The Hiding Place, part 4

“Ja! Herrein!” called a man's voice.

The guard pushed open the door, gave a straight-armed salute and marched smartly off. The man wore a gun in a leather holster and a beribboned uniform. He removed his hat and I was stark staring into the face of the gentle-mannered man who had visited me in my cell.

“I am Lieutenant Rahms,” he said, stepping to the door to close it behind me. “You're shivering! Here, let me get a fire going.”

He filled a pot-bellied stove from a small coal scuttle, for all the world a kindly German householder entertaining a guest. What if this were all a subtle trap? This kind, human manner-perhaps he had simply found it more effective than brutality in tricking the l truth from affection-starved people. Oh Lord, let no weak gullibility on my part endanger another's life.

“I hope,” the officer was saying, “we won't have many more days this spring as cold as this one.” He drew out a chair for me to sit on.

Warily I accepted it. How strange after three months, to feel chair-back behind me, chair-arms for my hands! The heat from the stove was quickly warming the little room. In spite of myself, I began to relax. I ventured a timid comment about the tulips: “So tall, they must have been beautiful.”

“Oh they were!” he seemed ridiculously pleased. “The best I've ever grown. At home we always have Dutch bulbs.”

We talked about flowers for a while and then he said, “I would like to help you, Miss ten Boom. But you must tell me everything. I may be able to do something, but only if you do not hide anything from me.”

So there it was already. All the friendliness, the kindly concern that I had half-believed in-all a device to elicit information. Well, why not? This man was a professional with a job to do. But I, too, in a small way, was a professional.

For an hour he questioned me, using every psychological trick that the young men of our group had drilled me in. In fact, I felt like a student who has crammed for a difficult exam and then is tested on only the most elementary material. It soon became clear that they believed the Beje had been a headquarters for raids on food ration offices around the country. Of all the illegal activities I had on my conscience this was probably the one I knew least about. Other than receiving the stolen cards each month and passing them on, I knew no details of the operation. Apparently my real ignorance began to show after a while Lieutenant Rahms stopped making notes of my hopelessly stupid answers.

“Your other activities, Miss ten Boom. What would you like to tell me about them?” “Other activities? Oh, you mean-you want to know about my church for mentally retarded people!” And I plunged into an eager account of my efforts at preaching to the feeble-minded.

The lieutenant's eyebrows rose higher and higher. “What a waste of time and energy!” he exploded at last. “If you want converts, surely one normal person is worth all the half-wits in the world!' I stared into the man's intelligent blue-gray eyes: true National- Socialist philosophy, I thought, tulip bed or no. And then to my astonishment I heard my own voice saying boldly, “May I tell you the truth, Lieutenant Rahms?” “This hearing, Miss ten Boom, is predicated on the assumption that you will do me that honor.”

“The truth, sir,” I said, swallowing, “is that God's viewpoint is sometimes different from ours-so different that we could not even guess at it unless He had given us a Book which tells us such things.”

I knew it was madness to talk this way to a Nazi officer. But he said nothing so I plunged ahead. “In the Bible I learned that God values us not for our strength or our brains but simply because He has made us. Who knows, in His eyes a half-wit may be worth more than a watchmaker. Or---a lieutenant.”

Lieutenant Rahms stood up abruptly. “That will be all for today.”

He walked swiftly to the door. “Guard!” I heard footsteps on the gravel path.

“The prisoner will return to her cell.”

From The Hiding Place, by Corrie ten Boom, pp. 172-173.

The Hiding Place, part 2

And while Haarlem and the rest of Holland strolled and bowed and swept its steps, the neighbors on our east geared for war. We knew what was happening—there was no way to keep from knowing. Often in the evening, turning the dial on the radio, we would pick up a voice from Germany. The voice did not talk, or even shout. It screamed. Oddly, it was even –tempered Betsie who reacted most strongly, hurtling from her chair and flinging herself at the radio to shut off the sound.

And yet, in the interludes, we forgot. Or, when Willem was visiting and would not let us forget, or when letters from Jewish suppliers in Germany came back marked “Address Unknown,” we still managed to believe that it was primarily a German problem. “How long are they going to stand for it,” we said. “They won’t put up with that man for long.”

Only once did that changes taking place in Germany reach inside the little shop on the Barteljorisstraat, and that was in the person of a young German watchmaker. Germans frequently came to work under Father for a while, for his reputation reached even beyond Holland. So when this tall good-looking young man appeared with his apprentice papers from a good firm in Berlin, Father hired him without hesitation. Otto told us proudly that he belonged to the Hitler Youth. Indeed it was a puzzle to us why he had come to Holland, for he found nothing but fault with Dutch people and products. “The world we see what Germans can do,” he said often.
His first morning at work he came upstairs for coffee and Bible reading with the other employees; after that he sat alone down in the shop. When we asked him why, he said that though he had not understood the Dutch words, he had seen that Father was reading from the Old Testament which, as he informed us, was the Jews’ “Book of Lies.”

I was shocked but Father was only sorrowful. “He has been taught wrong,” he told me. “By watching us, seeing that we love this Book and are truthful people, he will realize his error.”

It was several weeks later that Betsie opened the door from the hallway and beckoned to Father and me. Upstairs on Tante Jan’s tall mahogany chair sat the lady who ran the rooming house where Otto lived. Changing the bed sheets that morning, she said, she had found something under his pillow. And she drew from her market satchel a knife with a curving ten-inch blade.
Again, Father put the best interpretation on it. “The boy is probably only frightened, alone in a strange country. He probably bought it to protect himself.”

It was true enough that Otto was alone. He spoke no Dutch nor made any effort to learn, and besides Father, Betsie and me, few people in this working-class part of the city spoke German. We repeated our invitation to join us upstairs in the evenings, but whether he did not care for our choice of radio programs, or because the evening ended as the morning began, with prayer and Bible readings, he seldom did.

In the end, father did fire Otto—the first employee he had ever discharged in more than sixty years in business. And it was not the knife or anti-Semitism that finally brought it about, but Otto’s treatment of the old clockmender, Christoffels.

From the very first I had been baffled by his brusqueness with the old man. It wasn’t anything he did—not in our presence anyway—but by what he didn’t do. No standing back to let the older man go first, no helping on with a coat, no picking up a dropped tool. It was hard to pin down. One Sunday, when Father, Betsie and I were having dinner in Hilversum, I commented on what I thought was simple thoughtlessness.

Willem shook his head. “It’s very deliberate,” he said. “It’s because the Christoffels is old. The old have no value to the State. They’re also much harder to train in the new ways of thinking. Germany is systematically teaching disrespect for old age.”

We stared at him, trying hard to grasp such a concept. “Surely you are mistaken, Willem!” Father said. “Otto is extremely courteous to me—unusually so. And I’m a good deal older than Christoffels.”

“You’re different. You’re the boss. That’s another part of the system: respect for authority. It’s the old and weak who are to be eliminated.”

We rode the train home in stunned silence—and we started watching Otto more closely. But how could we know, how in the Holland of 1939 could we have guessed, that it was not in the shops we could observe him but in the streets and alleys outside that Otto was subjecting Christoffels to a very real, small persecution. “Accidental” collisions and trippings, a shove, a heel ground into a toe, were making the old clockman’s journeys to and from work times of terror.

The erect and shabby little man was too proud to report any of this to us. It was not until the icy February morning that Christoffels stumbled into the dining room with a bleeding cheek and a torn coat that the truth came out. Even then, Christoffels said nothing.

But running down the street to pick up his hat, I encountered Otto surrounded by an indignant little cluster of people who had seen what happened. Rounding the corner into the alley, the young man had deliberately forced the older one into the side of the building and ground his face against the rough bricks.

Father tried to reason with Otto as he let him go, to show him why such behavior was wrong. Otto did not answer. In silence he collected the few tools he had brought with him and in silence left the shop. It was only at the door that he turned to look at us, a look of the most utter contempt I had ever seen.

From The Hiding Place, by Corrie ten Boom. Pp. 74-76.