The Beje

“Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: They shall prosper that love thee.”

— Psalm 122:6, ASV

A Narrow House on a Busy Street

In the old centre of Haarlem, a few steps from the great market square and the towering Grote Kerk of St. Bavo, runs a short shopping street called the Barteljorisstraat. At number 19 stands a narrow house, only one room wide at the front, that seems to have been squeezed between its neighbours. Behind the shopfront it climbs and turns in ways that no architect would plan: steep stairs, half-landings, rooms at odd levels, and passages that are said to join what were once two separate buildings. Parts of it are said to date from around 1600. The family who lived there for more than a century called it the Beje, pronounced roughly “bay-yay,” from the initials of the street name, B and J.

The house is famous now. It is a museum, visited by tens of thousands of people a year, and it is listed among the places that tell the story of the Netherlands in the official national canon of Dutch history. Visitors climb the narrow stairs to a small bedroom at the top of the house. They peer through a low opening under a cupboard shelf into a space about the width of a man’s shoulders, where six people once stood hidden while soldiers searched the rooms around them. But for most of its history the Beje was nothing more than what it looked like from the street: a watchmaker’s shop with a family living above it.

A Shop Founded in 1837

The shop was opened in 1837 by a watchmaker named Willem ten Boom, Corrie’s grandfather. According to the family’s records, now kept by the museum, he began with a capital of one hundred guilders. It was a modest start for a modest business. For more than a hundred years, three generations of ten Booms repaired and sold clocks and watches from that small front room. They wound the town’s clocks, regulated its pocket watches, and knew its people by the timepieces they carried.

A watchmaker’s trade suited that family. It is patient, precise work, done with small tools and a steady hand, and it depends entirely on trust. A customer leaves a precious object and must believe it will be returned whole and honestly repaired. The ten Booms kept that trust for a century. It would matter more than they could imagine when the time came for their neighbours to trust them with something far more precious than a watch.

A Prayer Begun in 1844

Family tradition, preserved by the museum, holds that in 1844 Willem ten Boom began a practice that would shape his descendants more than any other. He was moved by a sermon from a Haarlem minister, the Rev. Witteveen, on the verse at the head of this chapter: “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: They shall prosper that love thee” (Psalm 122:6, ASV). From then on, the story goes, he gathered a small group once a week to pray for the Jewish people and for the peace of Jerusalem. It was an unusual prayer for a Dutch Protestant shopkeeper in the 1840s. It was nearly a century before the modern state of Israel would exist, and Jerusalem was a small Ottoman town.

No document from 1844 survives to confirm the date, and the claim that the prayer continued for exactly a hundred years is a round, commemorative figure. But it fits well with what we know of the religious world Willem lived in. In the first half of the nineteenth century the Netherlands was stirred by a movement called the Réveil, the “awakening.” It was an evangelical revival among Dutch Protestants that stressed personal faith, Bible reading, prayer, and practical charity. One of its leading figures was the poet Isaac da Costa, a converted Jew from Amsterdam, and the Réveil was marked by a warm interest in the Jewish people and their place in God’s purposes. A pious watchmaker in Haarlem, moved by such preaching to pray each week for Jerusalem, would have been entirely at home in that world.

Whatever its exact beginnings, the prayer became part of the family’s identity. Corrie’s father grew up with it, and so did Corrie. When the Nazis occupied the Netherlands a century later and began to hunt down Dutch Jews, the ten Booms did not have to be persuaded that the Jews were their concern. They had been praying for them all their lives.

What the Psalm Promises

Psalm 122 is a song of pilgrims going up to Jerusalem for the festivals. “I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go unto the house of Jehovah” (Psalm 122:1, ASV). Its prayer for the city’s peace is also a prayer for its people. “For my brethren and companions’ sakes, I will now say, Peace be within thee” (Psalm 122:8, ASV). To pray for Jerusalem, in the psalmist’s sense, is to love the people of God and to long for their good.

The psalm adds a promise: “They shall prosper that love thee.” It is worth pausing over that promise in the light of what happened to the ten Booms. By most earthly measures, they did not prosper for loving the Jewish people. Casper died in prison. Betsie died in a concentration camp. A grandson, Kik, died in Bergen-Belsen. Casper’s son Willem died of an illness he caught in prison. The home itself was taken from them. If “prosper” means safety and comfort, the promise seems to have failed.

But Scripture’s idea of prosperity is larger than that. Jesus said, “Blessed are they that have been persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:10, ASV). The ten Booms’ love for the Jewish people cost them almost everything this world could take. It also gave them the thing Corrie spent the rest of her life describing: an experience of God’s faithfulness in the darkest place, so real that she could not stop talking about it. In the end their name was honoured in Jerusalem itself: Corrie, and later her father and Betsie, were recognised among the Righteous Among the Nations, and a tree was planted there for Corrie. That is a strange kind of prosperity, but it is not nothing.

The Return to Haarlem

Willem ten Boom’s son Casper, Corrie’s father, learned the watchmaking trade from him. As a young married man, Casper set up his own shop in Amsterdam, in a neighbourhood with many Jewish families. That is where Corrie was born. When Willem died in 1891, Casper brought his family back to Haarlem to take over the shop in the Barteljorisstraat. The move seems to have taken place in 1892, soon after Corrie’s birth. From then on, the Beje was Corrie’s home until the day of the raid, when she was nearly fifty-two.

The house they moved into was already crowded. Casper’s wife, Cor, had three sisters, and over the years all three came to live in the Beje with them. With five children, three aunts, the shop, the workroom, and a constant stream of visitors, the narrow house was always full. Corrie later remembered it as a place where there was always room for one more at the table. That habit of making room was learned long before anyone needed hiding.

The Clocks in the Hall

A small detail from Corrie’s earliest account gives the flavour of the house. On the day of the raid in February 1944, as her aged father was led out of the Beje for the last time, he paused in the hall beside the old Frisian clock that hung there and suggested that Corrie pull up its weights. She wondered whether he realised that he would not be home the next day to hear it strike.

It is a touching picture. An old watchmaker, arrested for hiding Jews, thinks as he leaves of the clock that needs winding. But it is also a picture of the whole ten Boom household. For a hundred years they had done the small faithful thing that was needed next. They wound the clocks and kept the shop, they prayed each week for Jerusalem, and they set another place at the table. They did not know that all of this was preparation. It was simply how they lived.

For Reflection

We often think of courage as something that appears suddenly in a crisis. The story of the Beje suggests otherwise. The courage the ten Booms showed in 1943 and 1944 had been growing for a century. It was rooted in a grandfather’s weekly prayer, in a trade built on trust, and in a crowded household that had learned to make room. When the crisis came, they did what they had always done, but at a much higher cost.

What are the small, repeated faithfulnesses in our own homes? What do we pray for every week, and whom do we make room for? We may never face a test like the ten Booms’ test. But if one comes, it will probably find us doing whatever we have practised for years.