Corrie was stunned by her kindness. These days she wasn’t used to anyone in a uniform being friendly towards her. Her mind reeled with possibilities, but one thing was more important than any other. “A Bible. Can you get me a Bible?” she asked.
The nurse smiled. “I’ll try,” she said, and then she quickly unlocked the door and waited outside for Corrie. On the way back to the waiting room, neither of them spoke.
It was another hour before Corrie’s name was finally called, and Corrie entered a side room for a medical examination. The doctor felt her pulse, took her temperature, and listened to her lungs and heart with a stethoscope. “Hum,” he said, scribbling something on his pad. “Pleurisy. Normally I would tell you to get plenty of rest and keep warm, but under these circumstances….” His voice trailed off as he shrugged his shoulders.
Corrie stood and walked to the door. The doctor followed her. In a low voice he said, “Good-bye and good luck. I hope I have done you a favor reporting your pleurisy.”
As Corrie walked back to her seat, the nurse brushed past her, and Corrie felt a small package being pressed into her hands. She slid it into her coat pocket and kept walking toward her seat. Soon afterwards, the prisoners were led back to the car. As they were ferried through the streets of Scheveningen back to the prison, Corrie had two things on her mind: the package in her coat pocket and the doctor’s words. She rested her hand lightly on the outside of her coat pocket while she wondered whether the doctor had really done her a favor. Would having pleurisy be a good thing? Would the Germans possibly let her go? Or would they transfer her to a hospital? Corrie desperately hoped they would, but she also knew that the Nazis had little patience with the sick and the old, and to them she was both.
“You’re back,” three voices rang out as Corrie was led back into the cell. “What happened? Where did they take you? Did you hear anything about the war?” they all asked at once.
Corrie sat on the edge of the cot and told them everything. When she got to the part about the package, she drew it from her pocket. Everyone gasped. “Open it, open it,” they urged, like little children at a birthday party. Corrie tore open the newspaper the package was wrapped in and removed the contents one at a time. There were two small bars of soap, real soap like the kind you could buy in stores before the war. She passed them around, and everyone sniffed the soap’s fresh, flowery scent. Next Corrie produced a chain of about ten safety pins. They, too, were passed around and admired as though they were a diamond necklace. At the bottom of the package was the best thing of all: four small booklets. Corrie lifted them up and kissed them; they were booklets of the four Gospels. She offered one to the old woman in the green dress. The woman recoiled. “Don’t touch them,” she said with horror in her voice.
“It’s the Bible,” said Corrie, thinking she didn’t understand.
“I can see that,” the old woman snapped. “Do you want to get us all in trouble? Get caught with a Bible and you get your sentence doubled plus kalte kost for the rest of your stay.”
Kalte kost was a dreaded word in the prison; it referred to bread and water rations with no hot food. The threat of kalte kost hung over each prisoner in his or her cell just as surely as the single lightbulb did. A prisoner got kalte kost for talking too loudly, for singing, for spilling the toilet bucket, for asking guards questions, for walking on the seagrass mat. The list went on and on.
Corrie laid the four Gospels on her mattress. “Kalte kost would be a small price to pay for these,” she said.
The other women stared blankly at her.
That night Corrie lay on her thin mattress reading the Gospel of John. She could hear her father’s voice echoing in her mind as she read. She thought about him reading aloud from the Bible to the family each morning and evening. She wondered how he was. She also wondered about the guests in the Angels’ Den back at the Beje. Was it possible they were safe, even with the Gestapo guarding the house? And then her mind wandered again to the doctor’s words earlier in the day: “I hope I’ve done the right thing reporting your pleurisy.” Had he?
Corrie didn’t have to wait long to find out. Two nights later the key rattled in the lock of the cell door. It was the prison matron again. “ten Boom, Cornelia, get up and bring your things. No talking,” she barked.
Secretly, Corrie slipped the four gospel booklets into her coat pocket, pulled her hat from the peg, and followed the matron. This time, though, they did not turn right to head down the hallway, but they turned left. Corrie’s heart sank. They were headed farther inside the prison. About five hundred feet along the hallway, the matron stopped, found another key on her ring, and opened a cell door. Without even needing to be told, Corrie stepped inside. The layout of the cell was the same as the one she had just left, but the cell was different in two ways. There were no other prisoners in the cell, and the cell had a window. The window was high up on the wall and covered with bars, but it was a window nonetheless. In this cell, Corrie would have fresh air and sunlight. She decided she would drag her cot over to the outside wall in the morning and climb up and look out the window. Before she went to sleep, Corrie scratched a mark on the wall beside her cot and wrote the date, March 6, 1944. Somehow, she felt it was important not to lose track of time.
The next morning Corrie was so weak she was unable to stand up at all. She lay on the cot and looked at the sky through the twenty-eight tiny squares the bars formed across the window. Mealtime came, and a guard peered in through the food slot. Corrie waved her hand slightly. The guard grunted and flung the slice of bread at her through the small opening. The bread landed near the cot, and Corrie picked it up from the filthy floor and hungrily gulped it down. Then she waited, wondering what would happen next. An hour or so later, a trolley squeaked down the hallway and stopped outside her cell door. It was a medical attendant with foul-tasting medicine for Corrie to take. The attendant was wearing a prisoner’s uniform, and Corrie knew she was what the other prisoners referred to as a “trusty,” a fellow prisoner who got to help run some of the things in the prison. Trusties cooked the soup, swept the floors, and dispensed medicine. In return they were given extra privileges by the guards. Corrie felt sure the trusty would know a lot about what was going on in the prison.
After swallowing the wretched medicine, Corrie begged of the trusty, “Have you heard anything of the ten Booms or the van Woerdens?”
“Save your breath, woman,” snarled the trusty. “You don’t think I can talk to you and keep my job do you?” She glared at Corrie and then slammed the cell door shut.
Corrie lay down again on the cot. “So prison is just like the outside,” she said aloud to herself. “There are prisoners in here who will take risks to help each other and prisoners who won’t.”
Each day the trusty came to her cell with the awful medicine, but she never said another word to Corrie. The medicine she brought, though, seemed to be working, and slowly Corrie began to feel better. Even so, no other prisoners were put in the cell with her. As the long, boring weeks rolled by, Corrie became very lonely. One day as she scratched another mark on the wall, she noticed it was April 15. It was her fifty-second birthday. She tried to sing a song to remind herself of the many happy birthdays she’d had at the Beje, but the guard banged on the cell door and yelled, “Prisoners are not permitted to sing. Shut up or kalte kost.” So she sang the song in her head.
Hardly a minute went by that Corrie didn’t think about her father and her family. She desperately wanted to know whether they were all right. Her answer came partly as the result of another birthday. Only five days after her own, on April 20, Adolf Hitler turned fifty-five years of age. The guards all went to a party to celebrate his birthday and left the cells unguarded. There was no thought of anyone’s escaping; the doors were all locked, and the prisoners were fed so little that most of them could not have staggered far anyway. But the absence of the guards meant that the prisoners could yell to each other. At first, Corrie was confused by all the yelling, but gradually the noise died down, and the prisoners organized themselves. Up and down the hallway from cell to cell they took turns yelling and listening back and forth.
Corrie was delighted to yell messages to the prisoners in the next cells to hers. “Tell Ruud Engers that Hetty was released in February.” “To Rosina Kaufman, your mother is in cell 463; she is well and sends her love.” Some of the messages, though, were sad, and it was hard to pass them on. “To Isaac Franken, they took our twins. Have you heard where they are? From your wife Gertrude.” “To Joel Kugler, your brother Fritz was sent to a labor camp last week.”
To this stream of messages Corrie added her own. “I am Corrie ten Boom in cell 384. Is there any news of Casper, Willem, and Betsie ten Boom and Nollie and Peter van Woerden?”
She listened closely as the message echoed down the empty corridor. More messages flowed back and forth. Corrie waited and waited. Finally an answer came. “Willem ten Boom and Peter van Woerden were released.” Corrie clapped her hands and laughed with joy.
Then there was another message. “Nollie van Woerden released.” Corrie’s hopes soared. Maybe all the other members of her family had been freed! But the next message told her otherwise: “Betsie ten Boom in cell 314 says to tell her sister God is good.” How like Betsie. No matter how hard things were, she trusted God.
The stream of information continued. There were rumors about the war. The British air force had bombed the Public Records Building in The Hague, destroying many important Nazi records, and the Americans were making progress against the Japanese in the Pacific. Then finally, the clamor of voices began to die down until the prison was silent again.
Corrie sat on her cot and thought about the messages she had heard. It seemed everyone arrested at the Beje had been released except for Betsie and her. But what about her father? It was strange no one had any word of him; he was so old and distinguished looking with his long white beard, it would be hard to forget him. Corrie tried not to think the worst.
Two and a half weeks later on May 3, Corrie found out why she had not heard about her father. A letter was dropped through the food slot. Corrie stared at it. She had waited so long for news from home, and now that it was lying on the floor in front of her, she was too scared to pick it up. Finally, she got up the courage and reached down and picked up the letter. It was from Nollie. Corrie tore it open. It did not start out well. “Dear Corrie,” it read. “I need you to be very brave. The news I have to tell you is not going to be easy to read….” Corrie’s eyes welled with tears, but she wiped them away and kept reading. “Father was in prison for only ten days; then his soul was released, and he went to be with the Lord.”
Corrie burst into loud sobs. Her father, her dear, dear, wonderful father had died in this dirty prison surrounded by so much hatred and violence. Corrie could hardly bear to think about it. She could not be at his funeral, and she couldn’t be with her family. It was so unfair, and she sobbed louder. After many minutes of sobbing, she thought about the time her father had wanted to wear the yellow Star of David on his coat to identify with the Dutch Jews. When Corrie and Betsie had tried to stop him, he had told them, “If it is good enough for God’s chosen people to suffer, then it is good enough for me to suffer with them.” As Corrie thought about those words, she began to feel calmer. Her father had died for something he believed in, and he wouldn’t have had it any other way.
The next morning Corrie reread the letter. As she did so, she noticed that the writing on the envelope was very sloped, while the writing in the letter was not. What could it mean? Was there a reason Nollie had done that? Suddenly she remembered a letter that had come to the Beje for her nephew Kik. Kik had soaked off the stamp, underneath which was an important message from the underground. With trembling hands, Corrie put the envelope into the basin of water. Sure enough, when the stamp had soaked off, she could see tiny writing. She held the envelope up to the light and read. “All the clocks at the Beje are safe.” It was a code, but Corrie knew exactly what it meant. She broke into sobs once again. This time they were sobs of joy. Somehow all of the guests in the Angels’ Den had made it to safety. For the first time since being arrested, Corrie felt something inside other than fear and dread.
Chapter 10
The Reading
Corrie looked up from the Gospel of Mark she was reading. Had someone stopped outside her cell door, or was it just her imagination? She had been alone in the cell for six weeks now with nothing to keep her company except a troop of ants and the silent daily visit of a trusty to deliver food and empty her toilet bucket. When a key clicked in the lock, she knew she hadn’t been imagining. She quickly slipped the Gospel of Mark under the mattress. A moment later, a tall, thin guard stepped into the room. Corrie didn’t recognize her as one of the usual guards.
