It was Sunday, May 10, 1942, exactly two years after the fall of Holland. The sunny spring skies, the flowers in the lamppost boxes, did not at all reflect the city’s mood. German soldiers wandered aimlessly through the streets, some looking as if they had not yet recovered from a hard Saturday night, some already on the lookout for girls, a few hunting for a place to worship.
Each month the occupation seemed to grow harsher, restrictions more numerous. The latest heartache for Dutchmen was an edict making it a crime to sing the “Wilhelmus,” our national anthem.
Father, Betsie, and I were on our way to the Dutch Reformed church in Velsen, a small town not far from Haarlem, where Peter had won the post of organist in competition against forty older and more experienced musicians. The organ at Velsen was one of the finest in the country; though the train seemed slower each time, we went frequently.
Peter was already playing, invisible in the tall organ loft, when we squeezed into the crowded pew. That was one thing the occupation had done for Holland; churches were packed.
After hymns and prayers came the sermon, a good one today, I thought. I wished Peter would pay closer attention. He regarded sermons as interesting only to venerable relics like his mother and me. I had reached fifty that spring, to Peter the age at which life had definitely passed by. I would beg him to remember that death and ultimate issues could come for any of us at any age—especially these days—but he would reply charmingly that he was too fine a musician to die young.
The closing prayers were said. And then, electrically, the whole church sat at attention. Without preamble, every stop pulled out to full volume, Peter was playing the “Wilhelmus”!
Father, at eight-two, was the first one on his feet. Now everyone was standing. From somewhere in back of us a voice sang out the words. Another joined in, and another. Then we were all singing together, the full voice of Holland singing her forbidden anthem. We sang at the top of our lungs, sang our oneness, our hope, our love for Queen and country. On this anniversary of defeat it seemed almost for a moment that we were victors.
Afterward we waited for Peter at the small side door of the church. It was a long time before he was free to come away with us, so many people wanted to embrace him, to shake his hand and thump his back. Clearly he was enormously pleased with himself.
But now that the moment had passed I was, as usual, angry with him. The Gestapo was certain to hear about it, perhaps already had: their eyes and ears were everywhere. I thought of Nollie, home fixing Sunday dinner for us all. I thought of Peter’s brothers and sisters. And Flip—what if he lost the principalship of the school for this? And for what had Peter risked so much? Not for people’s lives but for a gesture. For a moment’s meaningless defiance.
At Bos en Hoven Straat, however, Peter was a hero as one by one his family made us describe again what had happened. The only members of the household who felt as I did were the two Jewish women staying at Nollie’s. One of these was an elderly Austrian lady whom Willem had sent into hiding here. “Katrien,” as the family had rechristened her, was posing as the von Woerden’s housemaid—although Nollie confided to me that she had yet so much as to make her own bed. Probably she did not know how, as she came from a wealthy and aristocratic family.
The other woman was a young, blonde, blue-eyed Dutch Jew with flawless false identity papers supplied by the Dutch national underground itself. The papers were so good and Annaliese looked so unlike the Nazi stereotype of a Jew, that she went freely in and out of the house, shopping and helping out at the school, giving herself out to be a friend of the family whose husband had died in the bombing of Rotterdam. Katrien and Annaliese could not understand any more than I could Peter’s deliberately doing something that would attract the attention of the authorities.
I spent an anxious afternoon, tensing at the sound of every motor, for only the police, Germans, and NSBers had automobiles nowadays. But the time came to go home to the Beje and still nothing had happened.
I worried two more days, then decided either Peter had not been reported or that the Gestapo had more important things to occupy them. It was Wednesday morning just as Father and I were unlocking our workbenches that Peter’s little sister Cocky burst into the shop.
“Opa! Tante Corrie! They came for Peter! They took him away!”
“Who? Where?”
But she didn’t know and it was three days before the family learned that he had been taken to the federal prison in Amsterdam.
IT WAS 7:55 in the evening, just a few minutes before the new curfew hour of 8:00. Peter had been in prison for two weeks. Father and Betsie and I were seated around the dining room table, Father replacing watches in their pockets and Betsie doing needlework, our big, black, slightly-Persian cat curled contentedly in her lap. A knock on the alley door made me glance in the window mirror. There in the bright spring twilight stood a woman. She carried a small suitcase and—odd for the time of year—wore a fur coat, gloves, and a heavy veil.
I ran down and opened the door. “Can I come in?” she asked. Her voice was high-pitched in fear.
“Of course.” I stepped back. The woman looked over her shoulder before moving into the little hallway.
“My name is Kleermaker. I’m a Jew.”
“How do you do?” I reached out to take her bag, but she held onto it. “Won’t you come upstairs?”
Father and Betsie stood up as we entered the dining room. “Mrs. Kleermaker, my father and my sister.”
“I was about to make some tea!” cried Betsie. “You’re just in time to join us!”
Father drew out a chair from the table and Mrs. Kleermaker sat down, still gripping the suitcase. The “tea” consisted of old leaves which had been crushed and reused so often they did little more than color the water. But Mrs. Kleermaker accepted it gratefully, plunging into the story of how her husband had been arrested some months before, her son gone into hiding. Yesterday the S.D.—the political police who worked under the Gestapo—had ordered her to close the family clothing store. She was afraid now to go back to the apartment above it. She had heard that we had befriended a man on this street. . . .
“In this household,” Father said, “God’s people are always welcome.” “We have four empty beds upstairs, “ said Betsie. “Your problem will be choosing which one to sleep in!” Then to my astonishment she added, “First though, give me a hand with the tea things.”
I could hardly believe my ears. Betsie never let anyone help in her kitchen: “I’m just a fussy old maid,” she’d say.
But Mrs. Kleermaker had jumped to her feet with pathetic eagerness and was already stacking plates and cups. . . .
JUST TWO NIGHTS later the same scene was repeated. The time was again just before 8:00 on another bright May evening. Again there was a furtive knock at the side door. This time an elderly couple was standing outside.
“Come in!”
It was the same story: the same tight-clutched possessions, the same fearful glance and tentative tread. The story of neighbors arrested, the fear that tomorrow their turn would come.
That night after prayer-time the six of us faced our dilemma. “This location is too dangerous,” I told our three guests. “We’re half a block from the main police headquarters. And yet I don’t know where else to suggest.”
Clearly it was time to visit Willem again. So the next day I repeated the difficult trip to Hilversum. “Willem,” I said, “we have three Jews staying right at the Beje. Can you get places for them in the country?”
Willem pressed his fingers to his eyes and I noticed suddenly how much white was in his beard. “It’s getting harder,” he said. “Harder every month. They’re feeling the food shortage now even on the farms. I still have addresses, yes, a few. But they won’t take anyone without a ration card.”
“Without a ration card! But, Jews aren’t issued ration cards!”
“I know.” Willem turned to stare out the window. For the first time I wondered how he and Tine were feeding the elderly men and women in their care.
“I know,” he repeated. “And ration cards can’t be counterfeited. They’re changed too often and they’re too easy to spot. Identity cards are different. I know several printers who do them. Of course you need a photographer.”
A photographer? Printers? What was Willem talking about? “Willem, if people need ration cards and there aren’t any counterfeit ones, what do they do?”
Willem turned slowly from the window. He seemed to have forgotten me and my particular problem. “Ration cards?” He gestured vaguely. “You steal them.”
I stared at this Dutch Reformed clergyman. “Then, Willem, could you steal . . . I mean . . . could you get three stolen cards?”
“No, Corrie! I’m watched! Don’t you understand that? Every move I make is watched!”
He put an arm around my shoulder and went on more kindly, “Even if I can continue working for a while, it will be far better for you to develop your own sources. The less connection with me—the less connection with anyone else—the better.”
Joggling home on the crowded train I turned Willem’s words over and over in my mind. Your own sources. That sounded so—so professional. How was I going to find a source of stolen ration cards?
Who in the world did I know . . .
And at that moment a name appeared in my mind.
Fred Koornstra.
Fred was the man who used to read the electric meter at the Beje. The Koornstras had a retarded daughter, now a grown woman, who attend the “church” I had been conducting for the feeble-minded for some twenty years. And now Fred had a new job working for the Food Office. Wasn’t it in the department where ration books were issued?
That evening after supper I bumped over the brick streets to the Koornstra house. The tires on my faithful old bicycle had finally given out and I had joined the hundreds clattering about town on metal wheel rims. Each bump reminded me jarringly of my fifty years.
Fred, a bald man with a military bearing, came to the door and stared at me blankly when I said I wanted to talk to him about the Sunday service. He invited me in, closed the door, and said, “Now Corrie, what is it you really came to see me about?”
Lord, I prayed silently, if it is not safe to confide in Fred, stop this conversation now before it is too late.
“I must first tell you that we’ve had some unexpected company at the Beje. First it was a single woman, then a couple, when I got back this afternoon, another couple.” I paused for just an instant. “They are Jews.”
Fred’s expression did not change.
“We can provide safe places for these people but they must provide something too. Ration cards.”
Fred’s eyes smiled. “So. Now I know why you came here.”
“Fred, is there any way you can give out extra cards? More than you report?”
“None at all, Corrie. Those cards have to be accounted for a dozen ways. They’re checked and double-checked.”
The hope that had begun to mount in me tumbled. But Fred was frowning.
“Unless—” he began.
“Unless?”
“Unless there should be a hold-up. The Food Office in Utrecht was robbed last month—but the men were caught.”
He was silent a while. “If it happened at noon,” he said slowly, “when just the record clerk and I are there . . . and if they found us tied and gagged . . .” He snapped his fingers. “And I know just the man who might do it! Do you remember the—”
“Don’t!” I said, remembering Willem’s warning. “Don’t tell me who. And don’t tell me how. Just get the cards if you possibly can.”
Fred stared at me a moment. “How many do you need?”
I opened my mouth to say, “Five.” But the number that unexpectedly and astonishingly came out instead was, “One hundred.”
WHEN FRED OPENED the door to me just a week later, I gasped at the sight of him. Both eyes were a greenish purple, his lower lip cut and swollen.
“My friend took very naturally to the part,” was all he would say.
But he had the cards. On the table in a brown manila envelope were one hundred passports to safety. Fred had already torn the “continuing coupon” from each one. This final coupon was presented at the Food Office the last day of each month in exchange for the next month’s card. With these coupons Fred could “legally” continue to issue us one hundred cards.
We agreed that it would be risky for me to keep coming to his house each month. What if he were to come to the Beje instead, dressed in his old meterman uniform?
The meter in the Beje was in the back hall at the foot of the stairs. When I got home that afternoon, I pried up the tread of the bottom step, as Peter had done higher to hide the radio, and found a hollow space inside. Peter would be proud of me, I thought as I worked—and was flooded by a wave of lonesomeness for that brave and cocksure boy. But even he would have to admit, I concluded as I stepped back at last to admire the completed hideaway, that a watchmaker’s hand and eye were worth something. The hinge was hidden deep in the wood, the ancient riser undisturbed. I was ridiculously pleased with it.
We had our first test of the system on July 1. Fred was to come in through the shop as he always had, carrying the cards beneath his shirt. He would come at 5:30, when Betsie would have the back hall free of callers. To my horror at 5:25 the shop door opened and in stepped a policeman.
He was a tall man with close-cropped orange-red hair whom I knew by name—Rolf van Vliet—but little else. He had come to the Hundredth Birthday Party, but so had half the force. Certainly he was not one of Betsie’s “regulars” for winter morning coffee.
Rolf had brought in a watch that needed cleaning, and he seemed in a mood to talk. My throat had gone dry, but Father chatted cheerfully as he took off the back of Rolf’s watch and examined it. What were we going to do? There was no way to warn Fred Koornstra. Promptly at 5:30 the door of the shop opened and in he walked, dressed in his blue workclothes. It seemed to me that his chest was too thick by a foot at least.
With magnificent aplomb Fred nodded to Father, the policeman, and me. “Good evening.” Courteous but a little bored.
He strode through the door at the rear of the shop and shut it behind him. My ears strained to hear him lift the secret lid. There! Surely Rolf must have heard it too.
The door behind us opened again. So great was Fred’s control that he had not ducked out the alleyway exit, but came strolling back through the shop.
“Good evening,” he said again.
“Evening.”
He reached the street door and was gone. We had got away with it this time, but somehow, someway, we were going to have to work out a warning system.
For meanwhile, in the weeks since Mrs. Kleermaker’s unexpected visit, a great deal had happened at the Beje. Supplied with ration cards, Mrs. Kleermaker and the elderly couple and the next arrivals and the next had found homes in safer locations. But still the hunted people kept coming, and the needs were often more complicated than rations cards and addresses. If a Jewish woman became pregnant, where could she go to have her baby? If a Jew in hiding died, how could he be buried?
“Develop your own sources,” Willem had said. And from the moment Fred Koornstra’s name had popped into my mind, an uncanny realization had been growing in me. We were friends with half of Haarlem! We knew nurses in the maternity hospital. We knew clerks in the Records Office. We knew someone in every business and service in the city.
We didn’t know, of course, the political views of all these people. But—and here I felt a strange leaping of my heart—God did! My job was simply to follow His leading one step at a time, holding every decision up to Him in prayer. I knew I was not clever or subtle or sophisticated; if the Beje was becoming a meeting place for need and supply, it was through some strategy far higher than mine.
A few nights after Fred’s first “meterman” visit the alley bell rang long after curfew. I sped downstairs expecting another sad and stammering refugee. Betsie and I had already made up beds for four new overnight guests that evening: a Jewish woman and her three small children.
But to my surprise, close against the wall of the dark alley, stood Kik. “Get your bicycle,” he ordered with his usual young abruptness. “And put on a sweater. I have some people I want you to meet.”
“Now? After curfew?” But I knew it was useless to ask questions. Kik’s bicycle was tireless too, the wheel rims swathed in cloth. He wrapped mine also to keep down the clatter, and soon we were pedaling through the blacked-out streets of Haarlem at a speed that would have scared me even in daylight.
“Put a hand on my shoulder,” Kik whispered. “I know the way.”
We crossed dark side streets, crested bridges, wheeled round invisible corners. At last we crossed a broad canal and I knew we had reached the fashionable suburb of Aerdenhout.
We turned into a driveway beneath shadowy trees. To my astonishment, Kik picked up my bicycle and carried both his and mine up the front steps. A serving girl with starched white apron and ruffled cap opened the door. The entrance hall was jammed with bicycles.
Then I saw him. One eye smiling at me, the other at the door, his vast stomach hastening ahead of him. Pickwick!
He led Kik and me into the drawing room where, sipping coffee and chatting in small groups, was the most distinguished-looking group of men and women I had ever seen. But all my attention, that first moment, was on the inexpressibly fragrant aroma in that room. Surely, was it possible, they were drinking real coffee?
Pickwick drew me a cup from the silver urn on the sideboard. It was coffee. After two years, rich, black, pungent Dutch coffee. He poured himself a cup too, dropping in his usual five lumps of sugar as though rationing had never been invented. Another starched and ruffled maid was passing a tray heaped high with cakes.
Gobbling and gulping I trailed about the room after Pickwick, shaking the hands of the people he singled out. They were strange introductions for no names were mentioned, only, occasionally, an address, and “Ask for Mrs. Smit.” When I had met my fourth Smit, Kik explained with a grin, “It’s the only last name in the underground.”
So this was really and truly the underground! But—where were these people from? I had never laid eyes on any of them. A second later I realized with a shiver down my spine that I was meeting the national group.
Their chief work, I learned from bits of conversation, was liaison with England and the Free Dutch forces fighting elsewhere on the continent. They also maintained the underground route through which downed Allied plane crews reached the North Sea coast.
But they were instantly sympathetic with my efforts to help Haarlem’s Jews. I blushed to my hair roots to hear Pickwick describe me as “the head of an operation here in this city.” A hollow space under the stairs and some haphazard friendships were not an operation. The others here were obviously competent, disciplined, and professional.
But they greeted me with grave courtesy, murmuring what they had to offer as we shook hands. False identity papers. The use of a car with official government plates. Signature forgery.
In a far corner of the room Pickwick introduced me to a frail-appearing little man with a wispy goatee. “Our host informs me,” the little man began formally, “that your headquarters building lacks a secret room. This is a danger for all, those you are helping as well as yourselves and those who work with you. With your permission I will pay you a visit in the coming week. . . .”
Years later I learned that he was one of the most famous architects in Europe. I knew him only as Mr. Smit.
Just before Kik and I started our dash back to the Beje, Pickwick slipped an arm through mine. “My dear, I have good news. I understand that Peter is about to be released.”
SO HE WAS, three days later, thinner, paler, and not a whit daunted by his two months in a concrete cell. Nollie, Tine, and Betsie used up a month’s sugar ration baking cakes for his welcome-home party.
And one morning soon afterward the first customer in the shop was a small thin-bearded man named Smit. Father took his jeweler’s glass from his eye. If there was one thing he loved better than making a new acquaintance, it was discovering a link with an old one.
“Smit,” he said eagerly. “I know several Smits in Amsterdam. Are you by any chance related to the family who—”
“Father,” I interrupted, “this is the man I told you about. He’s come to, ah, inspect the house.”
“A building inspector? Then you must be the Smit with offices in the Grote Hout Straat. I wonder that I haven’t—”
“Father!” I pleaded, “he’s not a building inspector, and his name is not Smit.”
“Not Smit?”
Together Mr. Smit and I attempted to explain, but Father simply could not understand a person’s being called by a name not his own. As I led Mr. Smit into the back hall, we heard him musing to himself, “I once knew a Smit on Koning Straat. . . .”
Mr. Smit examined and approved the hiding place for ration cards beneath the bottom step. He also pronounced acceptable the warning system we had worked out. This was a triangle-shaped wooden sign advertising alpina watches that I had placed in the dining room window. As long as the sign was in place, it was safe to enter.
But when I showed him a cubby hole behind the corner cupboard in the dining room, he shook his head. Some ancient redesigning of the house had left a crawl space in that corner and we’d been secreting jewelry, silver coins, and other valuables there since the start of the occupation. Not only the rabbi had brought us his library but other Jewish families had brought their treasures to the Beje for safekeeping. The space was large enough that we had believed a person could crawl in there if necessary, but Mr. Smit dismissed it without a second glance.
“First place they’d look. Don’t bother to change it though. It’s only silver. We’re interested in saving people, not things.”
He started up the narrow corkscrew stairs, and as he mounted so did his spirits. He paused in delight at the odd-placed landings, pounded on the crooked walls, and laughed aloud as the floor levels of the two old houses continued out of phase.
“What an impossibility!” he said in an awestruck voice. “What an improbably, unbelievable, unpredictable impossibility! Miss ten Boom, if all houses were constructed like this one, you would see before you a less worried man.”
At last, at the very top of the stairs, he entered my room and gave a little cry of delight. “This is it!” he exclaimed.
“You want your hiding place as high as possible,” he went on eagerly. “Gives you the best chance to reach it while the search is on below.” He leaned out the window, craning his thin neck, the little faun’s beard pointed this way and that.
“But . . . this is my bedroom. . . .”
Mr. Smit paid no attention. He was already measuring. He moved the heavy, wobbly old wardrobe away from the wall with surprising ease and pulled my bed into the center of the room. “This is where the false wall will go!” Excitedly he drew out a pencil and drew a line along the floor thirty inches from the back wall. He stood up and gazed at it moodily.
“That’s as big as I dare,” he said. “It will take a cot mattress, though. Oh yes. Easily!”
I tried again to protest, but Mr. Smit had forgotten I existed. Over the next few days he and his workmen were in and out of our house constantly. They never knocked. At each visit each man carried in something. Tools in a folded newspaper. A few bricks in a briefcase. “Wood!” he exclaimed when I ventured to wonder if a wooden wall would not be easier to build. “Wood sounds hollow. Hear it in a minute. No, no. Brick’s the only thing for false walls.”
After the wall was up, the plasterer came, then the carpenter, finally the painter. Six days after he had begun, Mr. Smit called Father, Betsie, and me to see.
We stood in the doorway and gaped. The smell of fresh paint was everywhere. But surely nothing in this room was newly painted! All four walls had that streaked and grimy look that old rooms got in coal-burning Haarlem. The ancient molding ran unbroken around the ceiling, chipped and peeling here and there, obviously undisturbed for a hundred and fifty years. Old water stains streaked the back wall, a wall that even I who had lived half a century in this room, could scarcely believe was not the original, but set back a precious two-and-a-half feet from the true wall of the building.
Built-in bookshelves ran along this false wall, old, sagging shelves whose blistered wood bore the same water stains as the wall behind them. Down in the far lefthand corner, beneath the bottom shelf, a sliding panel, two feet high and two wide, opened into the secret room.
Mr. Smit stooped and silently pulled this panel up. On hands and knees Betsie and I crawled into the narrow room behind it. Once inside we could stand up, sit, or even stretch out one at a time on the single mattress. A concealed vent, cunningly let into the real wall, allowed air to enter from outside.
“Keep a water jug there,” said Mr. Smit, crawling in behind us. “Change the water once a week. Hardtack and vitamins keep indefinitely. Anytime there is anyone in the house whose presence is unofficial, all possessions except the clothes actually on his back must be stored in here.”
Dropping to our knees again, we crawled single file out into my bedroom. “Move back into this room,” he told me. “Everything exactly as before.”
With his fist he struck the wall above the bookshelves.
“The Gestapo could search for a year,” he said. “They’ll never find this one.”