Corrie sat still. Her right eye was swollen, and she could barely see out of it. Her mouth was swollen, too, and her tongue felt five times its normal size. Downstairs she could hear moans and whimpers coming from her sister. Tears stung Corrie’s battered face. What lay ahead of them? She didn’t want to think about it. Instead, she concentrated on the noises coming from upstairs. She could hear lots of yelling and the splintering sound of wood being smashed. She supposed they were punching holes into walls and floorboards looking for the Angels’ Den. She wondered whether they could destroy that much of the house and still not find it? Corrie thought back to the way the secret room had been constructed. Brick walls so they wouldn’t sound hollow like wooden ones if they were thumped. And the floor. She remembered how proud Mr. Smit had been of the floor. He had cut the floorboards so they didn’t run under the wall. That way, if the Gestapo started smashing the floorboards looking for the secret room, they would not find any floorboards that ran under a supposed outside wall. Corrie breathed a prayer of thanks for Mr. Smit, who had given the guests the best possible chance. Now it was up to God to keep them safe.
Corrie’s thoughts were interrupted when Betsie staggered back into the room. Her face was bloody and swollen, but she managed a weak smile as she groped her way to sit beside Corrie.
Corrie offered her a handkerchief to wipe the blood from her lip. Just then there was a knock at the side door. Corrie froze. The man in the business suit laughed with delight. “This is exactly how a raid should be,” he proudly said to the other Gestapo officers. “Detain the suspects here in the home so their contacts think everything is normal. Then wait for them to come like bees to a honey pot.” He rubbed his hands together, drew his gun, and headed downstairs towards the side door.
Five minutes later he was back with a young woman whom Corrie recognized as a ration card deliverer. Within minutes there was another knock at the door, and the whole scene repeated itself. This time it was a young man who was carrying a warning message that the Beje was going to be raided. He was too late, of course.
Corrie heard excited voices on the stairs, and then two young German soldiers burst into the room carrying the once hidden radio. Corrie closed her eyes and tried to think. What else was in the house she hoped they wouldn’t find? As if in answer to her question, she heard the jingle of the telephone. Corrie had taken up the young man’s offer at her first underground meeting to reconnect it.
A sneer spread over the suited man’s face. “Well, we are lucky for an old watchmaker and his two spinster daughters, aren’t we?” he smiled mockingly. “And I thought all home telephones were disconnected three years ago.” Then his tone of voice changed abruptly. “Get up and answer it,” he barked, pointing the barrel of his revolver at Corrie.
As slowly as she dared, Corrie stood up and walked towards the phone in the hall, hoping it would stop ringing before she got to it. But it didn’t. The officer repositioned the barrel of his gun behind Corrie’s ear as she lifted the receiver. “Talk normally,” he instructed in a whisper, twisting her arm behind her back. Sharp pain shot through her shoulder from his force.
“Hello, Cornelia ten Boom, watchmaker,” Corrie said, hoping the person at the other end would know she hardly ever used her full name, and never on the telephone.
“You have to get everyone into hiding right away. They know who you are. You don’t have much time,” the voice on the other end of the phone blurted. The Gestapo man, who was listening with his ear pressed against the other side of the receiver, smiled.
No sooner had Corrie hung up the receiver than the phone rang again. The scene repeated itself, and then a third time. This time Corrie felt the caller seemed to catch on that something was wrong and hung straight up. There were no more phone calls after that. Still twisting her arm behind her back, the gray-suited man directed Corrie back to the others. As Corrie sat down in the dining room, a parade of people were led down the stairs. Corrie could see each one through the open door. She knew most of them from Willem’s prayer meeting. She felt sorry for them—the retired missionary from the Dutch East Indies, the woman from the bakery down the street—they knew nothing about the guests at the Beje. Corrie’s heart dropped when Willem and Peter passed the door. And then she gasped out loud when she saw Nollie trailing behind them. What had she been doing at the Beje? Nollie had already been arrested once for sheltering a Jewish girl. She had been released, but the Germans wouldn’t be so easy on her this time. Tears sprung to Corrie’s eyes. All four ten Boom siblings had been captured by the Gestapo, and so had one of Corrie’s nephews.
Just then there was a yell of triumph from upstairs. Corrie looked at Betsie, the terror in her eyes confirming that they were thinking the same thing. The Angels’ Den! They must have found it.
Corrie could hear the shouts in German. “Come and see what I’ve found! Innocent watchmakers, ha!” Corrie held her breath, waiting to hear some noise to confirm the discovery of the room.
Buzz buzz. It was the alarm Lenert had installed for them. It was sounding all over the house. A minute or so later, the man in the gray business suit strolled back into the dining room. “A very efficient alarm system,” he said. “And I have to ask myself what a family like you might need an alarm for.” He looked at Corrie questioningly.
Corrie shook her head, giddy with joy. Finding the alarm system would make things harder for her, Betsie, and their father with the Gestapo, but at least they hadn’t found the secret room. Corrie looked at the man defiantly through her unswollen eye. She hoped the message was clear; the Gestapo could beat her as much as they wanted, but they would not get any information from her.
The man must have understood. He swung around abruptly and yelled at the group, “Get up, and follow them,” pointing towards the two Gestapo officers at the door. “We’ve got quite a little haul here,” he taunted Corrie as she staggered to her feet. “You could have made it easier for everyone by telling us where your precious Jews are hidden. But don’t worry, we’ll put a twenty-four hour guard on this place. Either they’ll die like cowards and we’ll smell their rotting bodies in the end, or they’ll come crawling out of the woodwork like cockroaches in a couple of days. You would have done them a favor by telling us where they are,” he said with a cruel smile.
Corrie reached for the wall to steady herself before walking defiantly past the man. Her face might be battered and bruised, but she was the one who still held the secret to the location of the Angels’ Den. And as long as she held onto that secret, she hoped and prayed that the guests huddled inside it would be safe.
Chapter 8
A Privileged Family
The Frisian clock in the hallway struck eleven o’clock as the group from the dining room marched past. It had been eight hours since the Gestapo had raided the Beje. Casper ten Boom broke rank and walked over to the clock. He opened its glass door and reset the weights. “It would not do to let the clock run down,” he said, as he reached for his hat. Corrie put her arm around him as they walked out of the Beje. Outside they were herded together with the people who had been attending the prayer meeting and were handcuffed together to form a long chain. Corrie was linked at the wrist to her father on her right and to Betsie on her left. As she stood in the cold, dark alley, a hundred images raced through her mind. She thought of playing hoops with Nollie, of waiting for the streetcar to stop outside the clockshop and deliver Tante Jans back from one of her meetings, of the foster children organizing running races from one end of the alley to the other, of Kik waiting silently at the side door to escort a guest to safety. And then there was the horror of the present. Corrie was the captive of an army that had invaded her peaceful country. And now that invading army stood ready to tear her family and world apart.
One of the Gestapo officers barked an order for them all to march, and they began to make their way along the alley towards Smedestraat and the Haarlem police headquarters. It took only a few minutes to reach the headquarters, but it took more than two hours to be processed. Finally, well after 1:00 a.m., Corrie got to lie down on a thin mat on the floor of the gymnasium at the back of police headquarters. The gym had been turned into a large holding cell for all the people the Germans had rounded up that day. Corrie felt so wretchedly ill she didn’t care that the mat was lumpy and the cold wooden floor beneath was hard; she was just glad to be lying down again at long last.
The Gestapo had wanted to let Casper ten Boom go, but he refused to agree to their demand not to shelter any more Jews. So now he, Corrie, Betsie, Nollie, Willem, and Peter all huddled together on the mats on the floor. None of them knew what lay ahead. Casper ten Boom, seeing the concern on the faces of his children and grandson, spoke up. “Never, forget,” he said, his blue eyes shining, “what a privileged family we are.” Corrie felt tears cascade down her swollen face as he spoke. God, help me to never forget those words, she prayed silently.
Through the rest of the long night, Corrie tossed and turned on her thin strip of gym mat. She prayed for those left behind in the Angels’ Den. She asked God to somehow keep them all safe.
Slowly the pale morning sun filtered through the high windows of the gymnasium. People lying on the mats around the large room began to stir. Baskets of soft white bread rolls were handed around by the Dutch policemen. Corrie caught sight of Rolf van Vliet. He nodded slightly at her. She knew there was little he could do for them now. Corrie tried to force down a piece of bread; it could be the last food she would have for a long time, but her lips were still too swollen and sore to bite and chew. She still felt feverish from the flu. After about fifteen minutes, German soldiers marched into the gym. An officer yelled for the prisoners to form a line and march outside to a waiting bus. Corrie and Betsie reached for their father and pulled him up from the mattress. He seemed older and more frail than ever after his night in the crowded gym. Corrie wondered how long he would survive in such conditions.
As they walked out of the Haarlem police headquarters, Corrie was shocked to see a hundred or more people lined up along the sidewalk. It was a risk for them to even be out on the sidewalk in such a group. Corrie knew that they had come, regardless of the personal risk, to show their support for the residents of Haarlem whom the Nazis had arrested for doing nothing more than offering kindness and protection to innocent human beings who were being hunted down like wild animals.
The prisoners stood in the bus as it wound its way through the streets of Haarlem. Corrie stared out the window, trying to fix the beauty of the spring tulips and pink plum blossoms in her memory.
After the bus had rumbled along for a while, it came to a halt. The prisoners were herded off and loaded onto large trucks with canvas canopies on the back. Corrie hoped and prayed that they were not being taken to Germany. She breathed a sigh of relief when one of the other prisoners, a man with a bandaged hand, pointed out that they were headed west towards the coast. “They’re taking us to the prison at Scheveningen,” the man predicted. He was right.
After more than an hour rolling through the countryside, the truck lurched to an abrupt stop. The sides of the canvas canopy were unlaced and thrown open. Then the yelling began. Corrie wondered why every German occupying Holland had to yell so loudly. Her head was already throbbing from the effects of the flu, and the last thing she needed was someone yelling in her ear. She climbed down from the truck.
