“Father Was Released”

“When my father and my mother forsake me, Then Jehovah will take me up.”

— Psalm 27:10, ASV

The Last Glimpse

From Haarlem the prisoners were driven to the German security offices in The Hague, and then to the prison at Scheveningen on the coast. The Dutch came to call it the Oranjehotel, the Orange Hotel, because so many loyal patriots were held there. Casper was so frail that the guards had to carry him. Corrie remembered an officer calling him the worst of them all, because he spoke of nothing but Jesus and the Queen. Inside the gate, father and daughter exchanged a blessing, and she looked back at him once. She never saw him again.

The Dutch war-graves foundation records that Casper ten Boom died in The Hague on 9 March 1944, nine days after his arrest. The accounts of where he died differ. The foundation’s records mention the Scheveningen prison and a clinic in the district of Loosduinen. Corrie was later told that his mind had become confused, and that he died in a hospital corridor. His fellow prisoners reported that he stayed brave to the end, saying that if he were freed he would go straight back to helping the Jews. He was buried in a pauper’s grave. After the war his remains were moved to the national cemetery of honour at Loenen.

His children, several of them in the same prison, were not told. Relatives who went to The Hague to ask after him eventually learned, after being passed from office to office, that he had already been buried.

A Martyr’s Death

When the news reached Betsie, she wrote home that she had always expected their father to die a martyr’s death rather than in his bed. Casper had once said that he would count it an honour to give his life for God’s ancient people. Corrie’s 1945 book notes simply that the honour had now been given him. A grandchild’s note to Betsie in prison put the family’s comfort in his own words: the best had come for him at last.

The psalm at the head of this chapter was written for moments like this. “When my father and my mother forsake me, Then Jehovah will take me up” (Psalm 27:10, ASV). Casper had not forsaken his daughters. He had been taken from them, and they had not been allowed to be with him when he died. The psalmist’s promise is that there is a Father who is never taken away. The same psalm begins, “Jehovah is my light and my salvation; Whom shall I fear?” (Psalm 27:1, ASV), and it contains a line that Corrie would come to know well: “For in the day of trouble he will keep me secretly in his pavilion: In the covert of his tabernacle will he hide me” (Psalm 27:5, ASV).

A Crowded Cell

Corrie spent her first days in a crowded cell with women of very different backgrounds, still sick with the influenza she had caught before the raid. In the second week she was taken under guard to a doctor, who diagnosed pleurisy. A nurse there quietly asked how she could help, and managed to slip Corrie some small booklets of the Gospels. Corrie never forgot the kindness.

Solitary

Soon afterwards she was moved into solitary confinement, and there she stayed for weeks. Her 1945 account of that time is honest about fear and loneliness. The cell was cold and grey, she was ill, and at first she longed for any human face. The guards were hard, and punished her for asking about her father and for singing. She went on singing anyway.

Small things kept her going. She befriended a line of ants on the floor and fed them crumbs. She embroidered her prison clothes with threads from a coloured towel sent from home. When she was finally let out alone into the prison garden, she felt at first overwhelmed by colour, and then by the menace of the place. A verse steadied her: “And Enoch walked with God” (Genesis 5:24, ASV). She was not walking alone either.

A Letter from Nollie

At last a letter arrived from Nollie, who had been released. It told her, gently, that their father had lived only ten days after his arrest. Corrie wept for the first time since the raid. The guard she called for offered little comfort, only the suggestion that it was her own fault for breaking the law. Corrie recalled the proverb: “The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel” (Proverbs 12:10, ASV).

Her letters home in the following weeks show her working through her grief. She wrote that her father’s death left a great emptiness, and that the love and care she had given him would find another outlet.

The Lieutenant

Some weeks into her imprisonment Corrie was interrogated. Hearings were the terror of the prison, and she had been rehearsed for one by the young people of the underground, who had even questioned her in the night for practice. She gave away no names.

The officer, whom The Hiding Place names as Lieutenant Rahms, surprised her by his courtesy. When he learned of her classes for disabled people, he asked whether such work was not a waste of time. Corrie recognised the question as the voice of the regime, and answered that God’s love reaches especially the weak and despised, and that in God’s eyes such a person might be worth more than either of them. The next day, she recorded, he told her he had not slept for thinking about what she had said, and confided the darkness of his own life, with a family in a bombed German city whose fate he did not know. Corrie told him that there was no darkness Jesus could not dispel.

The statement he drew up, as she remembered it, recorded that she meant to go on helping anyone who needed it, “regardless of their race or creed,” because she was following Christ’s command to love God and her neighbour. We have it only as she remembered it, written down within a year.

Betsie’s questioning lasted several days, and each session, by the officer’s leave, ended in prayer. Nearly everyone arrested with them was released after questioning. Corrie, Betsie, and one of the young men remained.

The Watches Are Safe

In The Hiding Place Corrie tells how she received a message in prison, hidden in a parcel, that all the watches in her cupboard were safe. She understood at once. The six people in the hiding place had not been found. The message brought her great joy. She could not know then what we know now: that not all of the six would survive the war.

For Reflection

The weeks in solitary confinement at Scheveningen were, in some ways, the loneliest of Corrie’s life. She had lost her home and her father, and she was separated from her sister. She was sick, cold, and alone. Yet her 1945 account also records a closeness to God she had never known before. Never before, she wrote, had fellowship with him been so near.

Many people who have gone through suffering say something similar. God does not always remove the loneliness. But he comes into it. “When my father and my mother forsake me, Then Jehovah will take me up.”