Seventy Seconds

“Thou art my hiding-place; thou wilt preserve me from trouble; Thou wilt compass me about with songs of deliverance.” — Psalm 32:7 (ASV)

By the spring of 1943 people were living at the Beje for weeks and months, and the security police could raid without warning. The family needed a hiding place that could not be found. The man who built it is known only by an alias. Corrie called him Mr. Smit, a well-known architect who worked for the underground. His real name has never been established. He belongs to the huge company of people whose work survives and whose names don't.

He chose Corrie's own bedroom at the very top of the house, the point farthest from the street door, which meant a few precious extra seconds. Along one wall he built a second wall of brick, plastered and aged to look exactly like the old one. The space between was about two and a half metres long and seventy centimetres deep. In front stood a linen cupboard, and under its bottom shelf was a small sliding panel. You crawled through the panel, closed it from inside, and somebody hid it with boxes and linen. Inside there was a grille for air, a mattress, some water and dry biscuits.

The family called it the Engelenbak, the Angels' Crib, after the highest seats in an old Dutch theatre, nearest the angels. It was meant to hide people for hours, not days.

A hiding place is useless if you can't get into it in time, so they practised. Buzzers were wired up so a warning could be given from the shop. Corrie would sound the alarm without notice, often at night, and time everyone with a stopwatch as they raced upstairs, hid every trace of themselves, and crawled through the panel one by one. Their best time, she wrote in 1945, was seventy seconds. Afterwards they went over whatever had given them away. Then Corrie handed out cream puffs.

Over the months, by her count, more than eighty people passed through the house, with never fewer than seven and never more than twelve at a time. Some can now be identified. “Eusie” was Meijer Mossel, a cantor from Amsterdam with a big voice and, as Corrie remembered him, the high spirits of an overgrown boy. “Mary” was Mary van Itallie, who had run a travel agency before the war. Hans Poley, a university student, arrived in May 1943 as the first permanent guest and later wrote his own memoir from his wartime diaries.

What stands out in Corrie's earliest account isn't the fear. It's the life. There was music in the drawing room, a young man playing a violin sonata, and Eusie singing so passionately that Corrie had to warn him the whole street would hear. They ran evening classes: Mary taught Italian, Eusie Hebrew, Hans astronomy, and Casper, well into his eighties, came along with his notebook. The cat was called Maher-shalal-hash-baz, after a name in Isaiah. Underneath it all, Corrie knew the house would be found one day, and she kept a small Bible on her against that day.

That is a good pattern for living under pressure. They didn't deny the danger. They drilled for it with a stopwatch. They also didn't let the danger have the last word. The psalm says God surrounds his people “with songs of deliverance,” and at the Beje the songs came first.

But they never mixed up the brick wall and God. The Angels' Crib was well made, and it would do exactly what it was built to do. They knew no wall could finally protect them. Their final hiding place was not something they had built.

One thing to do this week: be practical about one thing you've been avoiding: a conversation, a plan, a deadline. Prepare for it properly. Then do one thing that is simply joyful, with other people, and thank God for it on purpose.