Her sister Nollie, who was two years older than Corrie, was training to be a schoolteacher. Each night she would come up to Corrie’s room and tell her funny stories about the children she had been “practicing” on that day. Corrie’s other sister, Betsie, often climbed the stairs to visit her also. Betsie was seven years older than Corrie, and she had never been well. From the time she was a little girl, she’d suffered from a blood disorder that caused her to tire easily. Sometimes after Betsie climbed the stairs to Corrie’s room, Corrie thought Betsie looked sicker than she did!
Several times each day Corrie’s mother would come up and visit. Often she would sit on the end of Corrie’s bed and do her embroidery and chat about what was going on downstairs.
Despite all the visitors, Corrie spent many hours alone in her bed each day. As she lay there listening, she got to know every sound in the house. It was a small house. In fact, it was two houses. The houses, which backed onto each other, had been joined together over a hundred years earlier, long before her grandfather had moved in and opened his clockshop in the front of the house on Barteljorisstraat, right in the heart of Haarlem.
Corrie’s bedroom was on the top floor of the back house. Underneath was her parents’ bedroom, underneath which was the dining room. A tiny room had been added on to the dining room that served as the kitchen. If the door to the stairway was left open, Corrie could hear her Tante Anna singing hymns as she made dinner in the kitchen. The front house was bigger. It had four tiny compartment rooms on the top floor. Tante Bep’s room was the front compartment, which had the only window. The other three rooms had no windows because the tile roof sloped away steeply, leaving no place for a window.
On the floor beneath these rooms was Tante Jans’s room. Corrie always dreaded hearing Tante Jans’s footsteps on the stairway. Tante Jans was the last of her mother’s sisters to arrive for a “visit,” never to leave. She had been married to a minister, but he had died young, leaving her to spend the rest of her life worrying about her own death. Tante Jans was the one who made sure the ten Boom children were wrapped up properly in case they “caught their death of cold,” and she made them drink her foul-tasting mixtures when they were sick. She seldom did any housework and instead spent most of her time either writing pamphlets about how to avoid hell or visiting rich Dutch people to raise money for the many causes she was involved with. When she came up to Corrie’s room to visit, she would lecture Corrie on how to prepare for death, in the process scaring her halfway there!
Corrie’s favorite visitor, though, was her brother Willem. Willem sometimes came to visit on weekends, and he would bring Corrie books to read. Willem was always interested in what was happening in the world. He would save newspaper clippings for Corrie, and they would read and discuss them together. Corrie learned that American Robert Peary had succeeded in reaching the North Pole and that in Russia, Czar Nicholas was making life very difficult for the Jewish people who lived there.
The nights, though, were the most difficult time for Corrie. Everyone was asleep, and the house was silent except for the ticking of clocks. It was during these hours that Corrie would think about why God was letting her die. But hard as she tried, she could not come up with an answer. Gradually, as the weeks rolled by and summer turned into autumn, she stopped worrying about dying and decided to live each day as best she could. It wasn’t long after deciding to do this, and five whole months after being sent to bed in the first place, that Corrie began to get terrible stomachaches. She thought it was an odd symptom to have, because tuberculosis makes a person’s chest, not his or her stomach, sore.
Later that week, Dr. Blinker made his regular visit to the ten Boom house to check up on Tante Bep’s condition, advise Tante Jans on some new medicine she had been reading about, and take Corrie’s temperature. He frowned as he removed the thermometer from under her tongue and held it up to the light to read. “Corrie, your temperature has gone up. How are you feeling?” he asked kindly.
Corrie put her hand on her stomach. “I don’t know if this has anything to do with my temperature, Doctor,” she replied, “but my stomach hurts right here.”
Dr. Blinker pressed Corrie’s stomach hard right where she had pointed. “Ouch!” she exclaimed. “That hurt.”
“And how about this?” asked Dr. Blinker as he pressed even harder on the other side of her stomach. Corrie curled up in pain.
Dr. Blinker asked Corrie a lot of questions, and then, finally, a huge smile lit up his face. “I think I might have made a mistake!” he said. “But a very happy mistake. If I’m not mistaken, you have appendicitis, not tuberculosis!”
Appendicitis! Never had a word sounded so good to Corrie. Appendicitis could be cured with an operation. Corrie wasn’t going to die after all! And so she was rushed to the hospital, where she was operated on the next day. Within a month, she was up and about again. Her “tuberculosis” was completely cured!
Of course, after nearly six months in bed, Corrie appreciated every day. She threw herself into many projects, some of which grew to be much bigger than anything she could have imagined. Betsie taught a Bible class, which Corrie began to help with. Before long, Corrie was teaching Bible lessons at many of the local schools. And then there was the girls’ club. Corrie had noticed there wasn’t much for teenage girls to do in Haarlem, so she started what she called “The Walking Club.” At first, just Corrie and a few of the girls from Betsie’s Sunday school class would go for walks on the sand dunes before church on Sunday mornings. Then several rich people in the nearby suburb of Bloemendaal heard about the club and offered their beautiful gardens for the girls to stroll in. Before Corrie knew what was happening, three hundred girls were in the club!
Soon Corrie started other clubs to give the girls more things to do. There was the gymnastics club, the German language club, and the drama club. It wasn’t long before there was at least one club meeting running every night of the week. And then in 1919, when Corrie was twenty-seven, she came up with the very modern idea of holding a club meeting where girls and boys could get together to play games and listen to music. The whole concept sounded rather scandalous to many parents, but after the club had been running for a year, most parents agreed it was a good idea.
As her clubs grew, Corrie knew she needed a better name for the club, which had grown far beyond just walking. Corrie and the girls came up with the name “The Triangle Club.” The symbol on the new patch for the club was a triangle inside a circle. The sides of the triangle stood for the social, physical, and intellectual skills the girls were developing in their club activities. The circle that encompassed the triangle stood for God. At every club meeting, Corrie tried to help the girls understand a little more about God’s love for them.
Once a year, the club would put on a demonstration of all they had learned, and more than a thousand people would come to see it. Indeed, Corrie’s club became known throughout Holland.
Although her three aunts had died, the Beje was never empty. There was always someone who needed a home, and the ten Boom family would take them in. There were the children of missionaries who needed a home in Holland, and during the First World War, the family took in German orphans. In all, the ten Booms fostered ten children, raising many of them to adulthood.
In 1921, Corrie’s mother suffered a series of strokes and died. It was a bitter blow for Corrie. Her mother had been such a help and support to her. But slowly Corrie got over the loss, and not too long afterwards she decided to become a watchmaker. Her father was one of the most skilled clockmakers in Holland, but wristwatches were becoming more and more common. Her father needed someone in the clockshop who knew how to repair wristwatches, so Corrie went to a factory in Switzerland and learned how to make and repair wristwatches. In 1924, at thirty-two years old, she became the first woman in Holland to be certified as a watchmaker.
Soon after qualifying as a watchmaker, Corrie thought her father was going to die and leave her to keep the ten Boom clock-mending tradition alive. Casper ten Boom got hepatitis, a serious illness for anyone, but particularly so for a sixty-four-year-old man. Corrie’s father lay seriously ill in the hospital for many days, until finally he began to recover. The day he came home from St. Elizabeth’s Hospital was a wonderful day for the whole town.
To most of the local people, Corrie’s father was known affectionately as “Haarlem’s Grand Old Man.” He looked like Santa Claus, and he was just as popular! The tiny workshop where he fixed clocks and watches hosted a continuous stream of people who needed advice, a kind word, or a prayer. Some of his visitors were rich Jewish merchants, others were penniless tramps. It made no difference to him who they were; he made time for all of them. So many of the shopkeepers who surrounded the Beje—the street sweepers, bargemen, flower sellers, even policemen from their headquarters around the corner on Smedestraat—had pooled their money to buy Casper ten Boom a very modern coming-home present: a radio!
Corrie cleared a space on the side table beneath the window for the radio, and when Willem arrived with it, he lowered its polished wooden case onto the table. The radio looked even bigger in the cramped parlor of the Beje than it had in the catalogue they’d ordered it from. Casper ten Boom eased himself out of his chair and hobbled over to his new, modern wonder. He ran his hand over its smooth veneer finish and declared, “It’s beautiful.” His bright blue eyes sparkled with delight.
“Just think,” said Betsie. “We will be able to listen to concerts from all over Europe. See, I already have this week planned out.”
Corrie leaned over to study the pad Betsie had been writing on. Sure enough, there in Betsie’s neat, flowing handwriting was a list of which concerts were on each night, and from which station.
“We’ll be able to hear news firsthand from all over Europe, too,” added Willem.
From the time the four ten Boom children had been very young, their father had insisted they speak German and English as well as Dutch. This was because the Netherlands was wedged along the coastline of Europe between Germany to the east and Belgium to the south. And just a few miles to the northwest across the North Sea lay the British Isles. Now they would be able to listen not only to beautiful music but also to news from Great Britain and Germany.
The music of Brahms and Beethoven floated from the shell-shaped speaker of the radio and filled the Beje. During the next few weeks, friends and neighbors came by to see the wonderful new device. Over and over, Corrie would hear her father say, “Just think, there’s a whole orchestra playing in there, and listen to how wonderful it sounds,” or, “Electricity! Now electricity is amazing. First we had lights at the flick of a switch, and now machines that collect music out of the air itself.”
As Corrie sat with Betsie and her father during that summer of 1924 listening to music from the radio, she could never have imagined that the radio that now brought them such beautiful music would one day bring them the news of war in Holland. And, more than that, that the parlor where they sat so peacefully and sipped coffee would become a rescue center for hundreds of desperate people and then a potential death trap for some of those Corrie loved the most.
Corrie could not have imagined any of those things then; no one in peaceful Holland could have. But these events would indeed happen, and the happy, busy life Corrie lived would be turned into a living nightmare.
*Aunt
Chapter 3
The Prime Minister Is a Fool
It was May 9, 1940, and there was no need for Corrie to ask her father whether he would be staying up past his new bedtime of 8:45 p.m. It seemed just about everyone in Holland would be staying up. At 9:30 p.m. that night, the prime minister of Holland was going to make an announcement on the radio. He was going to tell the country whether or not they would be joining in the Second World War. For months there had been talk of little else in Holland. For the past seven months, war had raged all around them, ever since Nazi Germany had invaded Poland in September 1939. Since then, Germany had become even more aggressive, taking over Denmark and Norway. Many people predicted that Luxembourg, Belgium, and Holland would be the Nazis’ next targets. A number of Dutch people, though, thought that was a crazy idea. They argued that Dutch people would never have to fight in a war. Throughout World War I Holland had remained neutral, supporting neither side. Why would World War II be any different? And besides, the Dutch had close ties to Germany. Queen Wilhelmina’s late husband had been German, and the husband of Princess Juliana, next in line for the throne, was German, too. Other Dutch people were not so sure. They said Adolf Hitler, leader of Nazi Germany, was a madman who would not stop until he had conquered the world. So everyone in Holland nervously awaited the prime minister’s announcement.
