28 February 1944

“He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High Shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of Jehovah, He is my refuge and my fortress; My God, in whom I trust.”

— Psalm 91:1-2, ASV

Monday Morning

On Monday, 28 February 1944, Corrie ten Boom was in bed with influenza. Downstairs her brother Willem was leading a Bible study, and the house was busier than usual. When the alarm sounded, four Jewish guests and two young resistance workers carrying incriminating papers ran past her bed into the hiding place. Corrie pushed her own records in after them, hid the panel, and was back in bed when the raiders reached the top of the stairs.

The raid was carried out by the Sicherheitsdienst, the German security police, with officers of the Haarlem police. That much is confirmed by the Dutch war-graves foundation and the museum.

“Where Is Your Secret Room?”

Corrie was arrested at once. When she refused to reveal the hiding place, she was told the house would simply be watched until whoever was inside gave themselves up. Downstairs, everyone who had come to the Bible study, and everyone who arrived during the day, was detained as they walked in. The house had become a trap.

The officer in charge, whom Corrie later called Kapteyn, questioned her in the shop and struck her repeatedly across the face. When she cried out to Jesus to protect her, he threatened her life, and then stopped. Betsie was beaten too. Afterwards, Corrie recorded, Betsie said that she pitied the man who had done it. The house was searched and the family’s savings and some valuables were taken. But the searchers did not find the Angels’ Crib.

“Jesus Is Victor”

For hours the prisoners waited in the dining room in silence. The telephone kept ringing with warnings from friends, and Corrie had to answer under a guard’s eye. Before long the line went dead, and the warning began to spread.

On the fireplace hung a small wooden plaque with the words “Jesus is Victor.” Betsie drew Corrie’s attention to it, and their father said aloud that it was true. It looked, Corrie thought, as though the Gestapo had won, and they had not. She did not understand what was happening, and she knew that believing is not the same as understanding.

When one of the Germans, noticing a Bible, asked the old man what it said about the government, Casper answered with Peter’s words about fearing God and honouring the Queen. As he was led out, he thought of the old clock in the hall that needed winding.

A Night at the Police Station

The prisoners were taken to the police station in the Smedestraat. How many were arrested that day is uncertain. The Dutch war-graves foundation and a regional history give twenty-one. The museum, Yad Vashem, and the Holocaust encyclopedia say more than thirty. Corrie counted thirty-five at the police station. The difference probably comes from people who walked into the trap later in the day. It is safest to say that some two or three dozen people were taken.

At the station a large mattress was put on the floor for the family. Casper lay down on it with all his children and one grandson around him: Betsie, Corrie, Nollie, Willem, and Nollie’s son Peter. Betsie remarked that she had once seen this very scene in a dream, their father and all his children lying on a mattress, without understanding it. Before they slept, Casper gathered them round him. At his request Willem read the ninety-first Psalm, and then the old man prayed. It was the last time, Corrie wrote, that she would hear her father pray.

The psalm Willem read that night is the one at the head of this chapter. “He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High Shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of Jehovah, He is my refuge and my fortress; My God, in whom I trust” (Psalm 91:1-2, ASV). It goes on to promise that God will deliver his people from the snare of the fowler, and that they need not be afraid of the terror by night. It is a psalm of protection, and the family read it on the night that protection seemed to have failed. They were not naive. Casper was eighty-four and ill, and they all knew what prison might mean for him. But the psalm’s deepest promise is not that nothing bad will happen. It is that God himself is the refuge. “He shall call upon me, and I will answer him; I will be with him in trouble” (Psalm 91:15, ASV).

Corrie also recorded that one of the men arrested with them was in fact a planted informer, and that they were warned in time.

The next day the prisoners were loaded onto a bus for Scheveningen, the seaside suburb of The Hague where the Germans held political prisoners. Corrie remembered the people of Haarlem standing silently along the street as they left, many of them in tears. The town, she wrote, loved her father and called him its grand old man. The sun shone on the Grote Kerk. It was, she thought, a bright last greeting from Haarlem.

Two and a Half Days in the Wall

Behind the false wall in Corrie’s bedroom, six people stood in the dark. There were four Jews and two resistance workers. The Germans were sure they were in the house, and left guards inside to wait for them to come out. The six stood from Monday afternoon until Wednesday. The hiding place had no room to lie down properly, very little air, and almost nothing to eat or drink.

On Wednesday, 1 March, policemen sympathetic to the resistance came on duty at the house. The museum names two of them, Jan Overzet and Theo Ederveen. Word had reached them, through the underground, of the people trapped in the wall, and when it was safe they let them out. The two resistance workers left over the neighbouring roofs. The Jews waited until dark and then left by a side door. Corrie’s 1945 account adds a detail she must have heard later. Eusie was so glad to be outside that he raised his arms in the middle of the street and chanted a Jewish prayer.

In prison, as she later told it in The Hiding Place, Corrie received a smuggled message that all the watches in her cupboard were safe. She understood. The hiding place had held.

What Became of the Six

Many retellings of Corrie’s story stop there, as though all six people were saved. The truth is harder, and they deserve to have it told.

The Jewish memorial register of the Netherlands records that Mary van Itallie, the travel agent who had taught Italian at the Beje, was arrested again within days at the new address where she had been placed. She was sent to the transit camp at Westerbork and on 23 March 1944 put on a train to Auschwitz. She died there on 1 May 1944. The Yad Vashem file’s statement that the Jews from the hiding place remained hidden for the rest of the war is not correct.

Meijer Mossel, the cantor Eusie, went into hiding in Friesland in the north. He too was eventually betrayed and arrested, and reached Westerbork in January 1945. By then the trains to the east had stopped, and he survived. After the war he became a well-known cantor. The museum says that one of the Jews and one of the resistance workers did not survive. The Dutch war-graves foundation says that three of the six survived. The sources do not agree, and the full fate of every one of the six has not been established.

Who Betrayed Them?

The question of the informer belongs here too, and it also needs careful telling.

The Hiding Place tells how on the morning of the raid a man came to the shop and asked Corrie for money to bribe the police to release his wife, who had been arrested for hiding Jews. She gave him money. In the 1971 book he is the informer, and he is named as Jan Vogel. But this scene does not appear in Corrie’s 1945 account, which does not say how the house was betrayed. A Dutch local historian gives the name differently, as H. van Vogel. The museum says the informer was sentenced to death after the war and executed. But the list of people executed under Dutch postwar special justice contains no one of that name. Many death sentences were commuted, and without the court records, which are not public, his fate cannot be settled. What is documented is that Corrie wrote to him in June 1945 to tell him she forgave him. That letter belongs to a later chapter.

For Reflection

On 28 February 1944 the Beje’s hiding place did what it was built to do. The house did not protect those who built it. Casper, Betsie, Corrie, and their friends went to prison, and not everyone who stood in the wall that day survived the war.

That is a sober ending to the story of the hiding place, and it is the true one. Psalm 91 does not promise that believers will be spared all harm. The people who read it on the police-station mattress that night would soon learn how much harm could come. But it promises that God will be with his people in trouble. The rest of Corrie’s story is about how that promise held when every human hiding place had failed.