The Hiding Place (13 page)

The other woman was a young, blonde, blue-eyed Dutch Jew with flawless false identity papers supplied by the Dutch national underground itself. The papers were so good and Annaliese looked so unlike the Nazi stereotype of a Jew, that she went freely in and out of the house, shopping and helping out at the school, giving herself out to be a friend of the family whose husband had died in the bombing of Rotterdam. Katrien and Annaliese could not understand any more than I could Peter's deliberately doing something that would attract the attention of the authorities.

I spent an anxious afternoon, tensing at the sound of every motor, for only the police, Germans, and NSBers had automobiles nowadays. But the time came to go home to the Beje and still nothing had happened.

I worried two more days, then decided either Peter had not been reported or that the Gestapo had more important things to occupy them. It was Wednesday morning just as Father and I were unlocking our workbenches that Peter's little sister Cocky burst into the shop.

“Opa! Tante Corrie! They came for Peter! They took him away!”

“Who? Where?”

But she didn't know and it was three days before the family learned that he had been taken to the federal prison in Amsterdam.

I
T WAS
7:55 in the evening, just a few minutes before the new curfew hour of 8:00. Peter had been in prison for two weeks. Father and Betsie and I were seated around the dining room table, Father replacing watches in their pockets and Betsie doing needlework, our big, black, slightly-Persian cat curled contentedly in her lap. A knock on the alley door made me glance in the window mirror. There in the bright spring twilight stood a woman. She carried a small suitcase and—odd for the time of year—wore a fur coat, gloves, and a heavy veil.

I ran down and opened the door. “Can I come in?” she asked. Her voice was high-pitched in fear.

“Of course.” I stepped back. The woman looked over her shoulder before moving into the little hallway.

“My name is Kleermaker. I'm a Jew.”

“How do you do?” I reached out to take her bag, but she held onto it. “Won't you come upstairs?”

Father and Betsie stood up as we entered the dining room. “Mrs. Kleermaker, my father and my sister.”

“I was about to make some tea!” cried Betsie. “You're just in time to join us!”

Father drew out a chair from the table and Mrs. Kleermaker sat down, still gripping the suitcase. The “tea” consisted of old leaves which had been crushed and reused so often they did little more than color the water. But Mrs. Kleermaker accepted it gratefully, plunging into the story of how her husband had been arrested some months before, her son gone into hiding. Yesterday the S.D.—the political police who worked under the Gestapo—had ordered her to close the family clothing store. She was afraid now to go back to the apartment above it. She had heard that we had befriended a man on this street. . . .

“In this household,” Father said, “God's people are always welcome.” “We have four empty beds upstairs, “ said Betsie. “Your problem will be choosing which one to sleep in!” Then to my astonishment she added, “First though, give me a hand with the tea things.”

I could hardly believe my ears. Betsie never let anyone help in her kitchen: “I'm just a fussy old maid,” she'd say.

But Mrs. Kleermaker had jumped to her feet with pathetic eagerness and was already stacking plates and cups. . . .

J
UST TWO NIGHTS
later the same scene was repeated. The time was again just before 8:00 on another bright May evening. Again there was a furtive knock at the side door. This time an elderly couple was standing outside.

“Come in!”

It was the same story: the same tight-clutched possessions, the same fearful glance and tentative tread. The story of neighbors arrested, the fear that tomorrow their turn would come.

That night after prayer-time the six of us faced our dilemma. “This location is too dangerous,” I told our three guests. “We're half a block from the main police headquarters. And yet I don't know where else to suggest.”

Clearly it was time to visit Willem again. So the next day I repeated the difficult trip to Hilversum. “Willem,” I said, “we have three Jews staying right at the Beje. Can you get places for them in the country?”

Willem pressed his fingers to his eyes and I noticed suddenly how much white was in his beard. “It's getting harder,” he said. “Harder every month. They're feeling the food shortage now even on the farms. I still have addresses, yes, a few. But they won't take anyone without a ration card.”

“Without a ration card! But, Jews aren't issued ration cards!”

“I know.” Willem turned to stare out the window. For the first time I wondered how he and Tine were feeding the elderly men and women in their care.

“I know,” he repeated. “And ration cards can't be counterfeited. They're changed too often and they're too easy to spot. Identity cards are different. I know several printers who do them. Of course you need a photographer.”

A photographer? Printers? What was Willem talking about? “Willem, if people need ration cards and there aren't any counterfeit ones, what do they do?”

Willem turned slowly from the window. He seemed to have forgotten me and my particular problem. “Ration cards?” He gestured vaguely. “You steal them.”

I stared at this Dutch Reformed clergyman. “Then, Willem, could you steal . . . I mean . . . could you get three stolen cards?”

“No, Corrie! I'm watched! Don't you understand that? Every move I make is watched!”

He put an arm around my shoulder and went on more kindly, “Even if I can continue working for a while, it will be far better for you to develop your own sources. The less connection with me—the less connection with anyone else—the better.”

Joggling home on the crowded train I turned Willem's words over and over in my mind.
Your own sources.
That sounded so—so professional. How was I going to find a source of stolen ration cards?

Who in the world did I know . . .

And at that moment a name appeared in my mind.

Fred Koornstra.

Fred was the man who used to read the electric meter at the Beje. The Koornstras had a retarded daughter, now a grown woman, who attend the “church” I had been conducting for the feeble-minded for some twenty years. And now Fred had a new job working for the Food Office. Wasn't it in the department where ration books were issued?

That evening after supper I bumped over the brick streets to the Koornstra house. The tires on my faithful old bicycle had finally given out and I had joined the hundreds clattering about town on metal wheel rims. Each bump reminded me jarringly of my fifty years.

Fred, a bald man with a military bearing, came to the door and stared at me blankly when I said I wanted to talk to him about the Sunday service. He invited me in, closed the door, and said, “Now Corrie, what is it you really came to see me about?”

Lord,
I prayed silently,
if it is not safe to confide in Fred, stop this
conversation now before it is too late.

“I must first tell you that we've had some unexpected company at the Beje. First it was a single woman, then a couple, when I got back this afternoon, another couple.” I paused for just an instant. “They are Jews.”

Fred's expression did not change.

“We can provide safe places for these people but they must provide something too. Ration cards.”

Fred's eyes smiled. “So. Now I know why you came here.”

“Fred, is there any way you can give out extra cards? More than you report?”

“None at all, Corrie. Those cards have to be accounted for a dozen ways. They're checked and double-checked.”

The hope that had begun to mount in me tumbled. But Fred was frowning.

“Unless—” he began.

“Unless?”

“Unless there should be a hold-up. The Food Office in Utrecht was robbed last month—but the men were caught.”

He was silent a while. “If it happened at noon,” he said slowly, “when just the record clerk and I are there . . . and if they found us tied and gagged . . .” He snapped his fingers. “And I know just the man who might do it! Do you remember the—”

“Don't!” I said, remembering Willem's warning. “Don't tell me who. And don't tell me how. Just get the cards if you possibly can.”

Fred stared at me a moment. “How many do you need?”

I opened my mouth to say, “Five.” But the number that unexpectedly and astonishingly came out instead was, “One hundred.”

W
HEN
F
RED OPENED
the door to me just a week later, I gasped at the sight of him. Both eyes were a greenish purple, his lower lip cut and swollen.

“My friend took very naturally to the part,” was all he would say.

But he had the cards. On the table in a brown manila envelope were one hundred passports to safety. Fred had already torn the “continuing coupon” from each one. This final coupon was presented at the Food Office the last day of each month in exchange for the next month's card. With these coupons Fred could “legally” continue to issue us one hundred cards.

We agreed that it would be risky for me to keep coming to his house each month. What if he were to come to the Beje instead, dressed in his old meterman uniform?

The meter in the Beje was in the back hall at the foot of the stairs. When I got home that afternoon, I pried up the tread of the bottom step, as Peter had done higher to hide the radio, and found a hollow space inside.
Peter would be proud of me
, I thought as I worked—and was flooded by a wave of lonesomeness for that brave and cocksure boy.
But even he would have to admit
, I concluded as I stepped back at last to admire the completed hideaway,
that a watchmaker's hand and
eye were worth something
. The hinge was hidden deep in the wood, the ancient riser undisturbed. I was ridiculously pleased with it.

We had our first test of the system on July 1. Fred was to come in through the shop as he always had, carrying the cards beneath his shirt. He would come at 5:30, when Betsie would have the back hall free of callers. To my horror at 5:25 the shop door opened and in stepped a policeman.

He was a tall man with close-cropped orange-red hair whom I knew by name—Rolf van Vliet—but little else. He had come to the Hundredth Birthday Party, but so had half the force. Certainly he was not one of Betsie's “regulars” for winter morning coffee.

Rolf had brought in a watch that needed cleaning, and he seemed in a mood to talk. My throat had gone dry, but Father chatted cheerfully as he took off the back of Rolf's watch and examined it. What were we going to do? There was no way to warn Fred Koornstra. Promptly at 5:30 the door of the shop opened and in he walked, dressed in his blue workclothes. It seemed to me that his chest was too thick by a foot at least.

With magnificent aplomb Fred nodded to Father, the policeman, and me. “Good evening.” Courteous but a little bored.

He strode through the door at the rear of the shop and shut it behind him. My ears strained to hear him lift the secret lid.
There!
Surely Rolf must have heard it too.

The door behind us opened again. So great was Fred's control that he had not ducked out the alleyway exit, but came strolling back through the shop.

“Good evening,” he said again.

“Evening.”

He reached the street door and was gone. We had got away with it this time, but somehow, someway, we were going to have to work out a warning system.

For meanwhile, in the weeks since Mrs. Kleermaker's unexpected visit, a great deal had happened at the Beje. Supplied with ration cards, Mrs. Kleermaker and the elderly couple and the next arrivals and the next had found homes in safer locations. But still the hunted people kept coming, and the needs were often more complicated than rations cards and addresses. If a Jewish woman became pregnant, where could she go to have her baby? If a Jew in hiding died, how could he be buried?

“Develop your own sources,” Willem had said. And from the moment Fred Koornstra's name had popped into my mind, an uncanny realization had been growing in me. We were friends with half of Haarlem! We knew nurses in the maternity hospital. We knew clerks in the Records Office. We knew someone in every business and service in the city.

We didn't know, of course, the political views of all these people. But—and here I felt a strange leaping of my heart—God did! My job was simply to follow His leading one step at a time, holding every decision up to Him in prayer. I knew I was not clever or subtle or sophisticated; if the Beje was becoming a meeting place for need and supply, it was through some strategy far higher than mine.

A few nights after Fred's first “meterman” visit the alley bell rang long after curfew. I sped downstairs expecting another sad and stammering refugee. Betsie and I had already made up beds for four new overnight guests that evening: a Jewish woman and her three small children.

But to my surprise, close against the wall of the dark alley, stood Kik. “Get your bicycle,” he ordered with his usual young abruptness. “And put on a sweater. I have some people I want you to meet.”

“Now? After curfew?” But I knew it was useless to ask questions. Kik's bicycle was tireless too, the wheel rims swathed in cloth. He wrapped mine also to keep down the clatter, and soon we were pedaling through the blacked-out streets of Haarlem at a speed that would have scared me even in daylight.

“Put a hand on my shoulder,” Kik whispered. “I know the way.”

We crossed dark side streets, crested bridges, wheeled round invisible corners. At last we crossed a broad canal and I knew we had reached the fashionable suburb of Aerdenhout.

We turned into a driveway beneath shadowy trees. To my astonishment, Kik picked up my bicycle and carried both his and mine up the front steps. A serving girl with starched white apron and ruffled cap opened the door. The entrance hall was jammed with bicycles.