The First Knock

“Deliver them that are carried away unto death, And those that are ready to be slain see that thou hold back.”

— Proverbs 24:11, ASV

How It Began

No one decided, on a particular day, to turn the Beje into a centre of the Dutch underground. It happened the way most rescue work in occupied Europe happened: one request at a time, each a little larger than the last, until the family found themselves deeply committed to something they had never planned.

The independent sources give the outline. The museum’s chronology says that Corrie and Betsie began helping Jews in 1941 and 1942, at first by finding them places to hide in other people’s homes. The Dutch women’s biographical lexicon says Corrie joined the organised resistance early in 1942. One account dates the first Jewish refugee at the Beje to May 1942, the month the yellow star was introduced. Hiding people in the house itself on a regular basis seems to have begun in the spring of 1943. The first permanent guest, a university student named Hans Poley, arrived in May 1943. That spring many Dutch students went into hiding rather than submit to the occupiers’ demands on the universities.

Corrie’s own accounts fill in the human detail. In her telling, the first refugees came to the door by word of mouth. They were Jews who had been warned that they were about to be picked up, or whose hiding places had become unsafe, and who had heard that the watchmaker’s family would help. The family took them in for a night or two, fed them, and then went looking for somewhere safer for them to go. It soon became clear that finding places was the hard part. It was relatively easy to shelter someone for a night. It was very hard to find a family willing to hide a stranger for months or years, knowing that discovery meant prison or death for the whole household.

A Knock at Night

Corrie’s 1945 book gives a glimpse of what one such night felt like. A Jewish couple, warned that they had been betrayed and that the police were coming, fled to the Beje with nothing, still grieving the possessions they had left behind. The family took them in, and Casper sat with them, because he was good at comforting frightened people. But the house was already full, and a young helper spent the evening walking the town in vain looking for another address. That night, Corrie wrote, the household took one more burden to God in its evening prayers. A place was found two days later.

A Clearing House

By 1943 the Beje had become more than a place where a few people were hidden. It was a hub. The Yad Vashem file on the family records that around eighty resistance workers from several groups visited the house regularly. Corrie described her little room upstairs as a kind of exchange, where the needs of one person were matched with the help another could give.

The needs were endless and varied. There were hiding places to find for children, papers to obtain, and messages to carry to distant provinces. On one occasion, she recorded, a group caring for hundreds of Jewish children asked her help in placing several children who needed psychiatric care, and she arranged for a doctor’s report so that they could be admitted to suitable institutions. It was work that called for a good memory, a wide acquaintance, and the organising skill she had learned running girls’ clubs.

The ten Booms were part of a much larger network. The most important national organisation helping people in hiding was the Landelijke Organisatie voor Hulp aan Onderduikers, the national organisation for help to people in hiding, usually called the LO. It supplied ration cards and papers, often obtained in raids on the distribution offices. The Beje was one node in a web of such groups. Corrie was one of hundreds of people doing similar work across the country, most of them never recognised.

Nollie’s Arrest

The danger was never far away. In 1943 Corrie’s sister Nollie, who lived with her husband and children in another part of Haarlem, was arrested for hiding a Jewish woman in her home. The Yad Vashem file confirms that Nollie was arrested, and that the police warned Corrie. Everyone at the Beje who was at risk moved to other addresses for a time.

The Hiding Place tells the story more fully, and makes it a moral drama. As Corrie tells it, Nollie had a principle of never telling a lie, even to the occupiers. When the police came and asked whether the woman in her house was Jewish, she said yes. The woman was taken. But she was later spirited away from the holding centre in Amsterdam by the underground, and Nollie herself was released after some weeks. In Corrie’s retelling, Nollie’s refusal to lie became a question that troubled the whole family. The next chapter will return to it. Here it is enough to say that this detailed version appears only in the 1971 book, not in the 1945 account, and that the independent record confirms only the arrest and the warning.

“Deliver Them That Are Carried Away unto Death”

The verse at the head of this chapter comes from the book of Proverbs: “Deliver them that are carried away unto death, And those that are ready to be slain see that thou hold back” (Proverbs 24:11, ASV). The next verse anticipates the excuse that most of us would make: “If thou sayest, Behold, we knew not this; Doth not he that weigheth the hearts consider it?” (Proverbs 24:12, ASV).

That is precisely the situation of occupied Europe in 1942 and 1943. People really were being carried away to death, and in the Netherlands they were carried away on regular trains from Westerbork. Many Dutch people could tell themselves that they did not know exactly where the trains went or what happened at the end of the line. But Proverbs does not accept that excuse. God, who weighs the heart, knows whether we did not know, or did not want to know.

The ten Booms knew enough. They did not know the full extent of the death camps, which few people in the West understood until later. But they knew that Jews were being hunted and taken away, and that they did not come back. They knew that Scripture told them to deliver those carried away to death. They acted on what they knew.

For Reflection

The ten Booms did not set out to join the resistance. They opened their door to one frightened person, and then another, and each act of help led to the next. By the time they realised how deeply they were involved, there was no going back.

That is often how God leads people into costly obedience. He rarely shows us the whole road at the beginning. He shows us the next person at the door. The question for most of us is not whether we would hide Jews from the Gestapo. It is whether we will open the door to the next person God sends, whoever they are, even when we cannot see where it will lead.