The Bottle That Did Not Fail

“The jar of meal wasted not, neither did the cruse of oil fail, according to the word of Jehovah, which he spake by Elijah.”

— 1 Kings 17:16, ASV

A Small Brown Bottle

New arrivals at Ravensbrück had to give up their medicines, but Corrie was allowed to keep a small bottle of liquid vitamins, about half full, as a toilet article. In a camp where women were slowly starving, that was precious. She began giving a few drops each day to the women around her, and before long to many of them. By her account the bottle went on yielding drops for weeks, far longer than it should have, until the women took to calling it the widow’s cruse, after the jar of oil that did not fail in the days of Elijah. When a friend in the camp hospital secretly brought her a supply of vitamins to share, the bottle, she wrote, finally ran dry.

A Story Told in 1945

This is one of the most famous stories in Corrie’s life, and it is worth noting where it comes from. It is not a late addition to her testimony. It appears in full in her 1945 book, written within months of her release, under the heading “The Miracle of the Vitamins.” The essentials there are the same as in the later telling.

No one can now test the story. There is no independent witness, and readers will judge it according to what they believe about God’s dealings with his people. It is possible to imagine natural explanations. Perhaps each dose was smaller than Corrie realised, or the bottle held more than it seemed to. Corrie herself was not naive about such things. She simply told what happened, as she remembered it within a few months, and gave God the glory. Her readers have been free to do the same, or not.

What can be said is that she did not invent it later for effect. And whatever one concludes about the bottle, the more important miracle in the story is not in dispute. In Ravensbrück, where experienced prisoners warned newcomers that the way to survive was to look after oneself alone, a middle-aged Dutch woman spent her precious vitamins on thirty strangers every day.

The Widow’s Cruse

The story the women remembered is in the first book of Kings. During a famine, the prophet Elijah was sent to a widow in the town of Zarephath, outside Israel, who was gathering sticks to bake a last meal for herself and her son before they died. Elijah asked her to make him a small cake first, and promised that her flour and oil would not run out until the famine ended. She did as he asked. “The jar of meal wasted not, neither did the cruse of oil fail, according to the word of Jehovah, which he spake by Elijah” (1 Kings 17:16, ASV).

The point of the story is not only that God can multiply food. It is that the widow gave first, out of her poverty, and found that God was faithful. Jesus later pointed to her as an example of God’s care for outsiders (Luke 4:25-26). Corrie’s bottle belongs in that line. She gave the little she had, again and again, and found that there was enough.

The Ravensbrück That Destroys

Corrie was sharply aware of the camp’s moral danger. When the Dutch newcomers arrived, prisoners who had been there longer told them that the way to survive was to look after themselves alone. Corrie called that, borrowing a phrase from the Swedish novelist Selma Lagerlöf, “the Ravensbrück that destroys.”

She came to see selfishness as more insidious than cruelty. Cruelty was obvious; selfishness could pass for common sense. Hunger, she observed, can teach a person to pray, and it can also make her think only of herself. She did not exempt herself. She confessed that once, watching a small birthday feast for a dying girl, she caught herself praying that she would be offered some, and was ashamed.

The Ravensbrück That Revives

But Corrie also saw the opposite. There was selfishness in Ravensbrück, she wrote, but there was also love and self-sacrifice. That was the Ravensbrück that revived.

There was the friend from the hospital, whom Corrie never names in her book. She worked late into the night, fed the hungry and clothed the cold, washed patients no one else would touch, and kissed a dirty gypsy child whom everyone else avoided. There was an old woman who got up in the night to carry two heavy stools out to the roll-call ground, so that Betsie, too sick to stand, could sit. When Corrie asked whether they were not too heavy for her, she said that it was the only thing she could still do for others. There was a Dutch nurse who made charcoal from wood to treat the dysentery that was killing so many. And there was a midwife among the prisoners who brought babies into the world in that hell with the same care and joy she would have brought to any nursery.

“Therefore I Could Not Hate”

One more passage from the 1945 book foreshadows the rest of Corrie’s life. A Russian prisoner asked her why the Dutch women seemed so calm and controlled and yet so full of hatred. The question startled her, and she searched her own heart. She saw the cruelty of the regime as clearly as anyone, she wrote, and suffered from it daily. But behind it she saw her Saviour, with his arms open, and so hatred found no place in her. That was written in 1945. She would be tested on it, harder than she could imagine, in the years to come.

For Reflection

The story of the vitamin bottle is usually told as a story about a miracle, and perhaps it was one. But set in its context, it is also a story about a choice. In a place where survival seemed to depend on looking after oneself, Corrie chose to give away what she had. Whether God multiplied the drops or simply honoured the giving, the camp was a little less deadly because of it.

We live in a world that also tells us to look after ourselves first. The widow of Zarephath, the Dutch prisoner with her little bottle, and the old woman carrying stools through the dark all point another way. Give first, even out of poverty, and trust God for what comes after.