Eight Hours

“Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers: The snare is broken, and we are escaped.” — Psalm 124:7 (ASV)

The day after Betsie died, the whole of Barracks 28 was punished with a roll-call because one woman was missing. They stood in the cold from half past five until noon. At last the missing woman was found: a Polish prisoner, dead in her bunk. The whole barracks had been punished for the absence of a dead woman. Five women, Corrie among them, fell ill after that roll-call, with swollen legs. Within ten days, she wrote, the other four were dead.

Three days after Betsie's death, Corrie's name was called at roll-call. She stepped forward expecting new danger and was told she was being discharged. But released prisoners had to look healthy, and her legs were swollen, so she was sent to the hospital barracks until the swelling went down. That week, she wrote, was among the worst of her imprisonment. At night the sickest women couldn't reach the icy latrine, and some died trying. Corrie helped them, and talked about Jesus as she did.

In one bed lay a young girl named Oelie, who had a learning disability. She was desperately ill and crying for her mother. Night after night Corrie talked to her about the Saviour. On the last night Oelie was able to tell her, simply and in her own words, that Jesus loved her, had taken her punishment, and was preparing a place for her. They thanked God together. Corrie said she understood then why she had been kept that week. The classes for disabled people back in Haarlem had come to this.

One night the windows were thick with frost and the water in the bucket froze solid. The bitter cold had come. In the morning she lay in her bunk listening to thousands of feet stamping outside at roll-call. Weeks earlier she had felt God promise she would be free before the severe cold. She had told the women at the Bible reading that they would all be freed before it came. She had been wrong, she wrote: the promise was for her alone. God, she said, had saved her eight hours before the cold set in.

She walked out with a discharge certificate bearing her prisoner number, 66730. Dutch sources date her release to 28 December 1944. After a hard journey across a collapsing Germany, meeting both cruelty and kindness, she reached a hospital in Groningen. One of the nurses had once been a leader in her girls' clubs and didn't recognise the gaunt woman in front of her. They bathed her and fed her and put her in a real bed. When she heard music again, she wept.

Now a myth to check. For the rest of her life Corrie told audiences that she was released through a clerical error, and that a week later all the women her age were sent to the gas chamber. She learned the “error” years later, apparently on a return visit to Ravensbrück. No document has been found showing a mistake, and her 1945 book never calls it one. Her letters from Vught show the sisters expected their sentence to end on a fixed date, so an ordinary, much-delayed release fits the facts at least as well. And the camp's gas chamber began operating in late January 1945, about a month after she left, not a week. But the danger was real. Sick and old women were already being sent to their deaths, and Corrie, fifty-two and swollen with illness, had every reason to fear the weeks ahead.

Psalm 124 doesn't explain how the snare broke. A bird doesn't know how. It only knows it is free. When she finally reached the Beje in January 1945, her father and sister were gone and much had been stolen. But her piano was there, and her father's chair. She stood by his bed and dared to be happy. She had been given her life back.

One thing to do this week: think of a time you were rescued from something, big or small, even if you don't know how it happened. Thank God for it by name, and tell one person the story.