Ration Cards and Lies

“But the midwives feared God, and did not as the king of Egypt commanded them, but saved the men-children alive.”

— Exodus 1:17, ASV

The Problem of Food

Hiding a person is not only a matter of a secret room. A person in hiding has to eat, every day, for as long as the hiding lasts. In the occupied Netherlands, that was the hardest problem of all.

Food and many other goods were rationed. Every legal resident received a ration card, and with it coupons that had to be handed over, with money, to buy bread, butter, meat, sugar, and much else. A person in hiding had no legal existence, and so no ration card. A family hiding three or four people had to feed them out of their own rations, which were barely enough for themselves, or buy on the black market at ruinous prices. For a few days that was possible. For months or years, it was not.

The underground’s answer was to obtain ration cards illegally, in large numbers, and distribute them to the people and families who needed them. The national organisation for help to people in hiding, the LO, did much of this work. Many cards came from armed raids on the distribution offices where they were stored, carried out by resistance groups. Others were supplied quietly by sympathetic officials, or forged.

The ten Booms became one of the distribution points. Corrie’s 1945 account describes the steady traffic: “Twenty more ration cards? Right, you shall have them.” She kept a stock of cards hidden inside the top step of the staircase, which had been made into a secret cupboard. No one, she wrote, would ever suspect it was there. In The Hiding Place she tells how the family first obtained cards in quantity through a civil servant at the local food office, a friend she calls Fred Koornstra. As she tells it, he arranged for a hundred cards to be taken from his own office. The name may be a pseudonym, and the story rests on her account. But the Yad Vashem file confirms the essential point: Corrie went on supplying ration cards to Jews hidden in other homes, and she checked those homes in person.

Papers and Names

Food was one problem. Identity was another. Every adult in the occupied Netherlands had to carry an identity card, and Jews’ cards were stamped with a large J. A Jew in hiding who needed to move from one address to another needed false papers. Young men of military age needed permits, called Ausweise, to avoid being sent to Germany as forced labourers. The underground forged, stole, and adapted documents on a large scale, and the Beje was one of the places where such papers passed from hand to hand.

Even names became part of the deception. Corrie’s 1945 account mentions casually that a new guest was given a new name as soon as she arrived. The family called her Tante Mien. The Jewish cantor who became one of the permanent guests is known to history by the nickname the household gave him, Eusie. The name of the civil servant who supplied the cards, the name of the architect who built the hiding place, and many of the young workers who passed through the house are known to us only by aliases. That was deliberate. What you did not know, you could not reveal under interrogation.

The Question of Lying

All of this raised a question that troubled many Christians in the resistance, and troubled the ten Boom family itself. Was it right to lie?

The underground ran on deception. It needed false papers, false names, stolen cards, and hidden rooms, and when the police came to the door, the answers were false. The ninth commandment says, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor” (Exodus 20:16, ASV). Paul tells the Ephesians, “Wherefore, putting away falsehood, speak ye truth each one with his neighbor” (Ephesians 4:25, ASV). Christians have long argued about whether any lie can ever be justified, even to save a life.

We saw in the last chapter that Corrie’s sister Nollie, as Corrie tells it, would not lie. When the police asked whether the woman in her house was Jewish, Nollie said yes. In The Hiding Place, Corrie presents this as a question on which the family did not agree. Nollie held that God honours those who speak the truth. Corrie did not share her sister’s scruple. The work demanded deception, and she practised it. The Jewish woman whom Nollie refused to deny was, in the end, rescued. Corrie tells the story with evident respect for her sister, but she does not claim to have settled the question.

The Midwives and Rahab

Scripture does not settle it simply either, and it is worth looking at the passages that Christians in the resistance often turned to.

The verse at the head of this chapter comes from the beginning of Exodus. Pharaoh had ordered the Hebrew midwives to kill every boy born to the Israelite women. “But the midwives feared God, and did not as the king of Egypt commanded them, but saved the men-children alive” (Exodus 1:17, ASV). When Pharaoh demanded to know why, they told him that the Hebrew women gave birth too quickly, before the midwives could arrive. The text does not comment on whether that answer was true. But it says plainly what God thought of the midwives: “And God dealt well with the midwives … And it came to pass, because the midwives feared God, that he made them households” (Exodus 1:20-21, ASV).

Then there is Rahab of Jericho, who hid the two Israelite spies on her roof. When the king’s messengers came asking for them, she told them the men had already left the city, and sent the pursuers off in the wrong direction (Joshua 2:4-5). The New Testament twice holds her up as an example of faith. “By faith Rahab the harlot perished not with them that were disobedient, having received the spies with peace” (Hebrews 11:31, ASV). James asks, “was not also Rahab the harlot justified by works, in that she received the messengers, and sent them out another way?” (James 2:25, ASV).

Some Christians read these passages as teaching that deception is right when it is used to protect innocent life from murderers. Others read them more cautiously. They say that God rewarded the midwives’ and Rahab’s faith and courage in protecting life, without approving everything they said. Augustine of Hippo, whose works are in this library, held that a Christian must never lie, even to save a life, though he honoured the mercy behind such acts. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, also in this library, wrote an essay in a Nazi prison in 1943 asking what it really means to tell the truth when the one asking the question has no right to the answer. The ten Booms stood in the middle of that argument, and they did not all come down in the same place.

What Was Clear

Whatever one concludes about lying, some things were clear to the ten Booms, and they are clear in Scripture. The occupiers’ laws requiring the registration, marking, and deportation of Jews were unjust, and no one was obliged to help carry them out. “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29, ASV), said Peter and the apostles when they were ordered to stop preaching. The lives of the hunted were precious to God, and those who were able to protect them were responsible for doing so. And those who took these risks did not do so for gain. The ten Booms made no money from the work, and they lost almost everything because of it.

It is also worth noticing that, in Corrie’s telling, the disagreement did not break the family’s unity or its work. Paul’s counsel to the Romans about disputed matters applies here: “Let each man be fully assured in his own mind” (Romans 14:5, ASV). In a crisis, Christians of good faith may reach different conclusions about hard questions. What matters is that they act before God, in love, and with a clear conscience.

For Reflection

Most of us will never have to decide whether to lie to the secret police. But the question behind the ten Booms’ argument is not remote. How do we hold together the command to be truthful and the command to protect the vulnerable? And how do we disagree with fellow Christians about hard questions without breaking fellowship?

The midwives in Egypt did not write a treatise on ethics. They feared God more than Pharaoh, and they saved the children. That, at least, is clear. In an unjust world, fearing God more than the powers of the age will sometimes mean refusing to cooperate with evil, at real cost to ourselves. The ten Booms learned that lesson in a watch shop in Haarlem. They were still learning it when the Gestapo came.