Peter was home, yet he was not safe, any more than any healthy young male was safe. In Germany the munitions factories were desperate for workers. Without warning, soldiers would suddenly surround a block of buildings and sweep through them, herding every male between sixteen and thirty into trucks for transport. This method of lightning search and seizure was called the razzia, and every family with young men lived in dread of it.
Flip and Nollie had rearranged their kitchen to give them an emergency hiding place as soon as the razzias started. There was a small potato cellar beneath the kitchen floor: they enlarged the trapdoor letting into it, put a large rug on top of it, and moved the kitchen table to stand on this spot.
Since Mr. Smit’s work at the Beje I realized that this hole under the kitchen floor was a totally inadequate hiding place. Too low in the house for one thing, and probably as Mr. Smit would say, “the first place they’d look.” However, it was not a sustained search by trained people it was intended for, but a swoop by soldiers, a place to get out of sight for half an hour. And for that, I thought, it was probably sufficient. . . .
It was Flip’s birthday when the razzia came to that quiet residential street of identical attached homes. Father, Betsie, and I had come early with a quarter-pound of real English tea from Pickwick.
Nollie, Annaliese, and the two older girls were not yet back when we arrived. A shipment of men’s shoes had been announced by one of the department stores, and Nollie had determined to get Flip a pair “if I have to stand in line all day.”
We were chatting in the kitchen with Cocky and Katrien when all at once Peter and his older brother, Bob, raced into the room, their faces white. “Soldiers! Quick! They’re two doors down and coming this way!”
They jerked the table back, snatched away the rug, and tugged open the trapdoor. Bob lowered himself first, lying down flat, and Peter tumbled in on top of him. We dropped the door shut, yanked the rug over it, and pulled the table back in place. With trembling hands, Betsie, Cocky, and I threw a long tablecloth over it and started laying five places for tea.
There was a crash in the hall as the front door burst open and a smaller crash close by as Cocky dropped a teacup. Two uniformed Germans ran into the kitchen, rifles leveled.
“Stay where you are. Do not move.”
We heard boots storming up the stairs. The soldiers glanced around disgustedly at this room filled with women and one old man. If they had looked closer at Katrien, she would surely have given herself away: her face was a mask of terror. But they had other things on their minds.
“Where are your men?” the shorter soldier asked Cocky in clumsy, thick-accented Dutch.
“These are my aunts,” she said, “and this is my grandfather. My father is at his school, and my mother is shopping, and—”
“I didn’t ask about the whole tribe!” the man exploded in German. Then in Dutch: “Where are your brothers?”
Cocky stared at him a second, then dropped her eyes. My heart stood still. I knew how Nollie had trained her children—but surely, surely now of all times a lie was permissible!
“Do you have brothers?” the officer asked again.
“Yes,” Cocky said softly. “We have three.”
“How old are they?”
“Twenty-one, nineteen, and eighteen.”
Upstairs we heard the sounds of doors opening and shutting, the scrape of furniture dragged from walls.
“Where are they now?” the soldier persisted.
Cocky leaned down and began gathering up the broken bits of cup. The man jerked her upright. “Where are your brothers?”
“The oldest one is at the Theological College. He doesn’t get home most nights because—”
“What about the other two?”
Cocky did not miss a breath.
“Why, they’re under the table.”
Motioning us all away from it with his gun, the solider seized a corner of the cloth. At a nod from him, the taller man crouched with his rifle cocked. Then he flung back the cloth.
At last the pent-up tension exploded: Cocky burst into spasms of high hysterical laughter. The soldiers whirled around. Was this girl laughing at them?
“Don’t take us for fools!” the short one snarled. Furiously he strode from the room and minutes later the entire squad trooped out—not, unfortunately, before the silent soldier had spied and pocketed our precious packet of tea.
It was a strange dinner party that evening, veering as it did from heartfelt thanksgiving to the nearest thing to a bitter argument our close-knit family had ever had. Nollie stuck by Cocky, insisting she would have answered the same way. “God honors truth-telling with perfect protection!”
Peter and Bob, from the viewpoint of the trapdoor, weren’t so sure. And neither was I. I had never had Nollie’s bravery—no, nor her faith either. But I could spot illogic. “And it isn’t logical to say the truth and do a lie! What about Annaliese’s false papers—and that maid’s uniform on Katrien?”
“‘Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth,’” Nollie quoted. “‘Keep the door of my lips.’ Psalm 141!” she finished triumphantly.
“All right, what about the radio? I had to lie with my lips to keep that!”
“And yet whatever came from your lips, Corrie, I am sure it was spoken in love!” Father’s kindly voice reproached my flushed face.
Love. How did one show it? How could God Himself show truth and love at the same time in a world like this?
By dying. The answer stood out for me sharper and chillier than it ever had before that night: the shape of a Cross etched on the history of the world.
IT WAS GETTING harder and harder to find safe homes in the country for the scores of Jews who were passing through our underground station by early 1943. Even with ration cards and forged papers there were not enough places for them all. Sooner or later we knew we were going to have to start hiding people here in the city. How sad that the very first should have been the dearest of all.
It was in the middle of a busy morning in the shop when Betsie slipped through the workshop door. “Harry and Cato are here!” she said.
We were surprised. Harry had never come to the Beje in the daytime because he feared his yellow star would cause awkwardness for us. Father and I hurried behind Betsie up the stairs.
Harry de Vries related the familiar story. The visit the evening before from an NSB quisling. The announcement that the shop was confiscated. Who cared if Harry were a Christian? Any Jew can convert to avoid trouble, the NSBer said. This morning the appearance of a uniformed German to make it official: the shop was closed “in the interest of national security.”
“But—if I am a security risk,” said poor Harry, “surely they will not stop with taking my store.”
Doubtless they would not. But just then there was absolutely no available place outside the city. In fact the only underground address we had at the moment was the home of a woman named De Boer, not four blocks from the Beje.
That afternoon I knocked on Mrs. De Boer’s door. She was a dumpy woman dressed in a blue cotton smock and bedroom slippers. We supplied Mrs. De Boer with ration cards and had arranged an emergency appendectomy from there. She showed me the living quarters in her attic. Eighteen Jews were staying there, most of them in their early twenties. “They’ve been cooped up too long,” she said. “They sing and dance and make all sorts of noise.”
“If you think one more couple is too much . . .”
“No. No . . . how can I turn them away? Bring them tonight. We’ll manage.”
And so Harry and Cato began their life at Mrs. De Boer’s, living in one of the narrow dormers in the attic. Betsie went every day to take them some homemade bread, a bit of tea, a slice of sausage. But Betsie’s main concern was not for the morale of Harry and Cato, it was for their very lives.
“They’re in danger, you know,” she told Father and me. “It’s true that these young people are at the bursting point. This afternoon they were making such a commotion I could hear them down on the street.”
There were other concerns, that bitter gray winter. Though there was little snow, the cold came early and stayed late, and fuel was scarce. Here and there in the parks and along the canals trees began to disappear as people cut them down to heat cookstoves and fireplaces. The damp unheated rooms were hardest on the very young and the very old. One morning Christoffels did not appear for Bible reading in the dining room, nor later in the workshop. His landlady found him dead in his bed, the water in his washbasin frozen solid. We buried the old clockmaker in the splendid suit and vest he had worn to the Hundredth Birthday Party, six years and another lifetime ago.
Spring came slowly. We celebrated my fifty-first birthday with a little party in the de Vrieses’ alcove home.
It was one week later, April 22, that Cato arrived alone at the Beje. Inside the door she burst into tears. “Those foolish young people went crazy! Last night eight of them left the house. Naturally they were stopped and arrested—the boys hadn’t even bothered to cut their sideburns. The Gestapo didn’t have any trouble getting information out of them.”
The house had been raided, she said, at 4:00 that morning. Cato was released when they discovered she was not Jewish. “But everyone else—Harry, Mrs. De Boer, too—oh what will become of them?”
For the next three days Cato was at the Haarlem police station from early morning until curfew, pestering Dutch and Germans alike to let her see her husband. When they sent her away, she stepped across the street and waited silently on the sidewalk.
Friday just before the noon closing when the shop was crowded, a policeman pushed open the street door, hesitated, then continued back into the rear room. It was Rolf van Vliet, the officer who had been here when our ration cards were first delivered. He took off his cap and I noticed again that startling orange-red hair.
“This watch is still not keeping time,” Rolf said. He took off his wristwatch, placed it on my workbench, and leaned forward. Was he saying something? It was all I could do to hear. “Harry de Vries will be taken to Amsterdam tomorrow. If you want to see him, come promptly at three this afternoon.” And then, “Do you see? The second hand still hesitates at the top of the dial.”
At three that afternoon Cato and I stepped through the tall double doors of the police station. The policeman on duty at the guard post was Rolf himself.
“Come with me,” he said gruffly. He led us through a door and along a high-ceilinged corridor. At a locked metal gate he stopped. “Wait here,” Rolf said.
Someone on the other side opened the gate and Rolf passed through. He was gone several minutes. Then the door opened again and we were face to face with Harry. Rolf stood back as Harry took Cato into his arms.
“You have only a few seconds,” whispered Rolf.
They drew apart, looking into each other’s eyes.
“I’m sorry,” said Rolf. “He’ll have to go back.”
Harry kissed his wife. Then he took my hand and shook it solemnly. Tears filled our eyes. For the first time Harry spoke. “I shall use this place—wherever they’re taking us,” he said. “It will be my witness stand for Jesus.”
Rolf took Harry by the elbow.
“We will pray for you many times every day, Harry!” I cried as the gate swung shut.
An instinct which I shared with no one told me that this was the last time I would ever see our friend The Bulldog.
THAT NIGHT WE held a meeting about Rolf: Betsie and I and the dozen or so teenage boys and girls who acted as messengers for this work. If Rolf had risked his own safety to tell us about Harry’s transport, perhaps he should work with us.
“Lord Jesus,” I said aloud, “this could be a danger for all of us and for Rolf, too.” But even with the words came a flood of assurance about this man. How long, I wondered, would we be led by this Gift of Knowledge.
I assigned one of our younger boys to follow Rolf home from work the next day and learn where he lived. The older boys, the ones susceptible to the factory draft, we sent out only after dark now, and then most often dressed as girls.
The following week I visited Rolf at home. “You have no idea how much it meant to see Harry,” I said when I was safe inside. “How can we repay this kindness?”
Rolf ran his hands through his bright hair. “Well, there is a way. The cleaning woman at the jail has a teenage son and they’ve almost picked him up twice. She’s desperate to find another place for him to live.”
“Perhaps I can help,” I said. “Do you think she could find that her watch needs repairing?”
The next day Toos came to the door of Tante Jans’s room where I was talking with two new volunteers for our work. More and more, I was leaving the watch shop to her and Father as our underground “operation” required more time. “There’s a funny looking little woman downstairs,” Toos said. “She says her name is Mietje. She says to tell you ‘Rolf sent her.’”
I met Mietje in the dining room. The hand that I shook was ridged and leathery from years of scrubbing floors. A tuft of hair grew from her chin. “I understand,” I said, “that you have a son you’re very proud of.”
“Oh yes!” Mietje’s face lit up at the mention of him.
I took the bulky old alarm clock she had brought with her. “Come for your clock tomorrow afternoon and I’ll hope to have good news.”
That night we listened to our messengers’ reports. The long, cruel winter had opened up places at several addresses. There was a place on a nearby tulip farm, but the farmer had decided he must be paid for the risk he was taking. We would have to provide a fee—in silver rijksdaalders, not paper money—plus an additional ration card. It didn’t happen often that a “host” would require money for his services; when one did we paid gladly.
When Mietje appeared the following morning, I took a small banknote from my purse and tore off a corner. “This is for your son,” I said. “Tonight he is to go to the Gravenstenenbrug. There is a tree stump right next to the bridge—they cut down the tree last winter. He is to wait beside it, looking into the canal. A man will come up and ask if he has change for a bankbill. Your son is to match the missing corner, and then follow this man without asking questions.”
Betsie came into the dining room as Mietje was grasping my hand in her two sandpaper ones. “I’ll make it up to you! Somehow, some day, I’ll find a way to repay you!”
Betsie and I exchanged smiles. How could this simple little soul help with the kind of need we faced?
AND SO THE work grew. As each new need arose, a new answer was found, too. Through Pickwick, for example, we met the man at the central telephone exchange whose department handled orders to connect and disconnect lines. With a little rewiring and juggling of numbers, he soon had our instrument in operation.
What a day it was when the old wall phone in the rear hall jangled joyously for the first time in three years! And how we needed it! For by now there were eighty Dutchmen—elderly women and middle-aged men along with our teenagers—working in “God’s underground” as we sometimes laughingly called ourselves. Most of these people never saw one another; we kept face-to-face contacts as few as possible. But all knew the Beje. It was headquarters, the center of a spreading web: the knot where all threads crossed.
But if the telephone was a boon, it was also a fresh risk—as was each added worker and connection. We set the phone’s ring as low as we could and still hear it; but who might happen to be passing through the hall when it rang?
For that matter how long would curious eyes up and down the street continue to believe that one small watch shop was quite as busy as it appeared? It was true that repair work was in demand: plenty of legitimate customers still passed in and out. But there was altogether too much coming and going, especially in the early evening. The curfew was now 7:00 p.m., which in spring and summer left no nighttime hours at all in which workers could move legally through the streets.
It was an hour and a half before that time on the first of June, 1943, and I was thinking of all this as I sat impatiently behind my workbench. Six workers still not back and so many loose ends to tie up before 7:00. For one thing, being the first of the month, Fred Koornstra should be arriving with the new ration cards. The hundred cards which had seemed such an extravagant request a year ago were now far too few for our needs, and Fred was only one of our suppliers, some of the stolen cards coming from as far away as Delft. How long can we go on this way? I wondered. How long can we continue to count on this strange protection?
My thoughts were interrupted by the side entrance bell. Betsie and I reached it at the same instant. In the alley stood a young Jewish woman cradling a tiny blanketed bundle in her arms. Behind her I recognized an intern from the maternity hospital.
The baby, he told us in the hallway, had come prematurely. He had kept mother and child in the hospital longer than permitted already because she had nowhere else to go.
Betsie held out her arms for the baby and at that moment Fred Koornstra opened the door from the shop. He blinked a moment at seeing people in the hall, then turned with great deliberation to the meter on the wall. The young doctor, seeing what he took to be an actual meterman, turned as white as his own collar. I longed to reassure both him and Fred, but knew that the fewer of the group who knew one another, the safer it was for all. The poor intern gulped a hasty good-bye while Betsie and I got mother and baby up to the dining room and closed the door on Fred and his work.
Betsie poured a bowl of the soup she had cooked for supper from a much-boiled bone. The baby began a thin high wail; I rocked it while the mother ate. Here was a new danger, a tiny fugitive too young to know the folly of making a noise. We had had many Jewish children over a night or several nights at the Beje and even the youngest had developed the uncanny silence of small hunted things. But at two weeks this one had yet to discover how unwelcoming was its world: we would need a place for them far removed from other houses.
And the very next morning into the shop walked the perfect solution. He was a clergyman friend of ours, pastor in a small town outside of Haarlem, and his home was set back from the street in a large wooded park.
“Good morning, Pastor,” I said, the pieces of the puzzle falling together in my mind. “Can we help you?”
I looked at the watch he had brought in for repair. It required a very hard-to-find spare part. “But for you, Pastor, we will do our very best. And now I have something I want to confess.”
The pastor’s eyes clouded. “Confess?”
I drew him out of the back door of the shop and up the stairs to the dining room.
“I confess that I too am searching for something.” The pastor’s face was now wrinkled with a frown. “Would you be willing to take a Jewish mother and her baby into your home? They will almost certainly be arrested otherwise.”
Color drained from the man’s face. He took a step back from me. “Miss ten Boom! I do hope you’re not involved with any of this illegal concealment and undercover business. It’s just not safe! Think of your father! And your sister—she’s never been strong!”
On impulse I told the pastor to wait and ran upstairs. Betsie had put the newcomers in Willem’s old room, the farthest from windows on the street. I asked the mother’s permission to borrow the infant: the little thing weighed hardly anything in my arms.
Back in the dining room, I pulled back the coverlet from the baby’s face.
There was a long silence. The man bent forward, his hand in spite of himself reaching for the tiny fist curled around the blanket. For a moment I saw compassion and fear struggle in his face. Then he straightened. “No. Definitely not. We could lose our lives for that Jewish child!”
Unseen by either of us, Father had appeared in the doorway. “Give the child to me, Corrie,” he said.
Father held the baby close, his white beard brushed its cheek, looking into the little face with eyes as blue and innocent as the baby’s own. At last he looked up at the pastor. “You say we could lose our lives for this child. I would consider that the greatest honor that could come to my family.”
The pastor turned sharply on his heels and walked out of the room.
So we had to accept a bad solution to our problem. On the edge of Haarlem was a truck farm that hid refugees for short periods of time. It was not a good location, since the Gestapo had been there already. But there was nowhere else available on short notice. Two workers took the woman and child there that afternoon.
A few weeks later we heard that the farm had been raided. When the Gestapo came to the barn where the woman was hidden, not the baby but the mother began to shriek with hysteria. She, the baby, and her protectors were all taken.
We never learned what happened to them.
ALTHOUGH WE HAD a friend at the telephone exchange, we could never be sure that our line was not tapped. So we developed a system for coding our underground messages in terms of watches.
“We have a woman’s watch here that needs repairing. But I can’t find a mainspring. Do you know who might have one?” (We have a Jewish woman in need of a hiding place and we can’t find one among our regular contacts.)
“I have a watch here with a face that’s causing difficulty. One of the numbers has worked loose and it’s holding back the hand. Do you know anyone who does this kind of repair work?” (We have a Jew here whose features are especially Semitic. Do you know anyone who would be willing to take an extra risk?)
“I’m sorry, but the child’s watch you left with us is not repairable. Do you have the receipt?” (A Jewish child has died in one of our houses. We need a burial permit.)
One morning in the middle of June the telephone rang with this message. “We have a man’s watch here that’s giving us trouble. We can’t find anyone to repair it. For one thing, the face is very old-fashioned. . . .”
So, a Jew whose features gave him away. This was the hardest kind of person to place. “Send the watch over and I’ll see what we can do in our own shop,” I said.
Promptly at 7:00 that evening the side doorbell rang. I glanced at the mirror in the window of the dining room where we were still sitting over tea of rose leaves and cherry stems. Even from the side of his head I could tell that this was our old-fashioned watch. His form, his clothes, his very stance were music-hall-comedy Jewish.
I ran down to the door. “Do come in.”
The smiling slender man in his early thirties, with his protruding ears, balding head, and minuscule glasses, gave an elaborate bow.
I liked him instantly.
Once the door was closed he took out a pipe. “The very first thing I must ask,” he said, “is whether or not I should leave behind my good friend the pipe? Meyer Mossel and his pipe are not easily separated. But for you, kind lady, should the smell get into your drapes, I would gladly say good-bye to my friend nicotine.”
I laughed. Of all the Jews who had come to our house this was the first to enter gaily and with a question about our own comfort.
“Of course you must keep your pipe!” I said. “My father smokes a cigar—when he can get one these days.”
“Ah! These days!” Meyer Mossel raised arms and shoulders in an enormous shrug. “What do you expect, when the barbarians have overrun the camp?”
I took him up to the dining room. There were seven seated at the table, a Jewish couple waiting placement and three underground workers in addition to Father and Betsie. Meyer Mossel’s eyes went straight to Father.
“But,” he cried, “one of the Patriarchs!”
It was exactly the right thing to say to Father. “But,” he returned with equal good humor, “a brother of the Chosen People!”
“Can you recite the 166th Psalm, Opa?” Meyer said.
Father beamed. Of course there is no Psalm 166; the Psalter stops with 150. It must be a joke, and nothing could please Father better than a scriptural joke. “The 166th Psalm?”
“Shall I recite it for you?” Meyer asked.
Father gave a bow of assent and Meyer plunged into verse.
“But that’s Psalm 100!” Father interrupted. And then his face lit up. Of course! Psalm 66 started with the identical words. Meyer had asked for the 100th and the 66th Psalm. For the rest of the evening I could hear Father chuckling, “Psalm 166!”
At 8:45 Father took the old brass-bound Bible from its shelf. He opened to the reading in Jeremiah where we had left off the night before, then with sudden inspiration passed the Bible across the table to Meyer.
“I would consider it an honor if you would read for us tonight,” Father said.
Lifting the Book lovingly, Meyer rose to his feet. From a pocket came a small prayer cap, and then, from deep in this throat, half-sung, half-pleaded, came the words of the ancient prophet, so feelingly and achingly that we seemed to hear the cry of the Exile itself.
Meyer Mossel, he told us afterward, had been cantor in the synagogue in Amsterdam. For all his lightheartedness he had suffered much. Most of his family had been arrested; his wife and children were in hiding on a farm in the north which had declined to accept Meyer—“for obvious reasons,” he said with a grimace at his own unmistakable features.
And gradually it dawned on all of us that this endearing man was at the Beje to stay. It was certainly not an ideal place, but for Meyer nothing could be ideal right now.
“At least,” I told him one evening, “your name doesn’t have to give you away too.” Ever since the days when Willem was studying church history, I had remembered the venerable fourth-century church father, Eusebius.
“I think we’ll call you Eusebius,” I decided. We were sitting in Tante Jans’s front room with Kik and some other young men, who had made us a delivery of forged travel-permits too late to get home by curfew.
Meyer leaned back and stared at the ceiling pensively. He took his pipe out of his mouth. “Eusebius Mossel,” he said, tasting the words.
“No, it doesn’t sound quite right. Eusebius Gentile Mossel.”
We all laughed. “Don’t be a goose,” Betsie said. “You must change both names!”
Kik looked slyly at Father. “Opa! How about Smit? That seems a popular name these days.”
“It does seem so!” said Father, not catching the joke. “Extraordinarily popular!”
And Eusebius Smit it became.
Changing Meyer’s name was easy—at once he became “Eusie.” But getting Eusie to eat non-kosher food was something else. The problem, of course, was that we were grateful for food of any kind: we stood in line for hours, this third year of the occupation, to get whatever was available.
One day the paper announced that coupon number four was good for pork sausage. It was the first meat we’d had in weeks. Lovingly Betsie prepared the feast, saving every drop of fat for flavoring other foods later.
“Eusie,” Betsie said as she carried the steaming casserole of pork and potatoes to the table, “the day has come.”
Eusie knocked the ashes out of his pipe and considered his plight out loud. He, who had always eaten kosher, he, the oldest son of an oldest son of a respected family, in fact, he Meyer Mossel Eusebius Smit, was seriously being asked to eat pork.
Betsie placed a helping of sausage and potato before him. “Bon appetit.”
The tantalizing odor reached our meat-starved palates. Eusie wet his lips with his tongue. “Of course,” he said, “there’s a provision for this in the Talmud.” He speared the meat with his fork, bit hungrily, and rolled his eyes heavenward in pure pleasure. “And I’m going to start hunting for it, too,” he said, “just as soon as dinner’s over.”
As if Eusie’s arrival had broken down a last hesitation, within a week there were three new permanent additions to the household. First there was Jop, our current apprentice, whose daily trip from his parents’ home in the suburbs had twice nearly ended in seizure for the factory transport. The second time it happened his parents asked if he could stay at the Beje and we agreed. The other two were Henk, a young lawyer, and Leendert, a schoolteacher. Leendert made an especially important contribution to the secret life of the Beje. He installed our electric warning system.
By now I had learned to make the nighttime trip out to Pickwick’s almost as skillfully as could Kik. One evening when I had gratefully accepted a cup of coffee, my wall-eyed friend sat me down for a lecture.
“Cornelia,” he said, settling his bulk on a velvet chair too small for him, “I understand you have no alarm system in your house. This is purest folly. Also I am given to believe that you are not carrying on regular drills for your guests.”
I was always amazed at how well Pickwick knew what went on at the Beje.
“You know that a raid may come any day,” Pickwick continued. “I don’t see how you can avoid one. Scores of people in and out—and an NSB agent living over Kan’s up the street.
“Your secret room is no good to you if people can’t get to it in time. I know this Leendert. He’s a good man and a very passable electrician. Get him to put a buzzer in every room with a door or a window on the street. Then hold practice drills until your people can disappear in that room without a trace in less than a minute. I’ll send someone to get you started.”
Leendert did the electrical work that weekend. He installed a buzzer near the top of the stairs—loud enough to be heard all over the house but not outside. Then he placed buttons to sound the buzzer at every vantage point where trouble might first be spotted. One button went beneath the dining room windowsill, just below the mirror which gave onto the side door. Another went in the downstairs hall just inside that door and a third inside the front door on the Barteljorisstraat. He also put a button behind the counter in the shop and one in each workbench as well as beneath the windows in Tante Jans’s rooms.
We were ready for our first trial run. The four unacknowledged members of our household were already climbing up to the secret room two times a day: in the morning to store their night clothes, bedding, and toilet articles, and in the evening to put away their day things. Members of our group, too, who had to spend the night, kept raincoats, hats, anything they had brought with them, in that room. Altogether that made a good deal of traffic in and out of my small bedroom—smaller now indeed by nearly a yard. Many nights my last waking sight would be Eusie in long robe and tasseled nightcap, handing his day clothes through the secret panel.
But the purpose of the drills was to see how rapidly people could reach the room at any hour of the day or night without prior notice. A tall sallow-faced young man arrived from Pickwick one morning to teach me how to conduct the drills.
“Smit!” Father exclaimed when the man introduced himself. “Truly it’s most astonishing! We’ve had one Smit after another here lately. Now you bear a great resemblance to . . .”
Mr. Smit disentangled himself gently from Father’s genealogical inquiries and followed me upstairs.
“Mealtimes,” he said. “That’s a favorite hour for a raid. Also the middle of the night.” He strode from room to room, pointing everywhere to evidence that more than three people lived in the house. “Watch wastebaskets and ashtrays.”
He paused in a bedroom door. “If the raid comes at night they must not only take their sheets and blankets but get the mattress turned. That’s the S.D.’s favorite trick—feeling for a warm spot on a bed.”
© Hans Poley/Nederlands fotomuseum, Rotterdam
Two Jewish women during an actual drill of the hiding place in 1943.
Mr. Smit stayed for lunch. There were eleven of us at the table that day, including a Jewish lady who had arrived the night before and a Gentile woman and her small daughter, members of our underground, who acted as “escorts.” The three of them were leaving for a farm in Brabant right after lunch.
Betsie had just passed around a stew so artfully prepared you scarcely missed the meat when, without warning, Mr. Smit leaned back in his chair and pushed the button below the window.
Above us the buzzer sounded. People sprang to their feet, snatching up glasses and plates, scrambling for the stairs, while the cat clawed halfway up the curtain in consternation. Cries of “Faster!” “Not so loud!” and “You’re spilling it!” reached us as Father, Betsie, and I hastily rearranged table and chairs to look like a lunch for three in progress.
“No, leave my place,” Mr. Smit instructed. “Why shouldn’t you have a guest for lunch? The lady and the little girl could have stayed, too.”
At last we were seated again and silence reigned upstairs.
The whole process had taken four minutes.
A little later we were all gathered again around the dining room table. Mr. Smit set out before him the incriminating evidence he had found: two spoons and a piece of carrot on the stairs, pipe ashes in an “unoccupied” bedroom. Everyone looked at Eusie who blushed to the tips of his large ears.
“Also those,” he pointed to the hats of mother and daughter still dangling from the pegs on the dining room wall. “If you have to hide, stop and think what you arrived with. Besides which, you’re all simply too slow.”
The next night I sounded the alarm again and this time we shaved a minute thirty-three seconds off our run. By our fifth trial we were down to two minutes. We never did achieve Pickwick’s ideal of under a minute, but with practice we learned to jump up from whatever we were doing and get those who had to hide in the secret room in seventy seconds. Father, Toos, and I worked on “stalling techniques,” which we would use if the Gestapo came through the shop door; Betsie invented a similar strategy for the side door. With those delaying tactics we hoped we could gain a life-saving seventy ticks of a second hand.
Because the drills struck so close to the fear that haunted each of our guests—never spoken, always present—we tried to keep these times from becoming altogether serious. “Like a game!” we’d tell each other: “a race to beat our own record!” One of our group owned the bakery in the next street. Early in the month I would deposit a supply of sugar coupons with him. Then when I decided it was time for a drill, I would go to him for a bag of cream puffs—an inexpressible treat in those sweetless days—to be secreted in my workbench and brought out as a reward for a successful practice.
Each time the order of cream puffs was larger. For by now, in addition to the workers whom we wanted to initiate into the system, we had three more permanent boarders: Thea Dacosta, Meta Monsanto, and Mary Itallie.
Mary Itallie, at seventy-six the oldest of our guests, was also the one who posed the greatest problem. The moment Mary stepped through our door I heard the asthmatic wheezing which had made other hosts unwilling to take her in.
Since her ailment compromised the safety of the others, we took up the problem in caucus. The seven most concerned—Eusie, Jop, Henk, Leendert, Meta, Thea, and Mary herself—joined Father, Betsie, and me in Tante Jans’s front room.
“There is no sense in pretending,” I began. “Mary has a difficulty—especially after climbing stairs—that could put you all in danger.”
In the silence that followed, Mary’s labored breathing seemed especially loud.
“Can I speak?” Eusie asked.
“Of course.”
“It seems to me that we’re all here in your house because of some difficulty or other. We’re the orphan children—the ones nobody else wanted. Any one of us is jeopardizing all the others. I vote that Mary stay.”
“Good,” said lawyer Henk, “let’s put it to the vote.”
Hands began rising but Mary was struggling to speak. “Secret ballots,” she brought out at last. “No one should be embarrassed.”
Henk brought a sheet of paper from the desk in the next room and tore it into nine small strips. “You too,” he said, handing ballots to Betsie, Father, and me. “If we’re discovered, you suffer the same as us.”
He handed around pencils. “Mark ‘No’ if it’s too great a risk, ‘Yes’ if you think she belongs here.”
For a moment pencils scratched, then Henk collected the folded ballots. He opened them in silence, then reached over and dropped them into Mary’s lap.
Nine little scraps of paper, nine times the word, “Yes.”
AND SO OUR “family” was formed. Others stayed with us a day or a week, but these seven remained, the nucleus of our happy household.
That it could have been happy, at such a time and in such circumstances, was largely a tribute to Betsie. Because our guests’ physical lives were so very restricted, evenings under Betsie’s direction became the door to the wide world. Sometimes we had concerts, with Leendert on the violin, and Thea, a truly accomplished musician, on the piano. Or Betsie would announce “an evening of Vondel” (the Dutch Shakespeare), with each of us reading a part. One night a week she talked Eusie into giving Hebrew lessons, another night Meta taught Italian.
© Hans Poley/Nederlands fotomuseum, Rotterdam
The Beje family in 1943, consisting of Corrie, Father, Betsie (third from right), Jewish guests, and Dutch underground workers.
The evening’s activity had to be kept brief because the city now had electricity only a short while each night, and candles had to be hoarded for emergencies. When the lamps flickered and dimmed, we would wind back down to the dining room where my bicycle was set up on its stand. One of us would climb onto it, and others taking chairs, and then while the rider pedaled furiously to make the headlight glow bright, someone would pick up the chapter from the night before. We changed cyclist and reader often as legs or voice grew tired, reading our way through histories, novels, plays.
Father always went upstairs after prayers at 9:15, but the rest of us lingered, reluctant to break the circle, sorry to see the evening end. “Oh well,” Eusie would say hopefully as we started at last to our rooms. “Maybe there’ll be a drill tonight! I haven’t had a cream puff in nearly a week.”