The Back of the Embroidery

“When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee: when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned, neither shall the flame kindle upon thee.” — Isaiah 43:2 (ASV)

On 6 June 1944, the day Allied armies landed in Normandy, the Germans began emptying the Scheveningen prison. At a small station outside The Hague, in a crowd of prisoners, Corrie saw Betsie for the first time in more than three months. They pushed through until they were in the same railway carriage and sat holding hands, hardly needing to talk. Another woman teased them as “the love-birds.” Whatever came next, they would face it side by side.

The train arrived at four in the morning at Vught, in the south of the country, the only SS concentration camp built on Dutch soil. On the first day the women were made to undress and shower in front of watching soldiers. The sisters held each other and prayed to be spared. Before their turn came, it was stopped, and they were processed privately days later. Corrie always counted that as answered prayer.

With nothing to do all day but sit at long tables, the women began to complain and backbite. Betsie had an idea. She started a society with simple rules: do your best not to grumble, don't speak ill of anyone, speak encouragingly to others. A small group prayed every day that the atmosphere would change. It is a very Betsie idea: small, practical, gentle, and rooted in prayer.

Later Corrie was lined up with older women to be picked for work crews. It felt, she wrote, like a slave market. She had always been independent. Now she told herself she was “in training.” A kind foreman found out she was a watchmaker and put her on testing relay switches for radios, eleven hours a day. On Sunday afternoons there was worship on a patch of grass between two barracks, and soon Corrie was leading it. She also ran a discussion group, like her girls' clubs, and one of her questions was whether the prisoners would have any responsibility towards the defeated enemy after the war. In a Nazi camp in 1944, she was already asking how they would treat the Germans.

She was honest about herself in her letters. Some women around her were heroines who had given up everything on purpose. She was not like that, she wrote. She longed terribly for home. That she had held out at all was only by God's grace.

Vught was still a concentration camp. Men were beaten to death. Prisoners were called out at roll-call and shot minutes later. In early September 1944, with the Allied armies close, the Germans began killing male prisoners before they could be freed. The women stood at the fence and watched men marched out of the gate. Then they heard the shots. Corrie counted one hundred and eighty. She put her head on Betsie's shoulder and asked God why he allowed it.

Afterwards, pouring out her grief, she sensed that she could not and need not carry the sorrows of the whole world. She was to bring them to God and leave them with him. Then she found the picture she would use for the rest of her life. Life, she wrote, looks like the back of a piece of embroidery: a meaningless tangle of threads. That's the underside. One day we will see the right side, and be amazed and thankful. Days later the sisters were packed with some eighty women into a goods wagon with almost no air, and after three days and nights they reached Ravensbrück, north of Berlin.

Isaiah doesn't promise God's people will avoid the water and the fire. He promises God will be with them in it. You're not asked to understand every tangled thread, or to carry the whole world's pain. You're asked to bring it to him.

One thing to do this week: try Betsie's society for seven days: don't grumble, don't speak badly of anyone, and say one encouraging thing to someone every day. Keep a tally of how often you slip, and don't beat yourself up about it.