The prayer meeting in Amersfoort was unlike any prayer meeting Andrew had ever been to. About a dozen men and women were gathered in the de Graafs’ parlor. There was no Bible study first and no fixed focus for their prayer. Rather, people sat listening for God to speak to them about an issue, which often meant there were long periods of silence as they did this. When a person felt that God had spoken to him or her, he or she would pray out about it fervently. Andrew was amazed at some of the things people prayed about, but more than anything, he was struck by the fervency of the people and the love and commitment to each other and to God that he felt in the room. For Andrew the time at the prayer meeting seemed to fly by, and he was astounded to learn when the meeting finally ended that it was four thirty in the morning!
A week later, while Andrew was writing another article for the magazine, he heard a knock at the door. Much to his surprise it was Karl de Graaf. Karl got straight to the point. “Andrew, I have come to ask you a question. Do you know how to drive a car?”
Andrew’s mind went back nearly nine years to when he had careened out of control in the Bren troop carrier. The thought of it made him want to laugh, but he could see that Karl was in a serious mood. “No, sir,” he replied.
“Well, you need to learn. Last night when we were praying, God told us to tell you that it’s very important to your future that you learn to drive and get a license,” Karl said.
Andrew nodded. Then much to Andrew’s amazement, Karl turned and left. “I am just the messenger,” Karl said over his shoulder. “Learn to drive, Andrew.”
Andrew did not give much thought to this two-minute interlude in his day, but he did wonder how on earth he would learn to drive. No one in the village had a car. In fact, the Whetstras were the only friends he knew with a motor vehicle, and they now lived in Amsterdam. There was no way he was going all that way so that they could give him driving lessons. The whole idea was just not realistic. However, a week later Karl was back.
“I didn’t think you’d do anything about it,” he told Andrew, shaking his head as if he were talking to a schoolboy. “Come on. I will teach you myself.”
Andrew turned out to be a quick learner, and within a month he had a driver’s license. Having a driver’s license seemed a little ridiculous to him. He could not afford to buy himself a bicycle, let alone a car. But he had to admit that it felt good having the license in his pocket.
In the spring of 1956 the people of Hungary revolted against the puppet Communist government set up in their country by the Soviet Union at the end of World War II. Eventually Soviet tanks were sent to Hungary to restore order and prop up the government, although not before thousands of Hungarians had fled their country and crossed the border into Austria. These people lived in huge refugee camps near the border and were in desperate need of help. When word reached Holland of the needs of these refugees, Andrew was one of the first to agree to go and help. In fact, he was on the first bus to leave Holland for the refugee camps in Austria. He and several other volunteers crowded into the front of the bus because the rest of the bus was filled to the brim with the most-needed supplies—food, clothing, and medicine.
In Austria Andrew found the refugees living in deplorable conditions. Often up to twelve families were living on top of each other in a single building. The people were dirty, hungry, and dispirited. Andrew soon learned that it was not only Hungarians living in the camps. Thousands of refugees from Communist Yugoslavia were there as well, and in West Germany more refugee camps were packed with people who had fled from East Germany and Czechoslovakia.
As the volunteers distributed supplies and worked among the refugees, Andrew was surprised by the refugees’ lack of knowledge about Christianity and, in particular, about the Bible. He began offering classes to teach the people the most elementary things about the Bible. Using interpreters, he taught those who attended day after day what the Bible said regarding God and how people could have a relationship with Him.
Andrew was astounded at the change this knowledge brought in the lives of the refugees who attended his classes. The years of despair etched into their faces slowly faded away, to be replaced with smiles, and the people’s despair changed into hope.
The supplies the volunteers had taken with them were soon exhausted. Andrew returned home to Sint Pancras long enough to collect more food, clothing, medicine, and Bibles before heading back to West Germany and Austria to continue helping with the relief effort. The work was exhausting, but Andrew was glad that he could bring some comfort to these refugees who had lost everything.
Three weeks after returning with more supplies, Andrew received a telegram from his sister, informing him that their father had collapsed and died in his garden. Andrew was in West Berlin at the time, and he caught the first train home to Holland. Mr. van der Bijl’s funeral service was simple and moving. The family house in Sint Pancras seemed empty now without Papa in it, and Andrew was glad to get back to his work among the refugees.
Andrew had learned that the refugee camps in West Berlin were not new, as were those camps holding Hungarians and Yugoslavians in Austria. The German refugee camps had existed since the end of World War II. They were filled with people who had lost everything in the war, and now the people seemed to have been forgotten by the world. Many children lived in the camps, having been born and raised there. And in a camp where two single people were allotted more space than a married couple, many of these children were illegitimate and often unparented.
Andrew worked hard to try to arrange for some of these refugee children to go to Holland, where families were willing to adopt them. However, the plan proved to be more difficult than Andrew had imagined. Before they could travel to Holland, the children needed to pass a medical examination. Unfortunately, tuberculosis had become an epidemic in the refugee camps. Virtually no one was living there who did not have the disease. As a result, the children failed the medical examination and could not be cleared for travel to the Netherlands.
As Andrew worked away one particularly busy day in the refugee camp, a strange thought passed through his mind. Today you will get your visa to enter Yugoslavia. Andrew did not know where the thought came from, but he waited eagerly for the morning mail to see whether it was true. Sure enough, there was an official-looking letter from the Yugoslavian consulate that his sister Geltje had sent on to him from Holland. Andrew eagerly opened the letter and read: “Your application for a visa has been denied.”
Andrew stared at the words for a long time. They relayed the exact opposite of what he had expected to read. Was that really God’s voice he had heard in his head earlier in the day, or was it his own imagination? As he thought about it, however, Andrew decided that it was a strange coincidence that after all these months of waiting, the visa rejection should arrive that very day. Then he heard the voice in his head again. Don’t take no for an answer! it said.
Andrew sprang into action. “Today I will get that visa!” he said as he hurried up to his room to collect some passport-size headshots and change his clothes. He was off to the Yugoslavian embassy in West Berlin.
It was lunchtime when he arrived at the embassy, far too late to get any kind of attention on a normal day, but Andrew climbed the steps anyway. He sat down and once again filled out the paperwork necessary to apply for a visa, only this time he did not write the word missionary on the line next to “Occupation.”
“What should I put, God?” he prayed silently.
The word teacher came to mind, and Andrew thought of the Bible verses that commanded believers to go into the world and teach all nations. Yes, it was not a lie to say that he was a teacher.
Much to Andrew’s surprise, an official beckoned him over to a desk. “Sit down here,” he said, “and I will examine your application while you wait.”
Andrew handed over his paperwork and sat nervously as the man looked through his application. After a few minutes, the man got up and walked away. Twenty minutes later he returned. “Here you are, Mr. van der Bijl. Thank you for waiting, and enjoy your visit to Yugoslavia,” he said.
Just like that, Andrew had the visa he had been waiting for months to receive, and he received it on the same day he got a letter from the consulate in Holland rejecting his application. Completely stunned, Andrew returned to the hostel where he was staying near the refugee camp. He wanted to tell someone the good news, but the van der Bijl house in Sint Pancras did not have a telephone, so he decided to call the Whetstras in Amsterdam.
“Hello,” the voice of Mr. Whetstra said on the other end of the telephone line.
“Hello, Mr. Whetstra. This is Andrew. I’m lucky to find you home in the afternoon,” Andrew said.
“Andrew, nice to hear your voice. I thought you were in Berlin. We were sorry to hear of the passing of your father.”
“Thank you, Mr. Whetstra. Yes, I am in Berlin. I have good news, and I wanted to tell someone. I have in my one hand a letter from the Yugoslavian consulate in Holland denying my visa request. I received the letter in the mail today. In my other hand I have my passport, stamped with a visa to enter Yugoslavia, issued by the Yugoslavian embassy here in Berlin today. I’m on my way behind the Iron Curtain again,” Andrew said excitedly.
“That is good news, Andrew. You had better come home and get your keys.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Whetstra. Our connection must be bad. I thought you said keys.”
“I did say keys, Andrew—the keys to your new Volkswagen. Mrs. Whetstra and I decided several months ago that if you got the visa, you would also get our car. So now you need to come home and pick up the keys to it,” Mr. Whetstra said.
Andrew hung up the phone a little bewildered. How could he take the Whetstras’ car? When he got back to Amsterdam, he tried his best to talk them out of their offer to give him the car. But the Whetstras would hear none of it.
“We’ve prayed about this, and we are sure that God told us to do this. The car is needed for the King’s business, and we are honored to be able to provide it for you,” Mr. Whetstra told Andrew as he handed over the keys.
Andrew gave in and took the keys, and the two men went down to the clerk’s office to have the title to the car transferred.
Later that afternoon Andrew was driving along the polder road toward Sint Pancras, his hands firmly on the steering wheel of a nearly new blue Volkswagen. As he drove past the familiar landmarks, he knew what God wanted him to do next—he was going to Yugoslavia, and he was going to drive there in his own car.
Andrew set himself a deadline of March 1957 to be at the Yugoslav border. In the meantime he had more articles to write for the Christian magazine. He had also hoped to personally contact at least one Christian in Yugoslavia before his trip, but this had proved impossible. The best he could do was write a letter to a man at a twelve-year-old address that the Dutch Bible Society had provided him with. Andrew had no way of knowing whether the man was alive or dead, let alone whether he was still at the address, but he wrote a vague letter explaining that he would like to get in touch with the man.
On a beautiful spring day in late March 1957, Andrew pulled to the side of the road in a tiny Austrian village, minutes from the Yugoslav border. This was his moment of reckoning. He had driven six hundred miles with a car full of Bibles and tracts in the Slovene and Croatian languages, and now he was about to cross the border into Yugoslavia. But the Yugoslav documents had been very clear and specific. General Tito, the leader of Yugoslavia, had decreed that anyone crossing the border into his country could bring with him or her only personal belongings. People coming into Yugoslavia could not carry anything to sell on the black market or to give away. And they were explicitly banned from carrying printed material into the country. Such printed material was considered foreign propaganda, and the person carrying it would be arrested on the spot.
