Barracks 28

“in everything give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus to you-ward.”

— 1 Thessalonians 5:18, ASV

Heads Up

Ravensbrück, about eighty kilometres north of Berlin, was the largest concentration camp for women in the Nazi system. Over the six years of its existence well over a hundred thousand women passed through its gates, from every country in Europe. Tens of thousands died there, of hunger, disease, exhaustion, beatings, medical experiments, and, in the final months, in a gas chamber. When Corrie and Betsie arrived in September 1944, the camp was already hugely overcrowded, and growing worse by the week as prisoners were brought in from camps further east.

The Dutch women came through the gate in ranks, still in their overalls from Vught, and some of them were singing. Corrie was astonished that they could. But the first women they passed were skeletons reaching out for bread, and a Dutch prisoner who had been there longer gave her a description of the camp so bleak that she refused at first to believe it. It turned out to be true.

Nights in the Open

For the first nights the new arrivals had no shelter at all, first in a crowded tent full of vermin and then on the open ground. The sisters cut Betsie’s hair short because of the lice. Lying together under one blanket, they comforted each other with the psalms, and Betsie reminded Corrie that God gives his beloved sleep (Psalm 127:2). Then it began to rain.

The Bible Under the Dress

After two nights in the open the newcomers were processed. Everything they had brought, clothes, blankets and food, was taken, and they came out wearing a thin dress and wooden shoes. The sisters prayed first for the strength to give it all up. Then Corrie found a way to keep what mattered most. She hid their woollen underwear and her small Bible in a corner during the showers, put them on again under her dress, and walked past the guards who were searching every prisoner. She was not searched. She believed all her life that God had hidden her, and she wrote that after that she could face even Ravensbrück without fear.

One does not have to share every detail of her interpretation to be moved by the result. Two middle-aged Dutch women entered one of the worst camps in Europe carrying a Bible, and it would be read aloud, day after day, to hundreds of women.

Barracks 28

In the quarantine barracks where they spent their first weeks, Corrie measured the bunks with her hand, as she had taught her club girls to do, and found them about seventy centimetres wide, with several women to each pair. Then the sisters were moved to Barracks 28. It was meant for a few hundred prisoners. Corrie later wrote that by the end it held some fourteen hundred. Windows were broken and stuffed with rags. The bunks, three tiers high, were missing slats, and when the women climbed in, some of the upper ones collapsed, showering straw and filth on those below. Two women, and sometimes more, slept in each narrow bunk. The air was foul, and the place was alive with lice. Barracks 28 was their home for the rest of Betsie’s life.

Here the sisters began the work that Corrie came to believe was the reason they had been sent to Ravensbrück. With their hidden Bible they held Bible readings every day, sometimes twice. Corrie preached, and Betsie prayed and comforted. Corrie wrote that on one Sunday she preached nine times, crawling along the top tier of bunks under the ceiling to groups of young women who had asked her to come. Dutch, Belgian, French, Polish, and Russian women listened, Protestants and Catholics together. When the sisters could not share a language with a Polish or Russian woman, they said only the name of Jesus, and her face would light up. There would be no separate Protestant and Catholic areas in heaven, Corrie reflected, so why should there be any in Ravensbrück?

The Fleas

The best-known story about Barracks 28 is not in Corrie’s 1945 account. It appears in The Hiding Place, published in 1971.

As it is told there, the barracks was infested with fleas, and Corrie complained bitterly. Betsie reminded her of Paul’s command, “in everything give thanks” (1 Thessalonians 5:18, ASV), and insisted that they thank God even for the fleas. Corrie thought this absurd, but joined in. Later they noticed that the guards never came into their part of the barracks, and so the Bible readings could go on undisturbed. They learned why. The guards would not enter because of the fleas.

The 1945 book has a related detail. It says the barracks was full of lice, and that women from other barracks were reluctant to visit because of them. It also says that as the camp became overcrowded, supervision in the barracks grew slack, and the Bible readings could continue without interruption. It does not mention thanking God for the fleas. It is possible that Corrie remembered the fleas and Betsie’s thanksgiving clearly and simply did not include them in 1945. It is also possible that the story took its sharp shape in the retelling. Either way, the lesson it carries was certainly Betsie’s. Her whole life in the camp, as the 1945 book describes it, was an exercise in giving thanks in everything.

Appealing Higher

One more small scene from the 1945 book shows Betsie’s way of seeing things. The women in the quarantine barracks were being driven out to roll-call again and again, all day long, until they were close to collapse. Someone said that one of them must get through to the camp commander and complain. The other women asked Betsie what she thought. No, she said. It would do no good. They must appeal higher, to the Weltführer, the leader of the world. He alone could help them. The women learned later that the commander was a brutal man, and that complaining to him would have been dangerous. They also learned that the endless roll-calls had been deliberately designed to break their spirits.

Roll-Call

Life in Ravensbrück was organised around roll-call. At half past four in the morning, often earlier, tens of thousands of women were driven out into the camp street and made to stand in ranks, in rain, snow, and freezing wind, while they were counted and counted again. It went on for hours. Anyone who moved or collapsed might be beaten. The sick and the dying had to be there too. On one terrible morning the women stood outside for three quarters of an hour after roll-call because the barracks door was locked. A guard beat a woman who tried to get in through a window. A disabled girl who soiled herself was savagely beaten, and an old woman collapsed. Betsie, leaning on Corrie, whispered that this was hell. Corrie whispered back God’s promise never to leave or forsake them (Hebrews 13:5). Then the rising sun caught the clouds from below and turned them red. Corrie thought that the light of the Saviour could shine on them even there, so that they would reflect it. She did not understand it, she wrote. Believing is not seeing.

Red Cards and Sick Transports

The sisters worked for a time in a Siemens factory outside the camp, hauling iron plates in the cold. Betsie was too weak for it. Corrie’s 1945 account tells how, when she was selected for a transport to a munitions factory, a woman doctor helped her stay by pretending that she needed new glasses. Soon afterwards both sisters were placed in a knitting detail, which allowed them to stay in the barracks. That gave Corrie time for the Bible readings.

They were also issued red cards, which marked them as unfit for heavy work. The next morning Corrie heard that when the camp became overcrowded, women with red cards were killed. She also saw, one foggy morning at roll-call, open trucks drawn up outside the hospital barracks. Nurses helped a hundred sick women onto them: the disabled, the incurable, and some who were simply troublesome. The trucks drove away into the mist. Everyone knew there was no return from those transports. The historical record confirms what she saw. In the last months of 1944 and early 1945, Ravensbrück was killing its sick and weak, first by such transports and by selections, and from January 1945 in a gas chamber.

For Reflection

The command at the head of this chapter is one of the hardest in Scripture: “in everything give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus to you-ward” (1 Thessalonians 5:18, ASV). Paul does not say “for everything,” as though evil itself were a gift. He says “in everything,” in every circumstance, however dark.

Betsie ten Boom gave thanks in Barracks 28. Whatever exactly she said about the fleas, she thanked God in a place designed to break human beings. She did not deny the evil around her, and she did not let it have the last word. Most of us will never be tested as she was. But we can practise, in our smaller trials, the discipline of looking for God’s hand in everything, and giving thanks.