Book Review: A Nickel's Worth of Hope

Title: A Nickel’s Worth of Hope

Author: André Vandenberg

Date: 1986

Publisher: Eagles Wings

ISBN: none

Length: 175 pages plus 8-page afternote by Bob Terrell

Quote: “[I]n a small village in western Holland...the Nazi did come, in the spring of 1940...I decided I could best serve my country by joining the Dutch Free Forces.”

So young Vandenberg soon found himself in a Nazi prison camp. Among other things he learned that the Nazis (as a group) were equal-opportunity haters. They worked, starved, crowded, tortured, and shot to death anybody who disagreed with them. Vandenberg’s fellow inmates in one camp came from seventeen different countries. At times it seemed impossible that he’d ever get out. The existence of this book shows that he did. Plenty of places, including but not limited to countries that had been overrun by the Nazis, would eventually want to hear his story.

The adventure grew longer as Vandenberg grew older, not because he was one of those memoirists whose stories expand with retelling, but because he kept travelling and having adventures. A Nickel’s Worth of Hope is an abridged edition of an earlier story about how he got to South Africa. A few years after that, a Billy Graham crusade brought him and his wife to the U.S. as part of their evangelical team. In the 1980s they went to Honduras, where, as Terrell reports, Vandenberg died “old.”

What some readers will love and other won’t: for a book promoted by Billy Graham this one contains remarkably little of “the Christian Message.” Mostly it’s the story of a very young man who grew up in the same vaguely Lutheran culture, with the same occasional prayers and church attendance and the same lack of personal spirituality, that the Nazis had grown up in. Though Hitler wasn’t much of a Christian, and admitted as much when he dared, he pretended to be one in order to exploit Christian preachers when possible. Vandenberg’s prison guard wore belt buckles stamped “Gott mit uns,” and sometimes Vandenberg wondered whether God was with them; they did seem to be winning. After the war it took him several years of wandering (literally) in the desert to reconcile himself to God. This story is mostly about his wandering years.

It’s a very twentieth century adventure story. The desert is still deadly hot in the daytime and freezing coldat night, and there are still wild animals, but the biggest hazards Vandenberg faces are his fellow men. He meets true friends, false friends, kind strangers, a rattletrap vehicle officially named “The Desert Rat” and a man who seems to deserve that name. He confronts bureaucracy, stupidity,a nd boredom.

In his last chapter Vandenberg describes his conversion and move to North Carolina, and then Terrell fast-forwards to Vandenberg seeming “old” with heart disease in his sixties and dying, almost literally, with his boots on.

This is neither the happiest nor the liveliest story Billy Graham ever promoted, but on the whole it qualifies as an Inspirational Book. I’m inclined to believe it’s true; Vandenberg is quite realistic about the boring quality of his trek across Africa, and from the fact that Terrell abridged it we may imagine that the boring parts could have been longer and more tedious still.

To buy it here, you may still send a U.S. postal order for $10 (that's $5 per book, $5 per package) to Boxholder, P.O. Box 322, Gate City, Virginia, 24251-0322. At least five, probably seven and possibly nine, book of this size would fit into one $5 package. You may also e-mail salolianigodagewi at yahoo for the correct current address to which to send Paypal payments, adding $1 (for totals up to $100) for Paypal's surcharge. (The post office collects its own surcharge.) Or you could test this new-style Paypal button.