A Letter to the Informer

“but I say unto you, Love your enemies, and pray for them that persecute you”

— Matthew 5:44, ASV

Liberation

Corrie came home to an occupied country in its hardest winter. The winter of 1944 and 1945 is remembered in the Netherlands as the Hunger Winter. In the western provinces, still under German control, food and fuel ran out, and some twenty thousand people died of hunger and cold. In Haarlem the people cut down the trees in the parks for firewood. Corrie’s 1945 book mentions a great wild cherry in the Kenaupark, known as the bride of Haarlem, whose blossoms she and Betsie and their father had gone to see every spring. It was chopped down for fuel that winter. When she went to look for it, it was gone.

On 5 May 1945 the German forces in the Netherlands surrendered. Corrie described the first service in the liberated Grote Kerk, with the minute of silence for the dead and the national anthem that she could not bring herself to sing. She named them in her heart: her father, Betsie, someone she calls Piet, and so many others. She described the crowds, the orange flags, and the singing in the streets outside her window.

Shaved Heads

She also described something else, and it tells us a great deal about her. In the first days of freedom, crowds in Haarlem, as all over the liberated Netherlands, seized women accused of relationships with German soldiers, shaved their heads in public, and mocked them.

Corrie watched from the edge of the crowd, and she did not join in. One of the girls reminded her of the young women she had known in the camp, and she felt pity, not triumph. She understood why people wanted revenge after five years of humiliation. But she was sure this was not the right way, and she went home. She thanked God that the day of reckoning so many had feared had not been bloodier, and wondered whether prayer had restrained it.

A woman just out of Ravensbrück, whose father and sister had died at German hands, stood in the town square and pitied the women whose heads were being shaved. That pity was already the beginning of her life’s second work.

The Cost Counted

The war had cost the ten Boom family dearly. Casper had died in prison in March 1944 and Betsie in Ravensbrück in December. Willem’s son Kik, arrested separately in the summer of 1944 for resistance work, had been taken through a series of camps to Bergen-Belsen. The Dutch war-graves foundation gives his death there in the spring of 1945. Willem himself had been released soon after the raid, but he had caught an illness in prison, usually described as spinal tuberculosis. He died on 13 December 1946. Nollie survived, and lived until 1953.

The Beje had been emptied and plundered. The watches left for repair had been stolen, along with rugs and books. By her later account, she tried to take up the watch shop again, but her heart was no longer in it. She found herself restless, and she knew why. She was supposed to be telling people what she and Betsie had learned.

A Book in June

By June 1945, just weeks after liberation, her first book was in print in Amsterdam. It was the short, vivid account of prison and camp that this biography has drawn on throughout. It closes with a postlude that looks forward to a home for people coming back from the camps, in the spirit of Betsie’s plans. It was the beginning of her public witness.

A Letter

On 19 June 1945, Corrie wrote a letter to the man who, as she understood it, had betrayed her family to the Gestapo. The letter was published thirty years later, in 1975, in a collection of her prison letters. As published, it tells him that she had heard he was most probably the one who had betrayed them. She wrote that her father had died because of it, and her sister in the camp. She said that she had suffered too, and that she forgave him everything. She told him that she was praying for him, and that she was sending him a New Testament, because Jesus had borne his sins and could make him new.

This book has already noted how uncertain the informer’s identity and fate are. The later books name him as Jan Vogel. A Dutch local historian gives the name as H. van Vogel. The museum says that he was sentenced to death, came to faith shortly before his execution, and was executed. But no one of that name appears on the list of people executed under Dutch postwar justice, and many death sentences were commuted. The court records that could settle the question are not public. So we do not know what became of the man, whether the letter reached him, or how he answered. The story of his conversion before execution may be true, or it may have drifted into his story from someone else’s. What we have is the letter, and the date on it.

The date matters. In June 1945 the Netherlands was only a few weeks free. The hunger, grief, and anger were raw everywhere. The special courts for collaborators had barely begun their work. Corrie did not wait until the pain had faded, or until justice had been done, or until the man had asked for forgiveness. She wrote barely six months after Betsie’s death, and about five months after her own return from Ravensbrück.

“Love Your Enemies”

The command at the head of this chapter is perhaps the hardest thing Jesus ever said. “But I say unto you, Love your enemies, and pray for them that persecute you” (Matthew 5:44, ASV). He gave a reason: “that ye may be sons of your Father who is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good” (Matthew 5:45, ASV). We are to love our enemies because God loves his, and we were once among them. “While we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son” (Romans 5:10, ASV).

It is important to be clear about what Corrie’s letter did and did not do. It did not deny that the man had done wrong. It named what he had done, and what it had cost. Nor did it ask the Dutch courts to let him go. Forgiveness in Scripture is not the same as pretending no harm was done, or as abolishing justice. Paul, in the same passage where he tells the Romans never to avenge themselves, reminds them that vengeance belongs to God. The next chapter speaks of rulers who bear the sword (Romans 12:19; 13:4). What Corrie did was give up her own claim to repayment. She handed the debt to God, and wished the man well, which meant wishing that he would come to know Christ. “And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving each other, even as God also in Christ forgave you” (Ephesians 4:32, ASV).

She would struggle with forgiveness for the rest of her life, and she said so openly. The 1945 letter was not the end of the struggle. It was a decision made at the beginning, before she could have felt much of the forgiveness she wrote about. Later she liked to say that forgiveness is an act of the will, and that the feelings follow. The letter to the informer is the earliest evidence we have that she believed this, and acted on it.

For Reflection

In the first weeks after liberation, Corrie ten Boom did two things that most of her neighbours did not. She pitied the women whose heads were being shaved in the square, and she wrote to the man who had betrayed her family to tell him she forgave him.

Neither act undid the past or brought back her father or sister. But both were signs of a heart that had been changed in Ravensbrück, a heart that could not hate, as she had written in the camp. Most of us are called to forgive smaller wrongs than hers. Her example suggests that we should not wait until we feel like it. We can decide, and write the letter, and trust God to bring the feelings after.