekly prayer fellowship at the Beje each Wednesday morning.

But Willem could do nothing routinely—especially pray—and soon the meeting was attended by dozens of Haarlemers hungry for something to believe in, this fourth year of the occupation. Most of those coming to the services had no idea of the double life of the Beje. In a way they posed a fresh danger as they passed workers and couriers from other underground groups coming and going on the narrow stairs. But in another way, we thought, it might be an advantage to have these flocks of obviously innocent people in and out. That, at least, was our hope.

We were sitting around the supper table after curfew one night, three ten Booms, the seven “permanent guests,” and two Jews for whom we were seeking homes, when the shop doorbell chimed.

A customer after closing? And one bold enough to stand on the Barteljorisstraat after curfew? Taking the keys from my pocket, I hurried down to the hall, unlocked the workshop door, and felt my way through the dark store. At the front door I listened a moment.

“Who's there?” I called.

“Do you remember me?”

A man's voice speaking German. “Who is it?” I asked in the same language.

“An old friend, come for a visit. Open the door!”

I fumbled with the lock and drew the door gingerly back. It was a German soldier in uniform. Before I could reach the alarm button behind the door, he had pushed his way inside. Then he took off his hat, and in the October twilight, I recognized the young German watchmaker whom Father had discharged four years ago.

“Otto!” I cried.

“Captain Altschuler,” he corrected me. “Our positions are slightly reversed, Miss ten Boom, are they not?”

I glanced at his insignia. He was not a captain or anything close to it, but I said nothing. He looked around the shop.

“Same stuffy little place,” he said. He reached for the wall switch, but I put my hand over it.

“No! We don't have blackout shades in the shop!”

“Well, let's go upstairs where we can talk over old times. That old clock cleaner still around?”

“Christoffels? He died in the fuel shortage last winter.”

Otto shrugged. “Good riddance then! What about the pious old Bible reader?”

I was edging my way to the sales counter where another bell was located. “Father is very well, thank you.”

“Well, aren't you going to invite me up to pay my respects?”

Why was he so eager to go upstairs? Had the wretched fellow come just to gloat, or did he suspect something? My finger found the button.

“What was that?” Otto whirled around suspiciously.

“What was what?”

“That sound! I heard a kind of buzzing.”

“I didn't hear anything.”

But Otto had started back through the workshop.

“Wait!” I shouted. “Let me get the front door locked and I'll go up with you! I—I want to see how long it takes them to recognize you.”

I dawdled at the door as long as I dared: definitely his suspicions were aroused. Then I followed him through the rear door into the hall. Not a sound from the dining room or the stairs. I dashed past him up the steps and rapped on the door.

“Father! Betsie!” I cried in what I hoped was a playful voice. “I'll give you three—no, uh—six guesses who's standing here!”

“No guessing games!” Otto reached past me and flung open the door.

Father and Betsie looked up from their meal. The table was set for three, my unfinished plate on the other side. It was so perfect that even I, who had just seen twelve people eating here, could scarcely believe this was anything but an innocent old man dining with his daughters. The alpina sign stood on the sideboard: they had remembered everything.

Uninvited, Otto pulled out a chair. “Well!” he crowed. “Things happened just like I said, didn't they?”

“So it would seem,” said Father mildly.

“Betsie,” I said, “give Captain Altschuler some tea!”

Otto took a sip of the brew Betsie poured him and glared around the table at us. “Where did you get real tea! No one else in Holland has tea.”

How stupid of me. The tea had come from Pickwick.

“If you must know,” I said, “it comes from a German officer. But you mustn't ask any further questions.” I tried to imply clandestine dealings with a high occupation official.

Otto lingered another fifteen minutes. And then, feeling perhaps that he had underlined his victory sufficiently, sauntered out into the empty streets.

It was only after another half-hour that we dared give the all clear to nine cramped and shaky people.

T
HE SECOND WEEK
in October, during a particularly hectic morning with underground problems, the secret telephone number rang downstairs in the hall. I hurried down to pick it up; only Father, Betsie, or I ever answered it.

“Well!” said a voice. “Aren't you coming to pick me up?”

It was Nollie.

“Nollie! When—How—Where are you?”

“At the train station in Amsterdam! Only I have no money for the trainfare.”

“Stay right there! Oh Nollie, we're coming!”

I biked to Bos en Hoven Straat and then with Flip and the children who happened to be at home, hurried to the Haarlem station. We saw Nollie even before our train came to a stop in Amsterdam—her bright blue sweater like a patch of blue sky in the big dark shed.

Seven weeks in prison had left her pallid-faced, but as radiantly Nollie as ever. A prison doctor, she said, had pronounced her low blood pressure a serious condition, one that might leave her permanently disabled and her six children a burden to society. Her face wrinkled in puzzlement as she said it.

C
HRISTMAS
1943 was approaching. The light snow that had fallen was the only festive quality of the season. Every family, it seemed, had someone in jail, in a work camp, or in hiding. For once the religious side of the holidays was uppermost in every mind.

At the Beje, we had not only Christmas to celebrate but also Hanukkah, the Jewish “Festival of Lights.” Betsie found a Hanukkah candlestand among the treasures stored with us behind the dining room cupboard and set it up on the upright piano. Each night we lighted one more candle as Eusie read the story of the Maccabees. Then we would sing, haunting, melancholy desert music. We were all very Jewish those evenings.

About the fifth night of the Festival, as we were gathered round the piano, the doorbell in the alley rang. I opened it to find Mrs. Beukers, wife of the optician next door, standing in the snow. Mrs. Beukers was as round and placid as her husband was thin and worried, but tonight her plump face was twisted with anxiety.

“Do you think,” she whispered, “your Jews could sing a little more softly? We can hear them right through the walls and—well, there are all kinds of people on this street. . . .”

Back in Tante Jans's rooms, we considered this news in consternation. If the Beukers family knew all about our affairs, how many other people in Haarlem did too?

It wasn't long before we discovered that one who did was the chief of police himself. One dark January morning when it was trying to snow again, Toos burst into underground “headquarters” in Tante Jans's rear room clutching a letter in her hand. The envelope bore the seal of the Haarlem police.

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.