Vught

“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

Together Again

On 6 June 1944, the day Allied forces landed in Normandy, the Germans began emptying the prison at Scheveningen. Rumours of invasion had run through the cells all day. The prisoners were ordered to put on their own clothes and pack their belongings. After hours of waiting they were loaded into buses and vans, and taken to a small station outside The Hague. There, among the crowd of prisoners, Corrie saw Betsie for the first time in more than three months.

They pushed through the crowd until they were in the same railway carriage, and sat side by side, holding hands, hardly needing to speak. One of the other women teased them as “the love-birds.” They had lived together, Corrie wrote, for more than fifty years in almost perfect harmony, and now, after months apart, they were together again. Whatever came next, they would face it side by side.

The train arrived at four in the morning at Vught, near ‘s-Hertogenbosch in the south of the Netherlands. It was a concentration camp the Germans called Herzogenbusch, the only SS concentration camp built on Dutch soil. The prisoners were driven through the darkness by soldiers with levelled guns, under searchlights, through a wood.

Answered Prayer

Corrie’s account of the first day at Vught records a small deliverance she always counted as answered prayer. The women were being made to undress and shower in front of watching soldiers, and the two sisters held each other and prayed to be spared. Before their turn came, the procedure was halted, and when they were processed days later it was done privately. God answers prayers, Corrie wrote.

A Society for Not Grumbling

The women from Scheveningen were first kept apart from the main camp, in a single large barracks where they sat all day at long tables with nothing to do. Boredom set in, and with it complaining and backbiting. Betsie had an idea. She founded a society, as the Dutch always seem to do, with simple rules. Members promised to do their best not to grumble or complain, not to speak ill of anyone, and to speak encouragingly to others. They also resolved to obey the orders of the prisoners put in charge of them. A small group met daily to pray that the atmosphere would improve.

It is a very Betsie idea: small, practical, gentle, and rooted in prayer. It reflects Paul’s counsel to the Philippians: “Do all things without murmurings and questionings; that ye may become blameless and harmless, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom ye are seen as lights in the world” (Philippians 2:14-15, ASV).

A Release That Was Not

One day the sisters were called out and given forms that other prisoners said meant release. They gave away their few possessions, said goodbye, and collected their watches and rings from the camp office, already imagining the journey home. Instead they were kept waiting for hours at the camp exit, among men who warned them that they were more likely bound for the punishment cells, and beside a Jewish woman who had just been singled out and made to stand facing the wall. Corrie prayed for God’s ancient people. Betsie, whose heart was beating irregularly, said that evidently the Lord still had work for them there, and began to sing.

In the end the threat passed. They were not put in the bunkers, and that evening they were marched instead into the main camp at Vught, where a young prisoner welcomed them to her table.

The Watchmaker at the Workbench

In the main camp most of the women worked for the Philips electronics company, which ran workshops at Vught using prison labour. Corrie was lined up with other older women to be inspected by the men in charge of the work crews. It felt, she wrote, like a slave market. She thought of Jesus’ words to Peter: “another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not” (John 21:18, ASV). She had always been independent. Now she was being humbled, and she told herself that she was “in training.”

She was sent to a workshop where the foreman, a fellow prisoner who had been a headmaster, ran the room with courtesy and care. At first she measured small glass rods. When the foreman noticed her interest in the more intricate work and learned that she was a watchmaker, he moved her to testing relay switches for radios. It was precise work, she wrote, but not as interesting as repairing watches. She worked eleven hours a day. When officers approached, someone at the window would call out a code word, and books, letters, and handwork would vanish. Betsie worked in the sewing room.

It was in some ways, Corrie admitted, much more bearable than solitary confinement. There was fresh air and sunlight, the great skies of Brabant, and friendship with other prisoners, some of them remarkable people. But it was still a concentration camp. Men were beaten to death. Prisoners were called out of the ranks at roll-call and shot a few minutes later. Corrie heard the volleys from the bunkers at night, and learned to pray then for the bereaved and for those who might be next.

A Church on the Grass

On Sunday afternoons the prisoners had some free time. On the first Sunday a girl invited the sisters to a worship service on a patch of grass between two barracks, where a woman was reading from the Bible. Corrie was asked to lead the prayer of thanksgiving, and the next week to lead the whole service. She began a discussion group in the evenings, as she used to do in her girls’ clubs, to lift the women’s thinking beyond the barbed wire.

The questions she prepared have survived in her 1945 book, and they are worth noting. They asked what the prisoners’ responsibility would be after the camp: to people who returned to find their families gone, to those who had lost their homes, to those whose minds had been broken, and to young people who would struggle to return to normal life. And one question asked whether they had any responsibilities towards the defeated enemy. In the summer of 1944, in a Nazi concentration camp, Corrie ten Boom was already asking her fellow prisoners how they would treat the Germans after the war. The seed of her life’s later work was already there.

She admitted that as a discussion it was a failure. The women held very different views, and they did not understand one another. But it had lifted their thinking beyond the wire.

How Long?

Letters smuggled out of Vught show the sisters trying to calculate when they would be free. Other prisoners said that six months at Vught was the usual term. Corrie wondered whether their time would end on 1 September, or on 6 September if the weeks at Scheveningen were counted, or on 8 December. These letters matter for the later story of her release. They show that in 1944 the sisters expected their imprisonment to end at a definite date. They did not expect to be held indefinitely.

In the same letters Corrie was frank about herself. Some of the women around her were heroines, she wrote, who had lost everything and made a conscious sacrifice of it. She was not like that. She longed terribly for home and comfort. That she had held out at all was only by God’s grace.

A Hundred and Eighty Shots

By late August 1944 the Allied armies were approaching the Netherlands, and rumours of liberation swept the camp. The prisoners counted the kilometres. Then, in the first days of September, as the front drew near, the Germans began to empty Vught and to kill many of the male prisoners before they could be freed.

Corrie described one of those days. The women crowded at the fence separating them from the men’s camp and watched as men were called out of the ranks and marched out of the gate. The women waited. Then they heard the shots. Corrie counted one hundred and eighty. Every shot, she wrote, meant the death of a good Dutchman, and every woman there wondered whether her husband, fiancé, or son was among them.

Corrie laid her head on Betsie’s shoulder and asked God why he allowed it. Betsie’s face, she noticed, was serene, as though the horror could not reach her. Corrie led her away and poured out her grief to God. She felt that she was told she could not, and need not, carry the sorrows of the whole world herself. She should bring them to him and leave them there. Peace came.

Her 1945 book records the image she found for it that night, an image she would repeat for the rest of her life. Everything in life looks like the back of a piece of embroidery, she wrote, a meaningless tangle of threads. But that is the underside. One day we will see the right side, and be amazed and thankful. The image is often associated with her later preaching and with a poem she liked to quote. It first appears here, at Vught, on the night of the executions.

East

Within days Vught was being evacuated. The sisters knew now that this did not mean freedom. They saw cartloads of files going to the furnaces, and the sick being carried to the train. On about 4 September 1944 they were loaded into a goods wagon with some eighty other women, twice as many as it was meant to hold. There were no windows and almost no air. Some of the women pried holes in the walls with knives until fresh air came through. At one point the train was fired on, in what turned out to be a failed rescue attempt by the resistance. Then it crossed the border into Germany. Someone in another wagon began to sing the old song of farewell to the Netherlands.

The journey lasted three days and three nights. Corrie was ill and tormented by thirst. At last the train stopped at Fürstenberg, a small town north of Berlin, and the women stumbled out and were marched along the shore of a lake. Corrie collapsed on the grass. Looking out over the lake to a church spire and the woods beyond, she thought of the twenty-third psalm: green pastures, still waters, and the valley of the shadow of death. Then they walked on to the gates of Ravensbrück.

For Reflection

The verse at the head of this chapter does not promise that God’s people will avoid the waters and the fire. It promises that he will be with them as they pass through. “When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee … when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned” (Isaiah 43:2, ASV).

Vught was a place of both, of small mercies and great horrors. It had friendship at the workbench and executions beyond the wire, a church service on the grass and the sound of volleys in the night. Corrie did not pretend to understand it. What she learned there was the embroidery lesson. We see only the underside now, and one day we will see the pattern. In the meantime, we are not asked to carry the whole world’s grief, only to bring it to the One who can.