May 1940

“For if thou altogether holdest thy peace at this time, then will relief and deliverance arise to the Jews from another place, but thou and thy father’s house will perish: and who knoweth whether thou art not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?”

— Esther 4:14, ASV

Five Days in May

In the early hours of 10 May 1940, German forces crossed the Dutch border. The Netherlands had stayed neutral in the First World War and had hoped to stay neutral again. Its army was small and poorly equipped, and it fought bravely for five days. On 14 May German bombers destroyed the centre of Rotterdam, killing hundreds of civilians. The German command threatened to do the same to Utrecht and other cities, and on 15 May the Dutch army surrendered. Queen Wilhelmina and her government had already escaped to London, where they would lead a government in exile for the rest of the war. The country was placed under a German civilian administration headed by the Austrian Nazi Arthur Seyss-Inquart.

In Haarlem, as everywhere else, ordinary life went on at first more or less as before. Shops opened, trains ran, and the watchmaker’s shop in the Barteljorisstraat took in watches for repair. German soldiers appeared in the streets. For many Dutch people the first months of occupation were more humiliating than frightening. The occupiers were, at first, careful to appear correct and reasonable. They hoped to win the Dutch, whom Nazi ideology regarded as fellow “Germanic” people, to their side.

The Tightening

For the Jews of the Netherlands, the occupation was something else entirely. About 140,000 Jews lived in the country in 1940, most of them in Amsterdam. Over the next two years the German authorities isolated them step by step, with a thoroughness that the Dutch civil service, trained to obey lawful orders, often helped to carry out.

Jewish civil servants were dismissed in 1940. In early 1941 every Jew had to register, and from early 1942 Jews’ identity cards were stamped with a large J. In February 1941, after German police rounded up hundreds of young Jewish men in Amsterdam, workers in the city went on strike in protest. It was one of the very few mass public protests against the persecution of Jews anywhere in occupied Europe, and it was crushed within two days. Jews were then barred from parks, cinemas, cafés, libraries, public transport, and non-Jewish schools. Their businesses were taken over. In May 1942 they were ordered to wear a yellow six-pointed star on their clothing, with the word “Jood” in the centre.

In July 1942 the deportations began. Jews received notices to report for “labour service in Germany.” They were gathered at a transit camp at Westerbork in the north-east of the country, and from there nearly every Tuesday a train left for the east, most often to Auschwitz or Sobibor. By the end of the war more than 100,000 Dutch Jews had been murdered, about three in every four. It was one of the highest proportions of any country in Western Europe.

What Could an Old Watchmaker Do?

The ten Booms watched all this from their shop window. Casper was eighty in 1939. Betsie was in her mid-fifties, and not strong. Corrie was nearly fifty. They had no weapons, no political influence, no connections in government, and no money to speak of. What could they possibly do?

We have already seen one answer. When the yellow star was introduced in May 1942, Casper wanted to wear one himself. That would have been a public act of solidarity, and a foolish one, since it would have achieved nothing except his own arrest. His family talked him out of it. But the instinct behind it was right. The persecution of the Jews was not something happening to other people. It was happening to God’s ancient people, the people the family had prayed for every week for a century. It was happening to neighbours and customers whose watches hung on the hooks in the shop.

Corrie’s own turning point, as she described it in 1945, came in the home of a Jewish doctor. She was visiting him one evening, discussing something ordinary, when his small child called down the stairs to remind him that he had not come up to tuck her in. The doctor excused himself at once, and Corrie heard him upstairs romping with the children before they slept. As she sat waiting, she realised what could happen to this family at any moment. The Gestapo might come for these children in the night, and the father might be taken away. Then and there, she wrote, a resolution took shape in her heart: she would help the Jews wherever she could.

It is a small scene, and it has the ring of truth because it is so small. There was no vision or voice, and no dramatic call. A child asked to be tucked into bed, and a woman in a Dutch sitting room decided that she could not stand by.

“For Such a Time as This”

The verse at the head of this chapter comes from the book of Esther, which tells of an earlier attempt to destroy the Jewish people. A powerful official in the Persian empire, Haman, had persuaded the king to issue a decree for the killing of all the Jews in his realm. The queen, Esther, was herself secretly Jewish. Her cousin Mordecai urged her to go to the king and plead for her people. To go into the king’s presence uninvited meant risking death. Esther hesitated, and Mordecai sent her a message: “For if thou altogether holdest thy peace at this time, then will relief and deliverance arise to the Jews from another place, but thou and thy father’s house will perish: and who knoweth whether thou art not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” (Esther 4:14, ASV).

Two things in Mordecai’s words are worth holding together. The first is confidence in God’s purposes. If Esther refuses, deliverance will come “from another place.” God does not depend on any one person. The second is personal responsibility. God may not need Esther, but he has placed her where she is, and she will answer for what she does with her position. Esther replied with the words that have given courage to many since: “and if I perish, I perish” (Esther 4:16, ASV).

The ten Booms were not queens. Their position was a watch shop, a narrow house, and a wide circle of friends and customers. But the same logic applied. God did not need them in order to save his people. And yet he had placed them in Haarlem, in that house, at that time, with that century of prayer behind them. Who knew whether they had come to the Beje for such a time as this?

The Cost of Silence

It should be said honestly that most Dutch Christians did not do what the ten Booms did. The churches did protest publicly against the deportations in 1942, and some church leaders were courageous. Thousands of ordinary Dutch people hid Jews at great risk, and many of them paid with their lives. But the great majority kept their heads down and hoped the storm would pass. That was understandable. The penalties for helping Jews were severe, the risks to one’s own family were real, and the occupation lasted five long years. Most of us, if we are honest, would probably have done the same.

That is exactly why the ten Booms matter. They were not unusual people. They were an elderly watchmaker and his two middle-aged daughters, with a son and a married daughter nearby, all of them devout, ordinary, and a little old-fashioned. What set them apart was not strength or cleverness or resources. It was a settled conviction that the lives of their Jewish neighbours were their responsibility before God, and a willingness to act on it when the time came.

For Reflection

The occupation of the Netherlands did not arrive with a single dramatic choice. It crept in step by step, and at each step it was easier to comply than to resist. The measures against the Jews came the same way, one decree at a time, each only a little worse than the last.

That is often how evil works. It rarely asks us to do something monstrous all at once. It asks us to accept one small injustice, then another, and to keep quiet. The question Mordecai put to Esther is one every Christian faces sooner or later, in some form: if we hold our peace at this time, what will we answer for? And who knows whether we have been placed where we are for such a time as this?