A Letter in June

“but I say unto you, Love your enemies, and pray for them that persecute you” — Matthew 5:44 (ASV)

Corrie came home to the Hunger Winter, when food and fuel ran out in the west of the Netherlands and thousands died of hunger and cold. On 5 May 1945 the Germans surrendered. At the first service in the freed Grote Kerk, with a minute of silence for the dead, she found she couldn't sing the national anthem. She named them in her heart: her father, Betsie, and so many others.

In those first days of freedom, crowds all over the country grabbed women accused of relationships with German soldiers, shaved their heads in public and mocked them. Corrie watched from the edge of the crowd and did not join in. One of the girls reminded her of the young women she had known in the camp, and she felt pity, not triumph. She understood why people wanted revenge after five years of humiliation. She was sure this wasn't the way, and she went home.

The war had cost the family terribly. Casper and Betsie were dead. Willem's son Kik, arrested for resistance work, died in Bergen-Belsen in 1945. Willem himself had caught an illness in prison and died in December 1946. The Beje had been plundered.

Then there was the question of who had betrayed them. The Hiding Place tells of a man who came to the shop on the morning of the raid asking for money to free his wife, and names him as the informer, Jan Vogel. That scene isn't in Corrie's 1945 book, which doesn't say how the house was betrayed, and a local historian gives the name differently. You may have read that he was executed after the war. The list of Dutch postwar executions has no one of that name, and without the court records his fate is unknown.

What we do have is a letter. On 19 June 1945, Corrie wrote to the man she had heard was most probably the one who betrayed them. As it was later published, she told him her father had died because of it, and her sister in the camp, and that she had suffered too. Then she told him she forgave him everything. She said she was praying for him and sending him a New Testament, because Jesus had carried his sins and could make him new.

Look at the date. Betsie had been dead six months. The country had been free for six weeks. The grief and anger were raw everywhere. The man hadn't asked for forgiveness. Corrie didn't wait to feel forgiving. Later she liked to say forgiveness is an act of the will, and the feelings follow. This letter is the earliest evidence that she believed it.

Be clear about what she did not do. She didn't pretend he had done nothing wrong; she named exactly what it cost. She didn't ask the courts to let him go. Forgiveness isn't pretending, and it isn't cancelling justice. It is giving up your own claim to pay someone back and handing the debt to God.

And she kept going. She opened a home in Bloemendaal, near Haarlem, for people recovering from the war, as she and Betsie had planned. Her later book says that former collaborators her neighbours despised lived there alongside former prisoners. In 1949 she opened a home for refugees in a former camp in Darmstadt, Germany. (Popular accounts say a concentration camp; the sources don't make clear what kind it was.) She even went to preach to former women guards from Ravensbrück, held in an internment camp. She wrote about it in 1953 in a chapter called “My Chocolate Sermon.”

Most of us are asked to forgive much smaller things. Corrie's example says don't wait until you feel like it. Decide, and act, and trust God to bring the feelings after.

One thing to do this week: if there's someone you need to forgive, write them a letter: name honestly what they did and what it cost you, and then say you forgive them. You don't have to send it yet. Pray over it, and ask a trusted adult whether and how to send it.