Entlassen

“Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers: The snare is broken, and we are escaped.”

— Psalm 124:7, ASV

Punishment for a Dead Woman

The day after Betsie died, a Sunday, the whole of Barracks 28 was punished with a disciplinary roll-call. One of the fourteen hundred women had failed to appear. The prisoners stood in the cold from half past five in the morning until noon while they were counted and recounted. At last the missing woman was found. She was a Polish prisoner, lying dead in her bunk. The whole barracks had been punished for the absence of a dead woman.

Five women, Corrie among them, became ill after that roll-call, with swollen legs and a wasting that grew worse day by day. Within ten days, Corrie wrote, the other four were dead.

“Ten Boom, Cornelia”

Three days after Betsie’s death, Corrie’s name was called at morning roll-call. She went forward expecting some new danger, and found instead that she was being discharged. Other prisoners told her how lucky she was. But first a doctor found her legs swollen with oedema, and since released prisoners had to leave the camp apparently healthy, she was sent to the hospital barracks until the swelling went down.

A Week in the Hospital Barracks

That week, Corrie wrote, was among the worst of her imprisonment. She lay among the gravely sick and wounded while she waited for clearance, and some of her fellow released prisoners were cruel to those around them. At night the sickest could not reach the icy latrine, and some did not survive trying. Corrie took on the work of helping them, and talked to them about Jesus as she did.

In one bed lay a young girl with a learning disability, desperately ill, crying for her mother. Her name was Oelie. Night by night Corrie spoke to her of the Saviour, and on the last night the girl was able to tell her, simply and in her own words, that Jesus loved her, had borne her punishment, and was preparing a place for her. They gave thanks together. Corrie wrote that she understood then why she had been kept that week. Her classes for disabled people in Haarlem had come to this.

Eight Hours

One night that week Corrie walked down the hospital corridor and saw that the windows were thick with frost and the water in the bucket was frozen solid. It was the first night of the bitter winter cold. She no longer had to stand at roll-call. In the morning she lay in her bunk and heard the rhythmic stamping of thousands of feet outside, as the prisoners stood for an hour and a half in the icy wind.

Weeks before, as she and Betsie walked to night roll-call, she had felt God promise her that she would be free before the severe cold came. She had told the other women at the Bible reading that they would all be freed before the cold. She had been wrong, she wrote. The promise was for her alone. God, she wrote, had saved her eight hours before the onset of severe cold.

The Gate

At last she was cleared. She was given clothes, a bundle of her own and Betsie’s belongings, and a discharge certificate, reproduced in her 1945 book, bearing her prisoner number, 66730. The date of her release is given in Dutch sources as 28 December 1944.

At the gate she learned that more of the Dutch women had died, among them one who had at first mocked the Bible readings and had later, by Betsie’s account, come to faith. Corrie walked out comforted, believing that even Betsie’s death had not been without fruit. Walking to the station through the snow, past women still being driven to their work, she felt how much grief she was leaving behind.

Home Through Germany

The journey home through a collapsing Germany took several days, with a sick young Dutch woman named Claire Prins as her companion. They had almost no food and no ration coupons. Corrie met both cruelty and kindness on the way: a welfare office that shut the door on her, a Red Cross nurse who fed her secretly, a soldier who treated her with contempt, and one family who gave the two women a meal and, for a few minutes, a glimpse of the decent Germany she had known before the war. At the border, at Nieuweschans, strangers helped the two exhausted women onto a Dutch train, and Corrie felt that at last she could begin to enjoy her freedom.

Groningen

In Groningen she went to a deaconess hospital. One of the nurses turned out to have been a leader in her own girls’ clubs, and did not at first recognise the gaunt woman in front of her. They fed her, bathed her, and found her clean clothes, and she slept in a real bed. When she heard music again for the first time, she wept. Her life, she wrote, had been given back to her as a gift.

Why Was She Released?

For the rest of her life, Corrie told audiences that she had been released through a clerical error. In The Hiding Place she says that she learned this much later. She also says that about a week after her release, all the women of her age group in the camp were sent to the gas chamber. The museum in Haarlem records that she learned of the “error” on a return visit to Ravensbrück, around 1959.

It is worth saying carefully what can and cannot be known. No document has been found showing that her release was a mistake. Her 1945 book, written within months, never calls it one. That book shows, as we have seen, that in 1944 the sisters expected their prison term to end at a fixed date. At Vught they wrote home asking whether it would end in September or December. Corrie was released alongside several other women who were also being discharged, some of whom had waited two months for medical clearance. That pattern fits an ordinary, if much delayed, release at the end of a sentence, at least as well as it fits a mistake. As for the gas chamber, the historical record shows that Ravensbrück’s gas chamber began operating in late January 1945. That was about a month after Corrie’s release, not a week. Selections of the sick, the weak, and older women for killing did take place in the last months of 1944 and early 1945, by transports and other means. Corrie herself had seen one of the transports leave.

So the honest conclusion is this. Corrie was discharged, for reasons never fully explained. Years later she was told it had been a clerical mistake, and she believed it. Whatever the cause, the danger she escaped was real. A sick woman of fifty-two with swollen legs had every reason to fear the weeks that followed at Ravensbrück, and within weeks the camp began gassing the sick and the old. Her conviction that God had brought her out of the snare does not depend on whether the paperwork was a mistake.

The psalm at the head of this chapter is a song of thanksgiving for exactly that kind of escape. “If it had not been Jehovah who was on our side … Then they had swallowed us up alive” (Psalm 124:2-3, ASV). And then: “Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers: The snare is broken, and we are escaped” (Psalm 124:7, ASV). The bird does not know how the snare came to break. It only knows that it is free.

For Reflection

Corrie came home to Haarlem in January 1945, alone, and walked into the Beje, still occupied Holland, with her father and sister gone. Watches left for repair, rugs, and books had been stolen. But her piano was still there, and her father’s portrait and his chair. She stood by her father’s bed and thought of him and Betsie seeing the answers to all their questions, and she dared to be happy.

She had been given her life back. What she would do with it is the subject of the rest of this book.