"The Baker's Secret" by Stephen Kiernan

The small town of Vergers lies a short mile from the Normandy coast in France. It has been under the fist of the German occupying army for four years. Jews have been shot or taken away. Men 15 years and older have been sent to Germany, to work in munitions factories. The people remaining survive as best they can – a few in the Resistance, a few collaborators, most just trying to survive.

Emmanuelle is 22 years gold and has become the town baker. She had been apprenticed the the long-time baker, but he was Jewish, and she and the other townspeople had seen his shop wrecked and the man shot in the head. She is required to bake the baguettes for the German army commandant, 12 loaves picked up every morning like clockwork, the flour provided by the Germans. But Emmanuelle has a secret; she grinds straw into powder and adds it to the dough. Doing so allows her to have 14 loaves instead of 12. She uses the extra two loaves to help people stay alive.

But her secret is bigger than two loaves of bread. She’s able to build an underground economy, supplying food needs and occasionally other things – a light bulb, a little gasoline. Without hope for liberation, Emmanuelle is the pivot of hope for keeping people alive.

And it’s June 5, 1944. The day before the D-Day invasion. The last day Emmanuelle will bake bread for the German commandant. The last day many of the Germans and the people she knows in her town will be alive.

The Baker’s Secret by Stephen Kiernan is Emmanuelle’s story, and what a story he tells. It’s filled with memorable characters like Odette the café owner, The Goat who secretly hides ammunition, Monkey Boy who climbs trees, Emmanuelle’s grandmother Meme, and the church priest who walks a fine line between collaboration and resistance, but can always be relied upon to show up with his wheelbarrow to bury the dead. 

Stephen Kiernan

Kiernan, a former journalist, is the author of two previous novels,The Curiosity (2014) and The Hummingbird (2016), and two non-fiction books, Last Rights: Rescuing the End of Life from the Medical System (2007) and Authentic Patriotism: Restoring America’s Founding Ideals through Selfless Action (2010). His work has won more than 40 awards. He lives in Vermont.

We’ve seen the story of Nazi occupation and the story of D-Day told over and over again. What we haven’t seen as much is the story of the people in French villages and towns who experienced both. Kiernan points out in the afterword that some 4,400 Allied soldiers died on the first day of the invasion, with some 9,387 eventually buried in military cemeteries in France. But it’s estimated that more than 50,000 French civilians died in the invasion and the days that followed.

The Baker’s Secret tells their story.

Top photograph: A beach in Normandy by Philippe D. via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Hiding Place: It is All of Our Stories

We were living in Houston in the mid-1970s when I first heard of Corrie ten Boom and the story she had to tell in The Hiding Place. The book had been recently published, and a movie of the same title was released in 1975. It starred Jeannette Clift as Corrie, Julie Harris as her sister Betsie, and Arthur O’Connell as their father. I read the book but didn’t see the movie.

Forty years later, the story has stood the test of time. It is still a good story. It is still a heartbreaking story. And it is a story that keeps begging the question, what would I do in their situation? What question the story does not beg is could this happen here?

The answer to the second question is obvious – yes, it or something like it could happen here. Never underestimate the darkness of the human heart. We saw the same human lunge toward evil on Sept. 11, 2001. We see it in Syria and Iraq and Libya. We saw it in the killing fields of Cambodia, and with the tribal warfare in Rwanda, and in Bosnia. But this isn’t a problem limited to radical Islam or people in faraway countries. The same desire for authoritarian power and control can be seen all too close to home, and it isn’t an impulse limited only to governments.

In the Epilogue to the book, we read that Corrie and her family learn that her teenaged nephew Kik died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. He was caught helping an American parachutist escape to the Dutch coast. In 1959, Corrie herself returned to the Ravensbruck camp, where she was imprisoned and where Betsie died. And she learned something both familiar and profound. A Nazi guard or commandant or functionary had mistakenly released her late in 1944. She was supposed to have been killed with all of the other women her age the following week, but someone had made a clerical error.

A bureaucratic mistake.

Or the hand of God.

Perhaps both.

We often hear people ask, if there is a God, how could he allow so much evil in the world? The real, and perhaps surprising, question should be, why isn’t there more evil than what we see? My answer to that age-old question is simple: if there was no God, if there is no God, then our world at best would look much like what Corrie ten Boom experienced during World War II. That impulse to evil exists within each of us.

What also exists within each of us is the impulse to reach for God.

The Hiding Place is the two of two sisters in a small city in Holland, caught up in a gigantic turn of history. Because of their faith in God, they embark upon a course of helping Jews hide and escape from the Nazis. That course eventually leads to their arrest. Betsie comes through the story as something of a saint, the believer giving thanks in all things, in all circumstances. Corrie questions and kicks against what happens. She is the most recognizable of the two, the most familiar, at least to me. She gets angry at God, she shakes her fist at him, she refuses to believe that she should give thanks for fleas, of all things.

Corrie survives the horror of imprisonment and the concentration camp. She survived with a purpose. She knew what God would have her do. And her path started with forgiveness, as difficult as it was.

In so many ways, the story of Corrie ten Boom is all of our stories. Perhaps not as extreme, bit it is – and can be – our stories.


Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we've been reading The Hiding Place. This concludes the discussion. To see more posts, please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

Photograph: A scene from the 1975 movie The Hiding Place, with Julie Harris as Betsie (left) and Jeannette Clift as Corrie (right).

The Hiding Place: Entlassen!

In The Hiding Place, Corrie ten Boom describes a few of the last things her sister Betsie tells her before she dies in the hospital at the Ravensbruck concentration camp. One is that there will be a place with tall windows, for people to come and heal from the spiritual and psychological wounds of the war. And it’s clear that Betsie is not only talking about the people who suffered at the hands of the Nazis, but the Nazis themselves.

Another is that they will be free by the New Year – January of 1945. In a place like Ravensbruck, that likely would have seemed laughable to Corrie. The only way out from Ravensbruck seemed to be sent further east – to the death camps in Poland, although the prisoners had little firsthand knowledge of those.

Sometime after Betsie’s death, Corrie hears her voice shouted by a guard at the door of the barracks. She hurries after her as fast as she can, hobbling with swollen feet. She sites on a bench by a camp official with a few other women. One by one they’re called to the official, who looks at papers and says the word they likely thought they’d never hear.

Entlassen!

Corrie understood the German word for “released.” They were inexplicably being released. In Corrie’s case, the official looks at her feet and sends her first to the hospital; sick prisoners cannot be released. After a few days, he feet less swollen, she’s given a skirt and blouse and the articles taken from her when she arrived, including her mother’s ring (amazing, given the penchant the Nazis had for looting and stealing art and jewelry).

One thing she leaves behind – the small copy of the Scriptures in Dutch she and Betsie had used to read to the women and for worship services. She gives the treasured Bible to a young woman from Holland.

The train takes her first to Berlin, which has been heavily bombed. She finally gets a train for the Dutch border, but the journey takes days – so many delays because of torn up tracks and the movements of troop and supply trains. The last part of her journey to Haarlem is by truck – the train track is destroyed.

She finds family; and she returns to her home above the watch shop. She is a very different Corrie than the one who was arrested some 10 months before. She has seen death and destruction. She has seen people killed. She has seen brutality and what humans are indeed capable of. She has experienced the death of her beloved sister and father. Yes, it is a very different Corrie who returns to Haarlem, one who faith has been refined by fire.

Led by Sarah Salter and Jason Stasyszen, we’ve been discussing The Hiding Place. To see more posts on this chapter, “The Three Visions,” please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines. This is the last chapter in the book; there is an epilogue. I’ll have a few final thoughts next week.

Photograph by Lilla Frerichs via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Hiding Place: What the Fleas Did

Fleas were a constant pest in the barracks at Ravensbruck, the women’s concentration camp some 56 miles north of Berlin where Corrie and Betsie ten Boom were imprisoned in 1944. As described in The Hiding Place, Betsie had already reminded Corrie that they were to give thanks in all things. Including flea infestations in a camp whose hallmarks were deprivation, brutality, and death.  

Betsie’s health had always been problematic, and the conditions of prison confinement and being forced to be part of work gangs worsened her health problems. Even as she became sicker, her peace and spirit seemed to radiate hope and encouragement to Corrie and the other prisoners.

It is during one camp hospital stay that Betsie learns the reason for one of Ravensbruck’s few blessings – the guards stayed out of their large women’s barracks. Because the guards would not come in, Betsie and Corrie had been unimpeded in sharing the gospel and even conducting not one but two worship services.

The reason was the fleas, Betsie learned. The guards would not come into the barracks because they were afraid of picking up fleas.

And Corrie thinks of Betsie’s admonition to give thanks in all things, including fleas.

We often experience difficult, even terrible situations, without knowing why, without any rhyme or reason. It seems that life – or God – is simply toying with us to see how much we can stand. For Corrie and Betsie ten Boom, having to deal with fleas along with all the other horrors of a Nazi prison camp might seem over the top. Fleas, in addition to brutality and beatings, the smell of awful latrines, the hopelessness hanging over the entire site? Fleas, too, Lord?

In this case, there was a purpose. The fleas effectively kept the Nazi prison guards out, and allowed the gospel and worship to spread.

In a place as terrible as Ravensbruck, those fleas were the conduit for hope.

And Corrie will need hope. Betsie’s health worsens. She’s eventually taken back to the hospital. And the day comes when Corrie slips into the hospital through the bathroom and sees her sister’s body stacked against the wall.

She touches Betsie’s face for the last time.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Hiding Place. To see more posts on this chapter, “The Blue Sweater,” please visit Sarah at Reading Between the Lines.

Photograph: A view of the barracks of the Ravensbruck concentration camp. The reality of the camp was not what this photograph might suggest.

The Hiding Place: Thanking God for Fleas

We’ve reached the point in The Hiding Place where Corrie ten Boom and her sister Betsie have been arrested for helping Jews hide and escape the Nazis in World War II Haarlem, sent first to a jail in Holland and a few months later to their first prison camp. From there, they are herded with other prisoners on a train, traveling south for more than three days into Nazi Germany. This was a dreaded fate – no one had heard of anyone returning from Germany.

Finally, they arrive. And discover they have been sent to Ravensbruck, a women’s prison camp whose horrors had reached back to Holland.

Ravensbruck was some 56 miles north of Berlin. Over the course of its existence, it housed an estimated 130,000 to 150,000 women prisoners from various countries in Europe, including Germany. No one knows for sure how many died there, but estimates run as high as 96,000. Many were transported to death camps in Poland; more than 2,000 were killed in gas chambers on site. Approximately 15,000 women survived and were liberated at the end of the war.

Corrie and Betsie’s first resting place there is a large tent with no sides, inhabited by too many women prisoners and lice. They are eventually assigned to a barracks, sharing a bed with five other women. Corrie still has a small Dutch Bible given to her earlier and her sister’s blue sweater, which she makes Betsie wear for warmth.

Terrible food, terrible latrine-like bathrooms, lice, fleas, and brutality from the guards (including the women guards). That was daily existence in Ravensbruck. When Betsie is taken to the camp hospital, Corrie sneaks in through the bathroom, where she finds bodies stacked against the wall.

At one point, Betsie reminds Corrie that they are to give thanks to God in all things, including Ravensbruck. They hold hands and pray their thanks – for being together, for having the Bible with them, and for the crowded conditions in the barracks that more women might hear the gospel.

And then Betsie tells her to give thanks for the fleas. Corrie can’t do it. “Betsie,” she says, “there’s no way even God could make me grateful for a flea.”

But Betsie insists. And the two sisters give thanks for the fleas.

I can’t imagine it. Right there, in an absolutely horrible, death-filled environment, the two ten Boom sisters give thanks.

For fleas.

Their attitude makes other notice. Gradually, the ten Booms become the center of a widening circle of the gospel.

And they give thanks for fleas.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Hiding Place. To see more posts on this chapter, “Ravensbruck,” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

Photograph: Female inmates working at Ravensbruck in 1939. Photo courtesy Wikimedia; 

"Bundesarchiv Bild 183-1985-0417-15, Ravensbrück, Konzentrationslager" by Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-1985-0417-15 / CC-BY-SA 3.0. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 de via Commons. 

The Hiding Place: What Do You See When You See Evil?

What do you see when you see a homeless person sleeping in a cardboard box in a city park?

What do you see when you look at a co-worker who has been saying untrue things about you in office gossip?

What do you see when your boss at work tells you “no raise this year” because Human Resources has decided you’ve topped out in your pay grade?

What do you see when you come face to face with human evil – a child murderer or molester, someone who has fired a gun into a house and killed a 9-year-old girl doing her school homework, a man who walks up to two television journalists doing a story and opens fire, an Islamic State member who swings a sword and beheads a Westerner, or a Christian, or a gay man, or a woman who works with refugees?

In The Hiding Place, Corrie ten Boom tells what happens when she and her sister Betsie, as long with numerous other women prisoners, are ordered one day to gather their belongings and be prepared to evacuate. They are transported, first by truck and then by train, to a prison work camp called Vught.

It is there that, by chance, Corrie learns the name of the Dutch man who betrayed their family to the Nazis.

The man whose action led to months of imprisonment.

The man responsible for her father dying only 10 days after his arrest.

The man whose betrayals led to the arrest and deaths of even more people than the ten Booms knew.

Corrie hears his name, and she sees anger and hate. “Fires of flame seemed to leap around that name in my heart,” she writes. “I thought of Father’s final hours, alone in a hospital corridor. Of the underground work so abruptly halted. And I knew that if Jan Vogel stood in front of me now, I could kill him.”

In her situation, any of us would have loved to have our hands around Jan Vogel’s neck.

Corrie lets her anger stew. It consumes her. She can’t pray. She tastes only bile and bitterness.

Finally, she asks her sister Betsie why she can handle this information so calmly and quietly, and doesn’t she feel anything about this man. Betsie, who had suffered everything Corrie had suffered, says this: “Oh, yes, Corrie! Terribly! I’ve felt for him ever since I knew—and pray for him whenever his name comes into my mind. How he must be suffering!”

Corrie ponders that response in silence. And then realizes what Betsie was telling her – that she, Corrie, was as guilty as Jan Vogel, “for I had murdered him with my heart and with my tongue.”

Corrie had looked at Jan Vogel and seen an evil, murderous villain. And he was. But he was also a lost soul, a man for whose sins Jesus had also died.

Rather than judge, perhaps we should follow Betsie ten Boom’s example and pray.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Hiding Place. To see more posts on this chapter, “Vught,” please visit Sarah at Living Between theLines.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Aili and Andres McConnon’s “Road to Valor”

He was a boy who came from a relatively poor family living in a small town near Florence. He was able to go to a school in Florence, but had to buy a bicycle for transportation. He worked and saved his money, and was finally able to buy a fourth-hand bike.

It changed his life. The boy became Gino Bartali, one of the great cycling legends. In Road to Valor: A True Story of World War II Italy, the Nazis, and the Cyclist Who Inspired a Nation, Aili and Andres McConnon tell Bartali’s story.

Actually, they tell three interlocking stories.

The first is Gino Bartali the great cyclist, who won the Tour de France twice – with each win separated by a decade – a record for time in-between wins that’s still unbroken.

The second is Gino Bartali the Italian resistance messenger, who at the behest of the Archbishop of Florence smuggled fake identity documents all over northern Italy, hidden in his bicycle. What he did saved the lives of hundreds of Jews. He even hid a Jewish family from the Nazis in his basement in Florence.

The third is Gino Bartali, the man whose impossible victory in a Tour de France stage in the Alps helped to stop exploding violence in Italy between the Communist and Christian Democratic parties. As one observer pointed out, men who had been trying to kill each other suddenly turned their attention northward, and celebrated Bartali’s victory together. Bartali had been 21 minutes behind the Tour leader, and in one stage erased the difference. He powered on to win the 1948 Tour, despite all of sports journalists and cycling fans who considered him a “washed-up old man” at 33.

The story of helping the Italian resistance and saving the lives of Jews was learned only fairly recently. Bartali, who died in 2000 at the age of 85, never talked about until late in life, when he told his oldest son some of what happened. Others, especially the Jewish families he helped to save, corroborated his story. His cycling around Tuscany, Umbria and other Italian locales could always be explained as “training.” But secreted in the tubes of his bicycle were false identity papers, to help protect Jews and also to help many escape.

The McConnons tell a riveting, wonderful story. Bartali wasn’t a saint; he had his human frailties like the rest of us. But he had great courage, and he acted on that courage – to save lives, and to win an impossible race. Even if you’re not a cycling fan, Road to Valor is an inspiring, moving account of a terrible time in human history.

Photograph: Gino Bartali cycling in a road race.

The Hiding Place: The Unexpected Kindness of the Gospel

You’re imprisoned for months. You know your elderly father has died, only 10 days after the family was arrested. Your sister is somewhere in the same prison. A few relatives have been released. Your crime: hiding Jews from the Nazi occupation forces in Holland, and helping them escape.

The time arrives, months after your arrest, for your interrogation.

In The Hiding Place, Corrie ten Boom describes the walk to the Lieutenant’s office. She’s fearful – who wouldn’t be? – and she rehearses various possibilities in her mind. When she arrives, she’s greeted with polite kindness. The lieutenant who is to interrogate her builds a fire and offers tea. She is wary; she knows his kindness may be a strategy to get her to divulge information that would endanger others and seal her own fate.

Unexpectedly, she finds herself sharing the gospel with him. He sends her back to her cell. She’s afraid she had only created more trouble for herself.

When he calls her back, they talk. The Nazi lieutenant says he feels he’s in a prison himself. His family in Germany lives in a  town that has just been bombed, and he doesn’t know if they’re unharmed or not. He is weighed down by the things he has done, the acts he has committed on behalf of the occupation forces.

Corrie tells him that God’s light can shine into the darkest of places. He listens. When he sends her back to her cell, he tells her to walk slowly down one corridor.

She does exactly that. She sees a door has been left open. She knows in her heart what she will see as she passes by – her beloved sister Betsie. Betsie doesn’t see her; she has her back to the cell door. But others in the cell see Corrie. And Corrie can see just enough to see that the cell looks like a home.

For the first time in months, her spirits soar.

Later, when it’s time for the reading of her father’s will, the lieutenant decides to follow Dutch law, and assemble all the family members. Corrie not only gets to see and touch Betsie, but her brother Willem and his wife Nollie as well. She and Betsie are not released, but they do have this precious moment as a family.

This is a blessing, coming from the hands of a Nazi lieutenant who has done evil things for his country and government. Kindness and blessings can sometimes come from the most unexpected of places.

Who would think to share the gospel with an official who is not only going to interrogate you, but holds life and death authority over you? As Corrie describes it, she didn’t plan to do this; it simply happened. And the sharing of the gospel resulted in a small miracle.

All of us have faced times and situations where the sharing of the gospel would make us look foolish at best and potentially cause serious problems at worst. Perhaps we should remember the example of Corrie ten Boom, who blurted out the gospel unexpectedly, and received an unexpected blessing in return.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Hiding Place. To see more posts on this chapter, “The Lieutenant,” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

Photograph by Anny Cecilia Walter via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Hiding Place: Misery, Tedium, and Kindness

As Corrie ten Boom describes in The Hiding Place, after their arrest in Haarlem in February 1944, members of the ten Boom family are trucked to Gestapo headquarters in The Hague. From there, they’re taken to nearby Scheveningen, the site of what had been the Dutch federal penitentiary but is not a prison used by the Nazis. The women are divided from the men, and she sees her elderly father sitting in a chair, brought by a guard out of respect for his age.

It is the last time Corrie will see her father.

She’s separated from her sister Betsie, other family members and anyone else from Haarlem. Corrie is still sick, trying to recover from the flu.

There in Scheveningen, she discovers the misery of prison life, not the least of which is the tedium. She also discovers occasional kindness, such as when she’s transported to a doctor and a nurse slips her some soap and four gospel tracts.

She will learn through the prison grapevine that, of all the ten Boom family members arrested, only she, Betsie and their father remain in prison; the others have been released. She will also learn that the “watches in her closet” – that is, the Jews who were hiding in the concealed room at the ten Boom clock shop – were all able to escape. They were not found by the Gestapo. She will receive a message from Betsie: “God is good.” And she will find out that her father died 10 days after the arrest.

She reads her gospel tracts. And Corrie discovers something.

The gospels are stories of – initially – a defeat. Jesus is arrested, interrogated, beaten, forced to carry his cross to Golgotha, and then crucified. For his disciples, the spiritual and emotional darkness that followed Jesus’ death lasted for three days. Most if not all of them were in hiding. It appeared as if Jesus’ ministry had been destroyed, and they were all marked men, without a leader, a teacher, or anyone to guide them.

What Corrie discovered from the gospel accounts was surprisingly simple, and something she might not have realized before she was in prison.

Defeat wasn’t the end.

Defeat was the beginning.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading the hiding Place. To see more posts on this chapter, “Scheveningen,” please visit Sarah at LivingBetween the Lines.

Photograph of a prison cell bathroom by Ken Kistler via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission. The cell occupied by Corrie ten Boom at Scheveningen wasn’t as well lit or as well furnished as this one.

“Thou art my hiding place and my shield”

Corrie ten Boom is lying in bed, trying to recover from the flu. It is the morning of Feb. 28, 1944, in Haarlem in The Netherlands. In what seems a fevered dream, she keeps hearing a buzzing, then becomes aware of people rushing past her. Groggily, she realizes that the Jews hiding in her family’s shop and home are rushing to conceal themselves in the hidden room.

The Gestapo is at the door.

The day long feared, long worried over, longed hoped that it would never happen, is here.

Corrie, her sister Betsie, their elderly father, their other sister and brother, and a grandchild are arrested. People are still concealed in the hidden room.

Both Corrie and her sister are physically struck, several times, the Gestapo captain demanding to know where the secret room is. Neither sister admits there is such a room. They will not betray the people they’ve been trying to help.

A succession of fellow conspirators arrive at the shop to report the latest arrests, not realizing they are walking into the Gestapo’s arms. Corrie has to listen to each walk into arrest. Later at the police station, she learns that a total of 35 people have been arrested because of the raid on the ten Boom shop.

If you’ve ever read the classic Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, you’ll know how the history of Christianity can read like a long list of persecutions, imprisonments, massacres, murders, and torture. The early church knew it; various sects knew it; both Protestants and Catholics knew it during the extended period of the religious wars in Europe; missionaries have known it; the dwindling number of Christians in the Middle East know it; the church in China knows it. Christianity is not about the prosperity gospel; it is not about the “enlargement of territory” a la  The Prayer of Jabez.

The church in Americas has been largely shielded from these trials in the last century. And it’s easy to forget that Christianity is not about worship styles and building programs.

Christianity is about the cross.

As she describes in The Hiding Place, Corrie had packed a prison bag, with her Bible, some clothes and toilet things, vitamins and aspirin. She had leaned it against the entrance to the concealed room. There it stayed, Corrie daring not to reach for it because it give away the room’s entrance. She left the bag to help protect the people hidden behind it.

Corrie and her family are taken away, her prison bag left behind. She has nothing with her, no medicines, no clothes, no Bible.

All she has is her faith and God.

The ten Booms now face the experience of the cross.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Hiding Place. To see more posts on this chapter, “The Raid,” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

Photograph by Anne Lowe via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission. 

The Hiding Place: Living with Fear

I was in third grade. Our class had an elderly, rather strict teacher who was nearing retirement and not prone to any kind of disobedience. We had received our textbooks, and there was one, a reader, which the teacher said could only be used in the classroom – it couldn’t leave the room.

A few months later, at the end of the school day, I hurriedly packed my knapsack (the forerunner to the backpack); the teacher had kept us late and the carpool was waiting, with a driver who was as much a stickler for being on time as my teacher was for obedience. When I got home, I discovered I had done the unthinkable: I had accidentally grabbed the reader with my other books and shoved it into my bag.

I was terrified.

An adult would shrug it off. An 8-year-old child scared to death of his teacher began to imagine all kinds of dire consequences.

What if she had checked our desks after we had left? What if she did a spot check of our knapsacks and book bags as we arrived the next morning (she did that occasionally)?

And it was a Friday – with an entire weekend of worry awaiting me before I returned to school on Monday.

That evening, my parents went to a local production of the musical The Music Man and took me with them. I was nearly sick with apprehension. I couldn’t stop thinking about the book. I had said nothing to my parents.

It was experience – a short one, to be sure – of living with fear.

In The Hiding Place, Corrie ten Boom describes what it was like to live with fear for years. During World War II, she and her family were helping Jews escape from Nazi-occupied Haarlem in The Netherlands; in some cases, they had Jews living with them and hidden within their combination home and watch shop. A secret compartment had been constructed to allow access to hiding in the event of a raid. And the possibility of that happening grew with each passing day and month, as the underground network the ten Booms were connected to grew and spread.

Mealtimes were especially worrisome, ten Boom says. People walking by the shop could see right through the windows. A white curtain helped, but she only felt secure at night, when the blackout curtains were in place.

Friends and relatives who knew what the ten Booms were doing could be and often were arrested. And the police would come in, forcing the family to develop tactics that were delaying without looking like delaying.

Exposure and arrest could come at any time.

Still, the ten Booms didn’t stop what they were doing. They believed they were doing God’s work, protecting the defenseless and the people who were God’s original chosen. Their hearts and their faith continued to more than balance their fears.

The story of the ten Booms is an incredible testimony – people living out their faith in the face of tyranny, fear and arrest at any moment.

My accidentally-taken-home book pales in comparison, but the fear was real enough – enough that I still remember my anxiety. On that Monday morning, sick to my stomach, I could eat very little breakfast. I had formulated a plan. When the bell rang, I would walk into the classroom, hope for no book bag checks, and go to my desk, quietly putting my books away with the offending reader stacked among them.

My plan worked. The teacher was late, and too harried to bother checking our bags. No one, including the girl sitting across from who loved to tattle on everyone in the class, noticed. I behaved normally. And avoided what I imagined to be nothing short of being handcuffed and taken to jail.

The ten Booms faced down a worse fear, a real fear, every day. But the storm was coming.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Hiding Place. To see more posts on this chapter, “Storm Clouds Gather,” please visit Sarah at Living Between theLines.

Photograph by Michal Spisak via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Hiding Place: The Bureaucracy of Hope

When it came to participating in an underground organization, especially one fighting the highly efficient Nazi war machine, everything – including survival – was in the details.

As Corrie ten Boom writes in The Hiding Place, elaborate systems had to be created to save Jews destined for the Nazi death camps. There were systems of initial contact – how would threatened Jews know to go to the ten Boom’s watch shop, and how would the ten Booms know that the individual at the door seeking help was exactly who they said they were.

Systems of temporary placement had to be devised. This included what to do in the event of a raid by the police. The ten Booms actually practiced, and had their temporary charges practice, hiding at a moment’s notice, including in the middle of the night. Could you go to a designated hiding place when you were sound asleep – and get everything together and yourself hidden in under a minute? And turn the mattress over so the police wouldn’t be able to feel the warm sport where you’d been lying?

Then there were systems of moving people from the watch shop to a farm or rural area. Contacts had to be made, information exchanged, movement arranged – it took planning and people. In some cases, people couldn’t be moved and had to stay in the ten Boom household.

The ten Booms used codes of all kinds – for the telephone, for visitors, for possible threats. They had to remember specific information, as did their fellow members of the underground. They also participated in an elaborate information network, where information was passed quickly.

The risks they ran were enormous, and, as time went on, kept growing. Expansion of the operations always incurred a risk. Taking care of more people always involved risk. Too much activity in the shop was a risk (a security office lived on the same street).

The risks were calculated, but they were rarely counted. The ten Boom family helped anyone who came to their door. Corrie’s father believed the Jews were indeed God’s chosen people, and they were worthy of help and support, no matter what risk might be entailed.

The Dutch underground, like underground organizations in other Nazi-occupied countries, had to create its own, specialized kind of bureaucracy, with defined processes, means of communication, goals and objectives. And do it all under the brutal shadow of the Nazi regime.

It was a bureaucracy driven by passion, determination, and hope.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Hiding Place. To see more posts on this chapter, “Eusie,” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

Photograph by Lutz Schimpf via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.