Corrie ten Boom Forgives Her Guard

The chairs in that basement were wooden and cold under my hands, and I was stacking them against the back wall when I saw him push forward against the tide of departing coats. Something in my grip went still.

The room smelled of coal dust and wet wool, the smell of every room in Munich that winter of 1947, because half the windows above us had no glass left in them and the cold came up through the floorboards like water rising. I had been gathering hymn sheets from seats where women in patched coats had held them without singing, because there was not much left in that country to sing about. I traveled with Corrie ten Boom's small party that season, one of the ones who carried the boxes, set the chairs, translated when the German got away from her. By then I had heard her tell the story of the ocean perhaps forty times, in forty rooms just like this one.

She told it again that night. When we confess our sins, she said, God throws them into the sea, into the deepest part, where they can never be dredged up again. I watched the faces while she said it. Bombed faces, hollow around the eyes, the kind that had lost a son on the eastern front or a daughter under the incendiaries and could not decide, from week to week, which grief to carry first. They listened the way people listen when they are afraid a mercy might actually be meant for them.

I knew some of what had brought her to that basement, because she had told me on the train from Haarlem, in pieces, the way people tell the worst things. Her father had been a watchmaker on the Barteljorisstraat, and behind her bedroom in that same house there was a space built into the wall where, for two years, Jews had hidden while the Gestapo combed the streets outside. On the twenty-eighth of February, 1944, the house was betrayed and the family was taken. Her father did not survive the arrest by many days. A brother and a nephew were lost to it too. Corrie and her sister Betsie were sent east to Ravensbrück, and it was there, in that camp built for women, that Betsie's body finally gave out on her, just before Christmas, only days before Corrie herself was released on the last day of that terrible year.

She had told me too about Jan Vogel, the Dutchman who had sold them to the Nazis, and how she had hated him with a hatred that frightened her, and how Betsie, even starving, even freezing on the wooden bunks of Barracks 28, had prayed for their guards by name. Corrie said she could not do that. Not then. She said she had knelt beside her sister once, in the light of a burning Haarlem sky the night the bombs first fell, and whispered to God that He should listen to Betsie's prayer for the German pilots overhead, because she herself could not manage one word of it.

So when the war ended and she came home, she opened a house for the broken ones, for women who had survived what she had survived, and later, harder still, a second house for the Dutch who had collaborated, the informers, the ones nobody in Haarlem would look at in the street. She had decided that forgiving was not a feeling to be waited on. It was a door people had to walk through, one at a time, or stay sick behind it forever. That was the sermon. That was why we were in Munich, in that cold room, with hymn sheets going damp in my hands.

The audience did not clap when she finished. Nobody clapped in Germany in 1947. They stood in silence and gathered their coats in silence and moved toward the door in a long grey line, and that was when I saw him working against that line, coming toward the front instead of away from it.

He was a heavy man going bald, in a gray overcoat too thin for the weather, a brown felt hat turning over and over in his hands the way a man turns a hat when he does not know what else to do with his fingers. For one breath I saw only that — an overcoat, a hat, a stranger. Then something underneath it surfaced, the way a shape rises through water you thought was empty, and I saw a blue uniform instead, and a cap with its silver skull stitched above the visor, and I understood, before Corrie did, or at the same instant she did, that we had both just stepped back into that other room.

I had never been to Ravensbrück. But I had heard her describe it enough times that I could see it now myself, laid over the basement like a second exposure on a photograph — the harsh lights strung along the ceiling, the mountain of dresses and shoes heaped in the middle of the concrete floor, the line of women made to walk past the guards with nothing on their bodies at all. I saw Betsie in that line, the way Corrie always described her, ribs standing under skin gone the color of old paper. Betsie, how thin you were. I did not say it aloud. I did not need to. Corrie's face had already gone the color of the wall behind her.