By Corrie ten Boom
The Hiding Place (edited by me)
The Three Visions
....That very week I began to speak. If this was God's new work for me, then He would provide the courage and the words. Through the streets and suburbs of Haarlem I bumped on my bicycle rims, bringing the message that joy runs deeper than despair.
It was news that people needed to hear that cheerless spring of 1945. No Bride of Haarlem trees filled the air with fragrance; only the stump that had been too big to haul off for firewood. No tulips turned fields into carpets of color; the bulbs had all been eaten. No family was without tragedy. In churches and club rooms and private homes in those desperate days I told the truths Betsie and I had learned at Ravensbruck.
And always at these meetings, I spoke of Betsie's first vision: of a home here in Holland where those who had been hurt could learn to live again unafraid. At the close of one of these talks a slender, aristocratic lady came up to me. I knew her by sight: Mrs. Bierens de Haan whose home in the suburb of Bloemendaal was said to be one the most beautiful in Holland. I had never seen it, only the trees at the edge of the huge park in which it was set, and so I was astonished when this elegantly dressed lady asked me if I were still living in the ancient little house on the Barteljorisstraat.
"How did you--yes, I do. But---"
"My mother often told me about it. She went there frequently to see an aunt of yours who, I believe was in charitable work"?
...."I am a widow," Mrs. Bierens de Haan was saying, "but I have five sons in the Resistance. Four still alive and well. The fifth we have not heard from since he was taken to Germany. As you spoke just now something in me kept saying, 'Jan will come back and in gratitude you will open your home for this vision of Betsie ten Boom."
It was two weeks later that a small boy delivered a scented envelope to the side door; inside in slanted purple letters was a single line, "Jan is home."
Mrs. Bierens de Haan herself met me at the entrance to her estate. Together we walked up an avenue of ancient oaks meeting above our heads. Rounding the final bend, we saw it, a fifty-six room mansion in the center of a vast lawn. Two elderly gardeners were poking about the flowerbeds.
"We've let the gardens go," Mrs. Bierens de Haan said. "But I thought we might put them back in shape. Don't you think released prisoners might find therapy growing things?"
I didn't answer. I was staring up at the gabled roof and the leaded windows. Such tall, tall windows...
"Are there--" my throat was dry. "Are there inlaid wood floors inside, and a broad gallery around a central hall, and--and bas-relief statues set along the walls?"
Mrs. Bierens de Haan looked at me in surpise. "You've been here then! I don't recall---"
"No, I said. "I heard about it from---"
I stopped. How could I explain what I did not understand?
"From someone who's been here," she finished simply, not understanding my perplexity.
"Yes," I said. "From someone who's been here."
The second week in May the Allies retook Holland...
In June the first of many hundreds of people arrived at the beautiful home in Bloemendaal. Silent or endlessly relating their losses, withdrawn or fiercely aggressive, every one was a damaged human being. Not all had been in concentration camps; some had spent two, three, even four years hidden in attic rooms and back closets here in Holland.
...in Bloemendaal they were reminded that they were not the only ones who had suffered. And for all these people alike, the key to healing turned out to be the same. Each had a hurt he had to forgive: the neighbor who had reported him, the brutal guard, the sadistic soldier...
I continued to speak, partly because the home in Bloemendal ran on contributions, partly because the hunger for Betsie's story seemed to increase with time. I traveled all over Holland, to other parts of Europe, to the United States.
But the place where the hunger was greatest was Germany. Germany was a land in ruins, cities of ashes and rubble, but more terrifying still, minds and hearts of ashes. Just to cross the border was to feel the great weight that hung over that land.
It was at a church service in Munich that I saw him, the former S.S. man who had stood guard at the shower room door in the processing center at Ravensbruck. He was the first of our actual jailers that I had seen since that time. And suddenly it was all there---the roomful of mocking men, the heaps of clothing, Betsie's pain-blanched face.
He came up to me as the church was emptying, beaming and bowing. "How grateful I am for your message, Fraulein." he said. "To think that, as you say, He washed my sins away!"
His hand was thrust out to shake mine. And I, who had preached so often to the people in Bloemendaal the need to forgive, kept my hand at my side.
Even as the angry, vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. Jesus Christ had died for this man; was I going to ask for more? Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me forgive him.
I tried to smile, I struggled to raise my hand. I could not. I felt nothing, not the slightest spark of warmth or charity. And so again I breathed a silent prayer. Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me Your forgiveness.
As I took his hand the most incredible thing happened. From my shoulder along my arm and through my hand a current seemed to pass from me to him, while into my heart sprang a love for this stranger that almost owerwhelmed me.
And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world's healing hinges, but on His. When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives, along with the command, the love itself.
It took a lot of love. The most pressing need in postwar Germany was homes.nine million people were said to be without them. They were living in rubble heaps, half standing builings, and abandoned army trucks. A church group invited me to speak to a hundred families living in an abandoned factory building....How could I speak to these people of the reality of God and then go back to my quiet room in the church hostel outside the city? No, before I could bring a message to them, I would have to live among them.
And it was during the months that I spent in the factory that a director of a relief organization came to see me. They had heard of my rehabilitation work in Holland, he said, and they wondered---I was opening my mouth to say that I had no professional training in such things, when his next words silenced me.
"We've located a place for the work," he said. "It was a former concentration camp that's released by the government."
We drove to Darmstadt to look over the camp. Rolls of rusting barbed wire still surrounded it. I walked up a cinder path between drab gray barracks. I pushed open a creaking door; I stepped between rows of metal cots.
"Windowboxes." I said. "We'll have them at every window. The barbed wire must come down, of course, and then we'll need paint. Green paint. Bright yellow-green, the color of things coming up new in the spring....."
AI
