The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom Page B

consulted a list in front of him. “Ten Boom, Casper, Ten Boom, Elisabeth, at the same address. Do either of them own a radio?”
    I had known from childhood that the earth opened and the heavens rained fire upon liars, but I met his gaze.
    â€œNo.”
    Only as I walked out of the building did I begin to tremble. Not because for the first time in my life I had told a conscious lie. But because it had been so dreadfully easy.
    But we had saved our radio. Every night Betsie or I would remove the stair tread and crouch over the radio, the volume barely audible, while the other one thumped the piano in Tante Jans’s room as hard as she could, to hear the news from England. And at first the news over the radio and the news in our captive press was much the same. The German offensive was everywhere victorious. Month after month the Free Dutch broadcasts could only urge us to wait, to have courage, to believe in the counter-offensive which must surely some day be mounted.
    The Germans had repaired the bomb damage to the airport and were using it now as a base for air raids against England. Night after night we lay in bed listening to the growl of engines heading west. Occasionally English planes retaliated and then the German fighters might intercept them right over Haarlem.
    One night I tossed for an hour while dogfights raged overhead, streaking my patch of sky with fire. At last I heard Betsie stirring in the kitchen and ran down to join her.
    She was making tea. She brought it into the dining room where we had covered the windows with heavy black paper and set out the best cups. Somewhere in the night there was an explosion; the dishes in the cupboard rattled. For an hour we sipped our tea and talked, until the sound of planes died away and the sky was silent. I said goodnight to Betsie at the door to Tante Jans’s rooms and groped my way up the dark stairs to my own. The fiery light was gone from the sky. I felt for my bed: there was the pillow. Then in the darkness my hand closed over something hard. Sharp too! I felt blood trickle along a finger.
    It was a jagged piece of metal, ten inches long.
    â€œBetsie!”
    I raced down the stairs with the shrapnel shard in my hand. We went back to the dining room and stared at it in the light while Betsie bandaged my hand. “On your pillow,” she kept saying.
    â€œBetsie, if I hadn’t heard you in the kitchen—”
    But Betsie put a finger on my mouth. “Don’t say it, Corrie! There are no ‘ifs’ in God’s world. And no places that are safer than other places. The center of His will is our only safety—Oh Corrie, let us pray that we may always know it!”
    T HE TRUE HORROR of occupation came over us only slowly. During the first year of German rule, there were only minor attacks on Jews in Holland. A rock through the window of a Jewish-owned store. An ugly word scrawled on the wall of a synagogue. It was as though they were trying us, testing the temper of the country. How many Dutchmen would go along with them?
    And the answer, to our shame, was many. The National Socialist Bond, the quisling organization of Holland, grew larger and bolder with each month of occupation. Some joined the NSB simply for the benefits: more food, more clothing coupons, the best jobs and housing. But others became NSBers out of conviction. Nazism was a disease to which the Dutch, too, were susceptible, and those with an anti-Semitic bias fell sick of it first.
    On our daily walk, Father and I saw the symptoms spread. A sign in a shop window: jews will not be served. At the entrance to a public park: no jews. On the door of the library. In front of restaurants, theaters, even the concert hall whose alley we knew so much better than its seats.
    A synagogue burned down and the fire trucks came. But only to keep the flames from spreading to the buildings on either side.
    One noon as Father and I followed our familiar route, the sidewalks were