By unraveling a hem, she worked free a length of thread. Someone had smuggled a needle to her, but without thread, without material to sew on, what use was a needle? But Corrie was sentenced to solitary confinement where, as the weeks went by, idleness eroded her courage. The Jews who were in their home at the time of the raid-including Eusie with his ashtray-got safely to the secret room. In fact, it is underwear: a fragment of the undershirt Corrie was wearing when the Gestapo raid came and she and Father and Betsie were hustled to prison. It holds a piece of cloth, ordinary white cotton, the kind underwear is made of. It is a small round frame four inches in diameter. Round frame containing an embroidered flower The third of Corrie’s gifts to me is the smallest, but perhaps the most precious. To me the star says: Whatever in our life is hardest to bear, love can transform into beauty. For years it hung on her wall as it hangs now on mine-a symbol as bittersweet as a cross. Now I know it was to give it to you, Corrie.Ĭorrie and I picked out the frame for Eusie’s star that very afternoon. From the bottom drawer, buried beneath a pile of table linen, he drew out a scrap of yellow cloth cut in the shape of a star.Īll these years I wondered why I saved this thing, he said. Meyer Eusebius Mossel set down his teacup and crossed the room to a massive antique sideboard.
But you’d forget your ashtray and I’d come running after you with it. You’d take your pipe with you when you ran in there, Eusie, Corrie reminded him, recalling the practice drills they’d hold against a potential raid by the Gestapo. At the home of Meyer Mossel-christened Eusebius by the ten Booms during the days when a person’s very name could mean death-we sipped tea while he and Corrie reminisced about the secret room concealed behind a wall of her bedroom. When I was working with Corrie on the story of her life, she took me to meet a number of the people for whom Father and Betsie had so willingly given their lives. During the German occupation, all Jews in Holland were required to wear such a star stitched to their clothes. In the frame is a piece of yellow cloth, cut in the shape of a six-pointed star. The second of the gifts Corrie gave me is a rectangular wooden frame, six inches wide by seven inches long, with a carved, gilded border. Wooden frame containing a yellow six-pointed star It shines for me today, telling me, What feeds the soul matters as much as what feeds the body. It shone on respites at home between Corrie’s tireless trips to Russia, Africa, Vietnam. It shone for Corrie when she returned alone from the concentration camp where Father and Betsie had died. Not only for Father and Betsie and Corrie but for the hundreds who during the Nazi terror found shelter in their home. Oh Corrie, this kettle will go on shining long after we’ve forgotten what we had for dinner tonight!Īnd so it did. de Groot at the vegetable stand gave me a special price on potatoes, Betsie added hastily, because Corrie kept the accounts for the family, and the little watch shop never took in much money. Oh Corrie, wait till I get the grime off and polish it awhile! Can’t you just see the morning sun glowing on this spout?"Īnd Mr. "It’s not meant to hold water," said Betsie. What are we going to do with that old thing? It won’t even hold water! Old brass kettle Sister! cried Corrie when Betsie arrived home with her prize. Corrie’s sister Betsie was on her way to the meat market when she caught sight of it, dented and soot encrusted, on a pile of old bicycle tires. The kettle speaks to me about priorities. Through all the displacements, all the moves of my own life, I have carried with me three gifts she gave me because they signify to me this wisdom. Today I live in a retirement community.Īmid all these changes, though, the wisdom Corrie gained in the crucible of a concentration camp remains true. There’ve been moves-we left our house in suburban New York for an apartment in Massachusetts. The death of my beloved husband of seventy years. There’ve been losses: Corrie’s death in 1983 on her ninety-first birthday.
In my case, for example, in 1971 we had teenagers at home today I text Oregon, Florida, and Georgia for news of my great-grandchildren. In any individual life, too, fifty years means constant change. Who, in 1971, could have foreseen a world connected by cell phone, where we googled our questions for answers? Who could have envisaged being socially distanced behind our masks in the grip of a global pandemic? These fifty years since the publication of The Hiding Place have seen unimaginable change.
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