The ten Boom family, living in the Dutch city of Haarlem, consisted of father Casper, son Willem, and daughters Betsie, Nollie, and Corrie. They were pillars of their community, widely respected and admired by their neighbors and friends. Their Christian faith sustained Corrie ten Boom and her family through the horror of the Nazi occupation from 1940-1945. This faith would be her salvation—as well as the salvation of all those whom she rescued from persecution and almost certain death, as their home would become both a spiritual and a literal hiding place.
Cornelia “Corrie” ten Boom, born in 1892, grew up as part of a tight-knit, devoutly Christian family that held regular Bible study sessions and taught their children to live according to Christian principles. The family patriarch, Casper ten Boom, was a master watchmaker whose skill was recognized all over Holland and even other countries in Western Europe. His watch shop was on the ground floor of the family’s home, known as the Beje.
Corrie would often accompany Casper on the train to business trips in Amsterdam. During one of these journeys with her father, young Corrie recalled asking him about “sexsin,” a word she had heard in a poem at school. Topics like sex were rarely discussed openly by families in early-20th century Europe—and certainly not in the conservative ten Boom household. After she asked this question, Casper asked Corrie to carry a box full of heavy watches across the train platform. She struggled and told her father that she couldn’t do it. He explained to her that just as there were physical burdens that were too heavy for her to bear, there were spiritual burdens that she could not carry on her own, so it was best to let God carry them for her.
Her mother, Cornelia, would take Corrie and her sister Nollie with her on her many visits to the city’s poorest slums to deliver alms to the needy. On one of these alms-giving expeditions, Corrie saw a baby dead of malnutrition. After relating this story to her father, Casper explained to Corrie that death was in God’s hands, and only He could judge when one’s time on Earth was finished. He said that when death came for her, God would give her the strength she needed.
Corrie formed a special bond with her maternal aunt, Tante Jans (“tante” being Dutch for “aunt”). Tante Jans was active in charity and religious work, believing that God judged individuals based upon how much they accomplished in life. For Tante Jans, her faith-based work was her life. Unfortunately, Tante Jans was diagnosed with diabetes in 1914. In January 1919, her condition took a turn for the worse and she knew she would soon die. Before she passed, Tante Jans told Corrie that we all went to God empty-handed, for our deeds on Earth were nothing compared to Christ’s sacrifices on the cross.
As a teenager, Corrie had a failed courtship with a young man named Karel, a university classmate of her older brother, Willem. Distraught after the end of this relationship, Corrie came to Casper for comfort. Casper explained that Corrie should never seek to block out her love for Karel, but instead, look to God to show her a new way for that love to express itself. Little did Corrie know just how much love she truly had to share with the world.
Corrie’s mother, Cornelia, died in 1921, a few years after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage. In the years that followed, Corrie settled into life at the Beje as a dedicated spinster aunt with her sister Betsie (also a spinster) and Casper. She became the bookkeeper for her father’s watch shop, while Betsie poured herself into refurbishing the Beje. Betsie made the Beje truly glow, while opening its doors to anyone in Haarlem who wished to stop in for a hot cup of coffee, homemade soup, or Christian prayer and fellowship.
One afternoon in 1937, when Corrie was 45 years old, the ten Booms held a party to celebrate the 100th anniversary of their family watch shop, started by Corrie’s grandfather, Willem, in 1837. In the hardships that were soon to befall her, Corrie would recall this day of celebration as one of the best and proudest of her life. The entire Haarlem community showed up to toast the ten Boom family, including fellow congregants at their church, St. Bavo’s, as well as business associates, suppliers, customers, and even competitors.
At the party, guests talked about Adolf Hitler, the growing threat of Nazi Germany, and their fears of another European general war. Willem, a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church, was taking in Jewish refugees from Germany. One of these refugees, a man named Gutlieber, was at the party. Willem told the guests that Gutlieber was forced to flee Munich after a violent assault at the hands of Hitler Youth members, during which they attempted to set his beard on fire.
On May 10, 1940, Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands, making the country’s worst fears of war and occupation a reality. It was still a stunning turn of events—not least for the pious ten Boom family. Disturbing changes began to present themselves. German uniforms and insignia became a common feature of ordinary life on the streets of Haarlem, while racist and antisemitic propaganda began to be published in once-respectable newspapers, now under the control of the Reich Ministry of Propaganda.
The Germans also ordered that all privately owned radios be handed over, in an effort to prevent the occupied Dutch population from hearing Allied broadcasts via the BBC. The ten Boom family chose to defy the confiscation order. Accordingly, when the German requisition officer visited the Beje to ask if the family had a radio or other contraband materials, Corrie lied and told him that they didn’t. This was one of the first moral conflicts of the war she faced. Corrie knew that lying was a sin, expressly forbidden by the Ten Commandments. But she also knew that the confiscation order was unjust and that she would be compromising another part of her and her family’s moral code to comply with it.
The Jewish community of Haarlem began to face harsh discrimination and was soon ordered to wear yellow stars stitched to their clothing. By 1941, Jews began simply disappearing off the streets. Awful rumors began to circulate about Jews being deported en masse to death camps in Eastern Europe.
Corrie’s first act to rescue Jews in Haarlem was helping her neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Weil. In November 1941, the Germans surrounded and vandalized the Weils’ furrier shop, located next to Casper’s watch shop. The ten Boom family watched as the Germans looted and destroyed the shop, thankfully while its occupants were absent. Corrie and the family made the pivotal decision to intervene, spiriting Mr. Weil into the Beje and sheltering him until the authorities left. Willem and his son, Kik (both of whom were already active in the Dutch Resistance through Willem’s efforts to shelter Jews in the nursing home he operated), helped Mr. Weil escape to a permanent safehouse in the countryside, while getting word out to Mrs. Weil not to return home.
Corrie knew that working with the underground would mean lying, defying authority, stealing, forging, and possibly even violence, all of which was in direct violation of her bedrock Christian faith. Yet that same faith also told her she could not sit idly by while her neighbors were being persecuted. She prayed for the answer to the question—how should a Christian act when evil is in power?
She began helping her Jewish neighbors on a regular basis, people whom she had seen for years on the streets of Haarlem, never even knowing that they were Jewish. Separately, Corrie’s sister Nollie and her husband were also sheltering two Jewish women in their home. One of them was a man she and her sisters knew only as “Bulldog,” so named because he was always to be seen walking his beloved bulldogs through the streets of Haarlem. Bulldog, whose real name was Harry de Vries, told Corrie that he had euthanized his pets, fearing that they would be neglected if he was arrested by the Nazis. Corrie made a solemn pledge to God: she would help His people in any way she could.
One night after the curfew, Kik introduced Corrie to the local leaders of the Resistance. They were instantly sympathetic with Corrie’s effort to rescue Jews and offered her their resources, knowledge, and contacts to help her expand and solidify her operation. The organization impressed upon Corrie the need to make sure that her safehouse was truly safe. The place in her home where Jews were hiding needed to be totally undetectable, with everyone at the Beje knowing exactly what to do in the event of a sudden raid by the Gestapo. Crucially, the Beje lacked a secret room—something that needed to be addressed immediately.
The Resistance sent an operative to help Corrie build a permanent hiding place at the Beje. He installed a false brick wall in Corrie’s room, behind which was to be the secret room where Jews would be able to hide. Corrie was astonished by the thoroughness and quality of the work. It was perfect, totally undetectable from the outside. There was enough room to stand and walk around in the hiding place, as well as a well-hidden vent that would let air in from the outside. The hiding place was only accessible through a small sliding panel, which was hidden behind bookshelves in front of the false wall. The Beje was now ready to function as a permanent hiding place.
The danger Corrie faced was immense. If caught, she and her whole family risked being thrown into a concentration camp or even being summarily executed by the Nazis. Corrie came to believe that self-sacrifice in the service of rescuing others was the deepest expression of love. And she was prepared to face death in order to show that love, just as Christ had on the cross.
Corrie’s rescue and hiding operation was growing rapidly by spring 1943. What started out as a small network of friends and family now included 80 co-conspirators. Many of these contacts were people in positions of authority in Haarlem, including a Haarlem police officer. Corrie began to worry that the circle was growing too large and unwieldy.
In 1943, a Jewish man named Meyer Mossel, a former synagogue cantor in Amsterdam, came to live as a permanent resident at the Beje. He delighted everyone with his humor and cheerfulness, despite the obviously fraught circumstances. He struck a particular chord with Casper, with whom he shared an abiding love for the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. Eventually, the Beje hiding place became home to six Jews who lived there on a permanent basis, along with Corrie, Betsie, and Casper. The six Jews and the ten Booms became a true family unit. They ate, laughed, sang, and prayed together, retaining their humanity in the face of nearly unimaginable fear.
Despite the cohesiveness, circumstances were fraught—the group had to hold regular drills to practice escaping to the hiding place from anywhere in the house at a minute’s notice without leaving behind any trace. These drills always provoked severe anxiety, because they brought home the awful reality of what would happen if they were caught. Corrie, meanwhile, prepared herself for being questioned by the Gestapo—she needed to master the sin of lying by being able to tell the Gestapo that there were no Jews hiding at the Beje.
On the morning of February 28, 1944, the Beje was raided by the authorities after one of Corrie’s operatives was caught by the Gestapo. Both Corrie and Betsie were savagely beaten during the home interrogation, as the Gestapo attempted to force a confession.
Although Corrie gave no information and the officers failed to find the Jewish fugitives in the hiding place, the ten Boom family—Corrie, Betsie, and Casper, in addition to Willem, Nollie, and Peter (Corrie’s nephew), all of whom were present at the Beje that morning for a meeting of their prayer group—was loaded into a van and taken to the federal prison at Scheveningen.
The authorities offered to release Casper and allow him to return home to the Beje. But Casper refused this offer of mercy, telling the Germans that he would never close his door to anyone seeking help—if he went home, he would simply continue hiding fugitives. Even the Nazi terror could not rob Casper of his humanity.
Corrie was separated from her family and placed into an overcrowded and filthy cell with a group of other inmates. She was sick with the flu when she was arrested and became even sicker under the inhumane conditions. Two weeks after her arrival at Scheveningen, Corrie was taken to the prison hospital, where a kindly nurse managed to smuggle her a package containing two bars of prewar soap; a packet of safety pins; and the four Gospels, in four small, separate booklets. Two nights later, for unknown reasons, Corrie was placed in solitary confinement.
She begged for word of her family, especially her father, but no one would share information with her. The Gospels, however, provided Corrie with the spiritual nourishment she so desperately needed. She remembered that Jesus had also suffered loss and defeat, far worse than what she and her group at the Beje had suffered—but He had ultimately triumphed and redeemed all mankind.
In April 1944, Corrie received word that all the members of her family were free—except for Betsie, who was still in Scheveningen. She also learned that all six Jews were safe. But just a few weeks later, Corrie learned that Casper had died after ten days in prison. Corrie took comfort in knowing that Casper was now with God and Mama, free from the agony and suffering of the mortal world, having lived a life committed to serving God and upholding his abiding faith.
In June 1944, Corrie was taken to a small room at the prison, where, to her surprise, she found her family waiting for her. Willem, Flip, Nollie, and even Betsie were there! A sympathetic guard used the loose pretext of the reading of Casper’s last will and testament to briefly reunite Corrie with her family, claiming that it was Dutch law that the full family had to be present for such an event. This unexpected reunion was a bright spot in Corrie’s otherwise dreary sojourn in Scheveningen. Willem was severely ill with jaundice due to the unsanitary conditions, malnutrition, and lack of medical care during his stay in prison. Betsie, too, was gaunt and pale from her ordeal. Corrie learned that her nephew, Kik, had been sent to a prison in Germany after being arrested in connection with his work with the Resistance. Before Corrie left her family and was forced to return to her cell, Betsie used the opportunity to present her sister with a new Bible (Corrie having given away the four gospels she received from the nurse)—this Bible was to be Corrie’s strength in the ordeals ahead.
In early summer 1944, Corrie was transported to the Vught concentration camp for political prisoners. During the journey from Scheveningen to Vught, she was reunited with Betsie, who was seriously ill from her ordeal in prison.
When the sisters arrived at Vught, they were shown the torture centers for recalcitrant inmates who failed to obey camp rules. If they stepped out of line, Corrie and Betsie would be taken to one of these buildings, stuffed into a room the size of a gym locker, have their hands bound above their head, and left to wait in this condition indefinitely.
Corrie was assigned to a slave labor unit in the Philips factory at the camp, assembling parts for radios for German fighter planes; Betsie, in her weakened condition, was assigned to duty sewing prison uniforms with the other sickly inmates. The Philips factory was run by a foreman named Moorman, a fellow prisoner who organized slowdowns and sabotage efforts among the workers, in an effort to hamper the German war machine.
The conditions of the camp put Corrie’s religious beliefs to the test. One day, Corrie learned that a man named Jan Vogels had betrayed the ten Boom family to the Gestapo. She fantasized about killing this man if she ever saw him. But Corrie ultimately saw the error and sin of her vengeful thoughts. She saw that she faced the same judgment before God as Vogels did. Corrie prayed to God to forgive Vogel and herself as well. In forgiving him, she found herself at peace.
Although Corrie and Betsie found community with the women in their barracks, the sheer brutality of the camp was impossible to ignore. One day in September, a fellow prisoner in their barracks went into labor with a child and was forced to give birth on the floor; the baby lived a mere four hours. One evening, the women listened as seven hundred prisoners in the neighboring men’s camp were shot to death.
That fall, the women were herded onto an overcrowded railcar and sent on a harrowing two-day journey east. When they disembarked, they saw that they were at Ravensbruck, the notorious women’s extermination camp in Germany. Corrie never forgot the sight of the smokestack from the crematorium as the camp loomed into her view for the first time.
Conditions were even worse than those at Vught. The barracks were flea-infested, with overflowing toilets spilling their vile contents onto the floor. The prisoners were at the psychological breaking-point, with fights and squabbles a common experience in the barracks. Upon arrival, Corrie and Betsie were forced to strip naked and shower in front of the SS men. Miraculously, Corrie managed to retain her Bible, which was to serve as her spiritual nourishment in Ravensbruck.
With the arrival of Corrie and Betsie, the barracks became a spiritual sanctuary for the women living there. Corrie and Betsie led daily prayer sessions, giving their fellow prisoners the strength they needed to persevere through their ordeal. Corrie described the moving power of these barracks religious services, as women translated the Bible to each other across the Dutch, German, French, Polish, Russian, and Czech languages. The women were of all different Christian denominations, but they shared in the redeeming strength of God’s word.
Corrie and Betsie began to formulate an idea for a home they would establish after the war, for survivors of Nazism. It would be a place of healing and love, where the persecuted and terrorized could heal their physical, psychic, and spiritual wounds. Betsie even envisioned transforming former concentration camps like Ravensbruck into places of restoration.
Betsie was in poor health when she arrived at Ravensbruck—her condition only grew worse in the harsh circumstances of the concentration camp. Shortly before Christmas, she took a turn for the worse. At last, Betsie was removed to the hospital. The next morning, Corrie snuck off to the hospital and made her way to Betsie’s window. What Corrie saw was an emaciated, yellowed body. Betsie was dead.
But Corrie witnessed a miracle. When Betsie’s body was laid down on the pile of corpses, it was transformed. No longer emaciated and yellow, Betsie was healthy-looking and beautiful again. Corrie believed she was seeing a vision of her sister as she looked in heaven. Betsie, like Casper, had passed through the suffering of the mortal world and ascended to Heaven in a state of beauty and grace.
Mere days after Betsie’s death, Corrie was issued release papers. Her sentence was finally up. Before she could leave, however, she was forced to spend two awful weeks in the camp hospital to recover from the swelling in her legs caused by edema.
The Nazi nurses in the hospital took little care for their patients, often mocking their tortured cries or yelling at them to shut up and stop complaining. Corrie did what she could to ease the suffering of others, bringing bedpans to the patients who were too weak to make it to the ward’s filthy latrine.
Finally, at the end of December, the doctors cleared Corrie for release. She was given back the possessions she’d been arrested with and, on New Years Day 1945, was placed on a train bound for Berlin. Corrie saw the awful devastation of war as she journeyed through bombed-out German cities and rail stations. After a ten-day sojourn in a hospital at the Dutch border town of Groningen, Corrie boarded a food truck headed to Willem’s town of Hilversum.
Reunited with her family, she learned that her nephew Kik had disappeared after being apprehended by the Germans in connection with his work with the Dutch Resistance. Years later, they learned that Kik had died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1944.
Upon her return, Corrie found that she had no more energy for underground work. She sensed that God had a different calling for her. She began preaching in the streets of Haarlem in early spring 1945, while the city was still under occupation. Corrie delighted in sharing the message of the unconquerable power of Christ’s love. She was driven to finally bring her and Betsie’s vision to life. She wanted to create a home that would bring healing to the wounded and suffering.
After one of her preaching sessions, a wealthy woman offered her house as the place for Corrie’s home for concentration camp survivors. Almost immediately after the liberation of Holland in May 1945, the first wave of what would become hundreds of people scarred by the war began making their way to Corrie’s recovery house. It became a place of refuge, where the wounded and weary could heal their psychological wounds and process the experience of their war trauma. Corrie saw it as her mission to tend to all those who were destroyed by the war—including the perpetrators and collaborators.
She believed that God had given her certain experiences in life, as a concentration camp survivor, to prepare her for her true mission and purpose. Corrie first traveled to war-torn Germany, the home of her persecutors, to share the message of Christ the redeemer to a traumatized people. Later, Corrie spearheaded the efforts to open a rehabilitation center in Germany—on the site of the former Darmstadt concentration camp.
Corrie ten Boom went on to travel the world as a renowned public speaker, visiting more than 60 countries in her lifetime. She went to far-flung and dangerous places, including Russia, China, Cuba, and other Communist-aligned countries. She saw scenes of dire poverty and oppression, just as she witnessed in the concentration camps—but she also saw hope and love. In Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Europe, she shared her personal story and delivered her constant, unchanging message: that Jesus’s love was unconquerable.
The Hiding Place is Corrie ten Boom’s autobiographical account of her experiences rescuing Jews from Nazi persecution during the Holocaust. Her decision to risk her own safety to stand up for what she believed was right derived from her deeply held Christian faith and her unshakeable conviction in the power of love to trump hate.
Corrie grew up in the Netherlands city of Haarlem as part of a long-established, devoutly Christian family deeply committed to their faith. The ten Boom family were pious Christians, regular readers of the Bible who took the tenets of their faith seriously and sought to live their lives in a way that accorded with what they saw as the best principles of Christian theology—mercy, charity, forgiveness, kindness toward one’s neighbors, and most of all, the unconquerable power of Christ’s love.
The ten Boom family—father Casper, son Willem, and daughters Betsie, Nollie, and Corrie—were pillars of their community, widely respected and admired by their neighbors and friends. As long as Corrie could remember, her father and her late mother had taken in children without homes, believing that it was their Christian duty to extend their bounty to those less fortunate.
The home was always filled with children, whom the ten Booms came to regard as members of their family—scores of children passed through the ten Boom home, known as the Beje, marking the house in Corrie’s mind as a hiding place of refuge and sanctuary from a world that was often cruel and indifferent. Casper could never bear the idea of a home without children and could never close his door to a child in need. In this, the family took their inspiration from Isaiah 32:2: “And a man shall be as a hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.”
The bedrock of this faith was what would sustain Corrie ten Boom and her family through the horror of the Nazi occupation. This faith would be her salvation—as well as the salvation of all those whom she rescued from persecution and almost certain death, as their home would become both a spiritual and a literal hiding place.
Cornelia “Corrie” ten Boom, born in 1892, grew up as part of a tight-knit extended family, with each of her maternal aunts coming to live at the Beje at one point or another. The family’s devout faith was a constant throughout her childhood, as her father, Casper, and her mother, Cornelia (after whom Corrie was named) held regular Bible study sessions and taught their children to live according to Christian principles.
Corrie’s childhood was a happy one. Looking back, she fondly recalled watching her father work in his watch shop (located on the ground floor of the Beje, below the family’s living quarters) and accompanying him on the train to business trips in Amsterdam. For Corrie, the hustle and bustle of Amsterdam was a far cry from the sleepy, small city of Haarlem. Casper traveled to Amsterdam frequently to do business with wholesalers and suppliers, many of whom Corrie remembered as being Jewish.
Reminiscing about these happy times with her father, Corrie also remembered the spirited—but always respectful—theological debates and discussions her father would have with these Jewish friends. Although devout in his faith, Casper’s religiosity was tolerant and respectful of the beliefs of others. He did not seek to convert or berate his Jewish friends: he simply loved discussing faith and God with them.
During one of these journeys with her father, young Corrie asked him about “sexsin,” a word she had heard in a poem at school. Topics like sex were rarely discussed openly by families in early-20th century Europe—and certainly not in the conservative ten Boom household. When she asked this question, Casper asked Corrie to carry a box full of heavy watches across the train platform. She struggled and told her father that she couldn’t do it. He explained to her that just as there were physical burdens that were too heavy for her to bear, so too were there emotional burdens that she could not carry on her own, so that it was best to let God carry them for her.
Corrie’s mother, Cornelia, was a woman thoroughly dedicated to Christian charity. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Haarlem, when young Corrie was coming of age, the city was home to many poor and indigent people, including children. Mama took Corrie and her sister Nollie with her on her many visits to the city’s poorest slums to deliver alms to the needy.
On one of these alms-giving expeditions, Corrie and Nollie went with their mother to a house where a baby had died the night before. To Corrie’s shock, the baby still lay in a crib, dead of malnutrition. Corrie and Nollie even reached out to touch the deceased child, feeling the cold skin against their hands. Casper later explained to Corrie that death was in God’s hands, and only He could judge when one’s time on Earth has ended. Her father said that when death came for her, God would give her the strength she needed.
When Corrie was 14, she met Karel, a classmate and close friend of her older brother Willem. She was immediately smitten with the young man, and she fantasized about a married life with him. Although Corrie was becoming interested in boys and romance at this time, she lacked confidence that she would ever find a husband. She was bashful and shy, and she did not think of herself as pretty. She sometimes struggled in social situations—she kept silent, despite having much to say.
Her older sister, Nollie, on the other hand, was attractive and vivacious, always able to hold her own at parties and gatherings and draw everyone’s attention—whether she was talking about Einstein’s theory of relativity or Admiral Peary’s journey to the North Pole.
Corrie was sometimes sad and disheartened by her awkwardness and difficulties expressing herself. Mama, however, reassured her by sharing what she saw as the key to happiness. Happiness was not simply a product of one’s surroundings—it was something that you created for yourself.
The family at the Beje extended beyond Corrie’s parents and siblings. During her childhood, Corrie’s maternal aunts (“Tante” in Dutch), Bep, Jans, and Anna came to live at the Beje. They were elderly and widowed, and in poor health.
Corrie formed a special bond with Tante Jans. Tante Jans was, like the rest of the family, deeply and passionately committed to her faith. She was a larger-than-life presence at the Beje, well-known in Haarlem (and throughout all of Holland) as a writer of fire-and-brimstone Christian tracts, often assailing “modern” forms of dress like mutton sleeves and bicycle skirts. She was indefatigable, possessed of boundless energy—for she believed that God judged individuals based upon how much they accomplished in life. For Tante Jans, her faith-based work was her life.
Unfortunately, Tante Jans was diagnosed with diabetes in 1914, just on the eve of the First World War. In those days, such a diagnosis was typically a death sentence, but Tante Jans refused to succumb to despair. She resolved instead to pour herself even more forcefully into her work.
Every week, Tante Jans needed to have her blood sugar level tested. Corrie eventually took it upon herself to administer the diabetes tests to Tante Jans. The doctors instructed Corrie to heat the compound to a precise temperature (no easy feat on a coal-burning stove) and record its color. If it was clear, then the sugar levels were stable; if it turned black, Corrie was to notify the doctors immediately. She did this diligently for the next five years, while the First World War raged across Europe.
One morning in January 1919, Corrie ran the test and observed the results, praying that she was mistaken—the compound was pitch black. She immediately notified the doctor, who told her that she wasn’t mistaken. Tante Jans, the doctor told her, had a mere three weeks to live. The family conferred on the matter that night. Casper made the decision to tell Tante Jans about her impending fate. He told her that, while some people meet God with empty hands, Tante Jans would return to the Lord with hands full from a life spent in meaningful work—raising money for the poor of Haarlem, starting clubs for returning veterans, and writing devotional literature.
Tante Jans broke down upon hearing this, insisting that everyone went to God with empty hands—because our deeds on Earth were nothing compared to Jesus’s sacrifices on the cross. All we needed in life was to be sure of this. Tante Jans died shortly after, but her boundless energy and commitment to her work set an indelible example for Corrie.
Four months after Tante Jans’ death, the ten Boom family took a day trip to the rural village of Made, where Willem was to deliver his first sermon as a clergyman of the Dutch Reformed Church. At the sermon, Corrie, now 27, was reunited with a familiar face—Karel! Although she had seen Willem’s old schoolmate a few times over the years since their initial meeting and had never stopped loving him, this occasion marked a new phase of their relationship.
Corrie and Karel began a brief courtship, during which Karel would visit the ten Boom home and take Corrie out for walks around Haarlem. The couple would talk about their future together and even discuss how many children they wished to have. She began to believe that she had found her partner, with whom she would be able to start her own family and live out the rest of her life.
Sadly, this was not to be Corrie’s fate. Willem informed Corrie that, although Karel did indeed love her, the two would never be married. Karel’s parents, Willem explained, wanted their son to “marry well”—they wanted their daughter-in-law to have the right social pedigree and wealth. Corrie, in their eyes, was unfit to marry their son. Karel, although hurt by his parents’ antipathy to his courtship with Corrie, decided to acquiesce to their wishes. In Karel’s goodbye to Corrie, he begged her to write to him and keep him informed about her family, whom he had come to love.
Corrie was initially devastated when Karel visited the Beje with his new fiancée. She shared her feelings with her father, who told her that love was the strongest force in all creation. Casper comforted her the way he always did, the way no one else could. He explained that Corrie should never seek to block out her love for Karel, but instead, look to God to show her a new way for that love to express itself. Even if our love could not find the expression or object we wanted, God always had a higher plan for it.
With this, she was able to make peace with this experience. Now approaching 30 (an old age to still be unmarried in this era) and with a decreasing likelihood of ever becoming a mother, Corrie began to embrace life as a spinster. She would save her love for her nieces and nephews, and the needy and downtrodden of Haarlem. Years later, God would reveal to Corrie just how much love she truly had to share with the world.
In 1918, Cornelia ten Boom, Corrie’s mother, suffered a cerebral hemorrhage that put her into a coma. She lay unconscious for two months before she finally came out of it. She managed to survive, but she was a shadow of her former self. She was physically disabled and limited in her movements. Worse, she almost entirely lost her powers of speech. One of the few words she retained, however, was “Corrie.” This was how she now referred to all people. But Mama’s condition taught Corrie about how truly strong love was. Although her mother could hardly move or speak, Corrie knew that Mama loved her family and her community. Love could not be bottled up or stifled, no matter the circumstances.
Despite her condition, Cornelia survived to see the wedding of her daughter Nollie in 1921. At the wedding, something miraculous happened. Cornelia, who had not spoken coherently in years, suddenly rose to sing the hymn “Fairest Lord Jesus,” with the entire assembled family and congregation joining her in rapturous wonder. For Corrie, it was a miracle, albeit a temporary one, a blessing from God on that happy day. Mama passed away a mere four weeks after Nollie’s wedding, but no one, least of all Corrie, ever forgot her moment of grace.
In the years that followed, Corrie settled into her life as a dedicated spinster aunt. As her siblings got married and started families of their own, she became a caregiver to a growing brood of nieces and nephews, whom she loved as though they were her own children. Although she loved them all, she was especially fond of Peter, one of Nollie’s sons. Peter was a musical prodigy who delighted the family, and the community at large, with his magnificent and beautiful piano playing. She also became the bookkeeper for her father’s watch shop, helping to bring some order and regularity to Casper’s notoriously eccentric business practices. In her life at the Beje, she was joined by her older sister Betsie, who also chose not to marry.
Thus began a tranquil time in Corrie’s life, one defined by domestic affairs and family commitment. Corrie became more involved in the workings of the watch shop, developing an aptitude and appreciation for the craft as well as the business—and, of course, relishing the opportunity to work beside and learn from her father. Betsie, for her part, made the Beje at last truly glow during this period, with flowers and beautiful decor infusing every corner of the old house. Betsie kept alive Mama’s tradition of making the Beje a true home for the entire city, opening its doors to anyone who wished to stop in for a hot cup of coffee, homemade soup, or Christian prayer and fellowship.
For the better part of the next two decades, the widowed Casper and the unmarried Betsie and Corrie settled into a happy, if familiar routine. Life was a procession of new nieces and nephews (as Nollie and Willem started families of their own), family gatherings, Bible readings, and business in the watch shop. It was a tranquil and happy existence—but one that would eventually be shattered in ways the happy trio could scarcely have imagined.
One afternoon in 1937, when Corrie was 45 years old, the ten Booms held a party to celebrate the 100th anniversary of their family watch shop, started by Corrie’s grandfather, Willem, in 1837.
The entire extended family, as well as the ten Booms’ Haarlem friends, neighbors, and business associates, came out to the Beje. Nollie, along with her husband and six children, were there, as well as Willem and his family. Corrie remembered Betsie’s grace, beauty, and vivacity on this day. Betsie, Corrie recalled, seemed to have an uncanny gift for creating beauty all around her.
Corrie would recall this day of celebration as one of the best and proudest of her life.
The entire Haarlem community showed up to toast the ten Boom family, including fellow congregants at their church, St. Bavo’s, as well as business associates, suppliers, customers, and even competitors. Also in attendance was a man Corrie and Betsie called “Pickwick,” a nickname he earned because of his resemblance to the sketch drawings in Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers. Although physically unattractive, Pickwick was benevolent and cheerful—Corrie remembered how he always used to amuse children by balancing teacups on his protruding belly.
Although the day was joyous and carefree, there was whispered, frightened talk of the menacing political situation brewing in neighboring Germany. Willem had traveled and studied extensively in Germany. As a student in the 1920s, years before the rise of Hitler, Willem had written an academic paper about the growing specter of racial ideology in the country, and, in particular, the widespread acceptance and open expressions of antisemitism. With such a background, Willem was knowledgeable about developments in Germany and, at the party, spoke to guests about his fears of another European general war, this one brought on by the murderous Nazi ideology of racial superiority and territorial expansion.
But Willem was not the only source of the growing concern about what was happening in Holland’s large, powerful neighbor to the east. Casper had long enjoyed business contacts in Germany, as many of his suppliers, customers, and wholesalers were based there. Many of these individuals, Corrie knew, were Jewish. But recently, the contact with these Jewish business contacts had dried up. Letters sent to these people would be returned with a curt official reply that they had either moved away and changed addresses, or gone out of business. Often, they received no more than a cryptic reply that read simply, “address unknown.” The whole thing was mysterious—what had happened to these friends and colleagues, with whom the watch shop had done business for years?
(Shortform note: By 1937, many of these Jewish-owned businesses may have fallen prey to Nazi Germany’s Arisierung, or “Aryanization,” policy. Under this policy, businesses owned by Jews were stolen from their original owners and given to racially “pure” Germans, who often paid the Jewish owners a fraction of the true value of the enterprises, if they were compensated at all. Jewish businesses ranging from major department stores to small sole proprietorships were expropriated through this process. According to Yad Vashem, only 8,000 of the 50,000 Jewish-owned enterprises that had existed in 1933 were still in business by 1938.)
Willem, bravely, was already taking in Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. He housed these refugees in a small nursing home that he and his wife operated in Haarlem. At the 100th anniversary party in 1937, Willem introduced the guests to a German Jew named Gutlieber. Gutlieber, Willem told the guests, was forced to flee Munich after a violent assault at the hands of Hitler Youth members, during which they attempted to set his beard on fire—a troubling sign of the violence and mayhem that seemed to be lurking just outside the peaceful world of the Beje.
In the late 1930s, Casper hired Otto, a young watchmaker from Germany, to work in the shop. Although technically skilled, Otto was harsh and cruel in temperament. Otto was a member of the Hitler Youth back in his native Germany, a fact of which he was immensely proud, and took every occasion to remind anyone who would listen.
Although Corrie and her family already knew from Willem the stories about the repressive political situation in neighboring Germany, this was their first personal interaction with a self-professed Nazi. He was stridently antisemitic in his rhetoric, scornful toward Dutch culture, and boastful about the supposed superiority of the German people and way of life.
Otto went out of his way to mock the ten Boom family for their religious commitment when they invited him to their evening prayer sessions. He sneered at the Old Testament and dismissed it as being of Jewish origin, and thus, fraudulent. Although Corrie was truly shocked by Otto’s blasphemy and disrespect, Casper always chose to turn the proverbial other cheek, taking pity on the cruel young man. Even when the landlady at Otto’s rooming house found a ten-inch blade under the young man’s pillow, Casper charitably believed that Otto was merely mistrustful of strangers and fearful for his safety, because he was living and working in a foreign land, away from his family and neighbors. To Casper, Otto deserved mercy, not scorn.
But this was hardly the end of Otto’s antisocial behavior. The young German also took delight in tormenting poor Christoffels. Christoffels was an itinerant clock mender, one of the few non-family members employed by the watch shop. Christoffels was a kindly, elderly man who was a frequent presence at the ten Booms’ prayer and Bible study sessions. Casper kept him on because he believed that itinerant watchmen like Christoffels, though a dying breed, were unmatched in skill.
But Otto took every opportunity to heap verbal, and even physical, abuse upon the old man. Christoffels’s advanced age was a particular focus of Otto’s rage—likely a product of his fascist ideology, which held that elderly people like Christoffels wastefully consumed resources while contributing little to the racial community. If people were unable to contribute to the state, in Otto’s Nazi worldview, they were useless and expendable. Accordingly, Otto frequently had “accidental” collisions, shoves, and trips with Christoffels, both inside the shop and out on the streets in Haarlem.
Otto’s abuse of Christoffels proved a bridge too far even for the warm and forgiving Casper ten Boom. Casper tried desperately to explain to Otto why his behavior was wrong and unacceptable, but the young man refused to listen. Casper had no choice but to fire him and send him home to his native Germany. Corrie later recalled that he was the only employee her father ever dismissed.
On May 10, 1940, Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands, making the country’s worst fears of war and occupation a reality. Although Dutch forces initially put up a stiff resistance, they were no match for the superior military might of the combined German Army and Air Force. Having seen the devastation of the German blitzkrieg tactics in Poland in September 1939, the Dutch government made the decision to surrender and submit to German occupation four days after the invasion, on May 14, 1940. Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands left the country shortly after to form a government-in-exile in London.
The pace of events came as a sudden and violent shock to people all over the country. Although the frightening specter of war had haunted the minds of nearly all Europeans ever since Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in 1933, it was still a stunning turn of events—not least for the pious ten Boom family.
The night of the invasion, Corrie had a terrible nightmare, one that she later came to see as a prophecy. In it, she and her family were in the Grote Markt, the central market square in their home city of Haarlem. It was always a joyous and bustling place for Corrie, filled with beautiful medieval architecture, commerce, and familiar and friendly faces. But in her dream, the Grote Markt was pitch black, silent, a grim and desolate place. She and her family were being carried through the square on a cart, driven by four black horses. She did not know where they were being taken.
(Shortform note: The four horses may be a reference to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, described in the New Testament’s Book of Revelation. In some interpretations, the Four Horsemen bring the Apocalypse before the Final Judgement and Second Coming of Christ. As a devout Christian, these are images and ideas with which Corrie ten Boom would likely have been familiar.)
At first, life in Haarlem carried on as it always had. The presence of German soldiers on the streets was unusual, but something one quickly became used to. As The Netherlands had been placed under a civil, rather than a military, occupation, much of the basic day-to-day administration of the city was carried on by Dutch officials, including the local police force. But things would soon take a terrifying turn for the worse.
Disturbing changes began to present themselves. German uniforms and insignia became a common feature of ordinary life on the streets of Haarlem. Although business boomed at the watch shop initially (the influx of soldiers with good wages and disposable income stimulated economic demand), it came at a terrible price.
Racist and antisemitic propaganda began to be published in once-respectable newspapers, now under the control of the Reich Ministry of Propaganda. “News,” as Corrie had known it, was no more. Life also began to get stricter and more regulated, with less freedom of movement. The occupying authorities issued ration cards, which stipulated how much food each household was to be allotted. All residents were issued identity cards, which had to be produced any time a German official demanded to see them—and there would be severe consequences for anyone caught without one.
The Germans also restricted information—what people were allowed to read, watch, or listen to. Early in the occupation, the Germans ordered that all privately owned radios were to be handed over, lest the population hear broadcasts from Allied nations. The ten Boom family, like many other people living in occupied countries, relied upon broadcasts from the BBC in London for real news about the war. Without it, German lies and propaganda would be their only sources of information about the outside world. Thus, the ten Booms chose to defy the confiscation order. Accordingly, when the German requisition officer visited the Beje to ask if the family had a radio or other contraband materials, Corrie lied and told him that they didn’t.
This was one of the first moral conflicts of the war she faced. Corrie knew that lying was a sin, expressly forbidden by the Ten Commandments. But she also knew that the confiscation order was unjust and that she would be compromising another part of her and her family’s moral code to comply with it. She knew that her only way to survive was to put her life into God’s hands and trust in His will. By lying to the requisition officer, Corrie had taken her first steps toward resistance. She was to take many more.
Think about how your core beliefs anchor your behavior and outlook.
Corrie’s sense of right and wrong was powerfully influenced by her commitment to Christian doctrine. In a few sentences, describe what you think are the main influences behind your moral values.
Have circumstances ever forced you to compromise these moral values? If so, briefly describe the situation.
In thinking about this, what can you do in the future to help yourself live in accordance with your deepest-held values?
More disturbing than the rationing, curfews, identity cards, or confiscation of radios, however, were the measures that the German occupiers began to take against the Jews of Haarlem. For years, Corrie’s brother Willem had warned his family about the violent antisemitic ideology of Nazi Germany. Now it was happening on Dutch soil.
The Jewish community of Haarlem began to face harsh discrimination. They were barred from entering restaurants, cafes, and parks, to Corrie’s horror and dismay. The anti-Jewish measures soon took on a violent character—Jewish cemeteries and synagogues were looted and vandalized, with the perpetrators desecrating holy religious texts and painting swastikas on the walls and doors of Jewish houses of worship. Later, Jews were marked out from the rest of the community by the infamous decree ordering them to wear yellow stars stitched to their clothing.
One of the most shocking aspects of the antisemitic campaign was how eagerly many ordinary Dutch people gleefully participated in it. The Netherlands had its own version of the German Hitler Youth, called the NSB. These were local Nazi sympathizers and collaborators, who espoused a hateful antisemitic ideology that found expression in terrorizing and harassing their Jewish neighbors. Corrie was aghast to discover that people whom she had known and seen in Haarlem in ordinary times were now enthusiastic participants in the gathering storm of hate.
By 1941, Jews began simply disappearing off the streets. There were awful scenes being played out on the streets of Haarlem, as Corrie saw her Jewish neighbors and acquaintances (many of whom she hadn’t even known were Jewish) being subjected to harsh interrogations, raids, and mass arrests. In the watch shop, the disappearances left behind a more subtle, yet sinister trace—repaired watches left on the hooks, never picked up by their owners. As Jews were hauled off the streets, no one could truly guess where the Germans were taking them. Awful rumors began to circulate about Jews being deported en masse to camps in Eastern Europe where they would be worked to death or even killed outright.
The streets Corrie had known all her life were running red with blood. She wanted to help, wanted to assist her friends and neighbors in distress, wanted to live up to her most deeply held Christian principles. But how could one individual stand up to the powerful forces of concentrated evil?
In this, she looked to Willem. As a pastor in the Dutch Reformed Church, Willem operated a nursing home in the nearby town of Hilversum. Just as he had worked to help persecuted Jews escape Nazi Germany, now he was using the nursing home to hide Dutch Jews who faced the threat of arrest and deportation. He was using the nursing home as a temporary hiding place, where fugitive Jews could wait until they found a more permanent safehouse out in the countryside, where there were fewer occupying troops.
Corrie’s first act to rescue Jews in Haarlem was helping her neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Weil. In November 1941, the Germans surrounded and vandalized the Weils’ furrier shop, located next to Casper’s watch shop. The ten Boom family watched as the Germans looted and destroyed the shop, thankfully while its occupants were absent. Corrie and the family made the pivotal decision to intervene, spiriting Mr. Weil into the Beje and sheltering him until the authorities left. But Mr. Weil still feared for his wife: she had been visiting her sister in Amsterdam at the time of the raid. She needed to be warned not to return home.
The family reached out to Willem, who had extensive contacts in the Dutch Resistance and knew of addresses where persecuted Jews would be able to hide. If anyone would be able to get a warning to Mrs. Weil and help get the couple to safety, it would be Willem. Corrie made the long journey to Hilversum, where she asked Willem’s son, Kik, to help. At 9 o’clock that evening (after the German-imposed curfew), Kik came to the Beje to escort Mr. Weil to safety. When Betsie asked how this would work, Kik told her not to ask too many questions—the underground survived by secrecy.
The decision to join the Resistance was a turning point for Corrie. She knew that working with the underground would mean lying, defying authority, stealing, forging, and possibly even violence, all of which was in direct violation of her bedrock Christian faith. Yet that same faith also told her she could not sit idly by while her neighbors were being persecuted. She prayed for the answer to the question—how should a Christian act when evil is in power?
The introduction of the yellow star and the campaign of antisemitic persecution revealed to Corrie neighbors whom she hadn’t known were Jewish. One of them was a man she and her sisters had known only as “Bulldog,” so named because he was always to be seen walking his beloved bulldogs through the streets of Haarlem.
One day, Corrie and Casper saw him on the streets, without his dogs. Concerned, they asked him what had happened to his pets. At a visit to his home that evening, he tearfully revealed the truth—he had euthanized his pets by poisoning them. As a Jew, he was not allowed to have animals and he couldn’t bear the idea of them being taken away from him by the Germans. Bulldog, whose real name was Harry de Vries, explained that he didn’t even think of himself as Jewish. He was born a Jew, but he had long since converted to Christianity, and his wife had always been a Christian. But this was no protection from Nazi ideology, which saw Jewishness as a matter of blood and race, not professed religion.
(Shortform note: Under the German Nuremberg Laws, which were later extended to the countries occupied by the Nazis, anyone who could be proven to have at least three Jewish grandparents was considered to be Jewish, regardless of what religion they practiced. Converting to Christianity would not save one from this new, racial form of antisemitism.)
Another neighbor, a rabbi, implored Casper to take his Torah and Talmud, sacred Jewish religious texts, for safekeeping. This rabbi feared that he would soon be arrested and deported by the Germans, and wanted to know that these holy texts would be safe from harm. Casper agreed to do so—shortly after, the rabbi disappeared, and he was never seen again by Corrie or anyone else.
Witnessing these horrors happening to her neighbors and seeing so many in her community succumbing to the worst evil by collaborating with the Nazis, Corrie made a solemn pledge to God: she would help His people in any way she could.
By May 1942, the Holocaust was in full swing, with Jews being deported en masse from German-occupied countries to labor and extermination camps in Eastern Europe. Although the full extent of what was happening to the deported Jews was not yet known by the ten Boom family, they knew that their Jewish neighbors were in grave danger. Nollie, like Willem, had begun the work of hiding Jews, using her connections with the Dutch Resistance to secure documents that would conceal their Jewish identities. She was soon harboring two Jewish women full-time in her home.
The family was resisting the Nazi oppression in other ways as well. One day in church, Corrie’s beloved nephew Peter performed the “Wilhelmus,” the Dutch national anthem, which had been expressly banned by the occupation authorities. As the familiar chords began to ring out in the cathedral, the entire congregation sang along, joining Peter in this small, but powerful act of defiance and national pride in the face of tyranny.
Corrie was displeased by Peter’s showy act of defiance. Nollie was hiding two Jewish women in her home, to say nothing of Willem’s activities. The Gestapo would surely hear about Peter’s performance, which would bring dangerous scrutiny to the ten Boom family. Sure enough, within days of playing the forbidden anthem, Peter was arrested by the Gestapo.
As the war progressed, the Beje increasingly became a refuge for Jews looking to hide from Nazi persecution. Every night seemed to bring a new knock to the door, and a new person looking for refuge. The situation was becoming unsustainable: there was only so much room at the Beje, and the home was situated dangerously close to the local police headquarters. In 1942, The watch shop was not yet a full-fledged safehouse. It was instead being used as a temporary hiding place for individual Jews or Jewish families seeking refuge from the Gestapo before they could be sent to more permanent safehouses, usually in the remote Dutch countryside.
Willem told Corrie that she needed to develop her own contacts to secure papers and supplies for the people living at the Beje and that she needed to operate at least semi-independently. Otherwise, he explained, her potential capture could compromise all other rescue operations in Haarlem. While the different elements of the Resistance collaborated, they also needed to maintain a healthy separation from one another, for safety. That way, the other cells could continue to function even if one was detected by the authorities. Willem knew that he was likely to be already on the authorities’ radar; it was too risky for everyone to have Corrie be so openly collaborating with him.
The most critical challenge Corrie faced was ration cards—she needed to find a way to secure them for the Jews under her care. The safehouses in the countryside to which they would be sent demanded that incoming Jews have valid ones. Unlike other documents, ration cards couldn’t be easily forged or counterfeited, as they were changed too frequently and would be too easy for the authorities to spot.
She needed to obtain real cards—it was Willem who suggested that she steal them. This was another dilemma, one that put Corrie’s Christian values to the test. She knew she would have to defy the law to obtain the ration cards. But she also knew that she was answering to a much higher law.
Corrie knew Fred Koonstra, the man who ran the Food Office, which was the department in charge of issuing ration cards. Before this, he had worked for the local electric company, reading the meter at the Beje. He also had a mentally challenged daughter, which gave him a more meaningful connection to the ten Boom family. For years, Corrie had been administering religious services and instructions to the mentally challenged community of Haarlem, including Fred’s daughter.
She visited Fred and told him plainly about the situation she was in and how he was in a position to help her. She was running a major risk, as she did not know Fred’s politics and had no way of knowing whether or not he would be sympathetic to the cause of rescuing Jews. Corrie prayed silently to herself that she had not made a mistake in approaching him. To her relief, Fred agreed to cooperate.
He told Corrie that the best way to get the ration cards would be to stage a fake robbery of the Food Office, at a time when only he and the record clerk were there. Corrie agreed to this plan, despite her qualms about the dishonesty it involved. Fred had one more question for Corrie: “How many cards do you need?” Corrie only had five Jews at the Beje, so she really needed no more than this. But, when she answered Fred’s question, she found herself saying, “100.” She was going to go to the maximum extent to rescue as many people as she could. She told Fred not to tell her who he would recruit to perform the “robbery,” or any other details of the operation. The less she knew the better.
The conspiracy worked. A week later, Fred turned up at the Beje with 100 cards, as well as bruises on his face—the “robber” had evidently committed to realism. He and Corrie worked out an arrangement in which he would deliver new cards to the Beje each month, disguised in his old meterman uniform. The new cards would be stored under a secret hollow space under the stairs at the house.
The system worked well enough, as Fred would innocuously stroll into the Beje in his meterman uniform, pretend to read the meter, deposit the new issue of food ration cards, and leave. Only one time did Corrie fear that something would go wrong. On July 1, 1942, a policeman named Rolf strolled into the Beje at the same time as Fred, ostensibly to drop off a watch that needed cleaning. But to Corrie’s relief, Fred maintained his composure and the officer left with no incident. This exchange was one of Corrie’s first tastes of just how nerve-wracking her life was about to get.
One night after the curfew, Corrie’s nephew Kik (Willem’s son) took her to a home in the fashionable suburb of Aerenhout, journeying by bicycle. There, she was introduced to the local leaders of the underground. She was shocked to discover that the head of the Haarlem Resistance was none other than Pickwick! As she went around the room and met the other leaders, she saw that no one gave their real names. The organization was committed to anonymity.
They briefed her on the organization’s purpose—the Resistance existed to assist the Allied forces by sharing intelligence about German armed forces’ movements and positions. But they were instantly sympathetic with Corrie’s effort to rescue Jews and offered her their resources, knowledge, and contacts to help her expand and solidify her operation. They also shared some good news: Peter was about to be released!
Pickwick welcomed Corrie to the Resistance, but he warned her that the consequences would be severe if she was ever caught. He told her that it was better that she did not know anyone’s real name, so that she would not be able to reveal anyone’s identity if she were apprehended and interrogated.
The organization impressed upon Corrie the need to make sure that her safehouse was truly safe. The place in her home where Jews were hiding needed to be totally undetectable, with everyone at the Beje knowing exactly what to do in the event of a sudden raid by the Gestapo. Pickwick knew that the Beje lacked a secret room—he told Corrie this needed to be addressed immediately.
The man sent by the Resistance to examine conditions at the Beje introduced himself to Corrie only as “Mr. Smit.” False identities were standard operating procedure within the Resistance: knowing too much about one’s co-conspirators was dangerous for the entire group. Mr. Smit, Corrie learned after the war, was actually an architect, one of Europe’s most famous.
Some aspects of Corrie’s operation met with Smit’s approval. Corrie had, for example, implemented a warning system to prevent aid workers delivering supplies from entering the Beje if a raid was already underway—a small triangular sign that in the shop window was the “all clear” signal to enter; its absence was the signal to stay away. Smit deemed this acceptable, as well as the hiding space for the ration cards beneath the stairs.
But the lack of a true hiding place for the people at the Beje was a major cause for concern. When Smit went up to Corrie’s room, however, he found that the architecture of the house was ideally suited for constructing a secret hiding place.
Smit installed a false brick wall in Corrie’s room, behind which was to be the secret room where Jews would be able to hide. Corrie was astonished by the thoroughness and quality of Smit’s work. It was perfect, totally undetectable from the outside. There was enough room to stand and walk around in the hiding place, as well as a well-hidden vent that would let air in from the outside. The hiding place was only accessible through a small sliding panel, which was hidden behind bookshelves in front of the false wall.
Mr. Smit proudly declared that the Germans would have great difficulty locating anyone hiding in the space he had built, boasting that the Gestapo could search for a year and never find anything. The Beje was now ready to function as a permanent hiding place.
Corrie knew that her activities were dangerous, and that she faced severe punishment—even death—at the hands of the Nazis if caught. She had been forced to lie in service of her work. But Casper reminded her that the lies that crossed her lips were spoken with love—the love that he had always told her was the greatest and most powerful force in the universe. And she was prepared to face death in order to show that love, just as Christ had on the cross—for, in sacrificing herself, there could be no greater act of love.
But still, it was impossible not to think about the enormous risks she and her circle were running by this time. In early 1943, the hiding place to which the Resistance had sent Harry de Vries after his brief sojourn at the Beje was discovered by the Gestapo. In the ensuing raid, Harry was rounded up and taken to the police station in Amsterdam. Corrie did manage to see him one final time before he was transported to Amsterdam and from there, most likely out of the country to a concentration camp.
The police officer Rolf (who had spotted Fred Koonstra delivering ration cards at the Beje the previous summer) arranged this meeting, letting slip to Corrie the day Harry was to be sent away—apparently, Rolf had some sympathies with the Resistance. When she said goodbye to Harry at this meeting, Corrie knew she would never see him again.
In another heartbreaking incident, a young Jewish mother and baby had appeared at the Beje, knowing that it was a safehouse. Unfortunately, the Beje was full and unable to accommodate them, so arrangements were quickly made to hide the mother and baby with a sympathetic local pastor. But the pastor was unwilling to take them in, citing the security risk and fearful for what would become of him in the event of a raid.
As a last resort, the pair were spirited off to a farm in the countryside. This was far from ideal: the farm was not a secure safehouse and it was believed that the authorities already knew of its existence. Still, it was the only solution available. Sure enough, the farm was raided by the Gestapo, and the mother and baby were taken away, never to be heard from again.
All over Haarlem, tensions were stretched to the breaking point. The deprivations of wartime began to be felt all across the city as winter set in. Food and fuel were running constant shortages, taking a terrible toll on the very young and the very old—including Christoffels, who finally succumbed to the cold and hunger in winter 1943.
Corrie’s rescue and hiding operation was growing rapidly by spring 1943. What had started out as a small network of friends and family had expanded by this time to include 80 co-conspirators. Many of these contacts were people in positions of authority in Haarlem, including the police officer Rolf, who began directly assisting the operation by funneling fugitives to hide at the Beje (often under the pretense of needing a watch repaired) and ensuring a minimal police presence in the area.
Corrie worried that the circle was growing too large and unwieldy. The more people who were involved, the greater the likelihood that one of them would betray the group to the occupation authorities. The widening circle of conspirators—and, now, possible informants—necessitated the use of extra security procedures. The operation was now carried out through clandestine meetings and illicit telephone conversations using pseudonyms and code words to deceive the authorities, whom Corrie understood to be listening in on such conversations.
In 1943, a Jewish man named Meyer Mossel, who had been a synagogue cantor in Amsterdam, came to live at the Beje. Mossel had been deemed a high security risk for operators of Haarlem safehouses due to the fact that he “looked” especially Jewish—he had sharp and distinct Semitic features that members of the Resistance feared would make him difficult to pass off as Gentile. But Corrie was unwilling to turn away Mossel, whom she christened (quite literally) on his false paperwork as “Eusebius Smit.”
“Eusie,” as the family at the Beje came to call him, was a warm and benevolent presence in the home. He delighted everyone with his humor and cheerfulness, despite the obviously fraught circumstances. He struck a particular chord with Casper, with whom he shared an abiding love for the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. Indeed, on Eusie’s first night at the Beje, Casper said he would be honored if the cantor would lead the evening’s prayers.
He even had a jaunty attitude when it came to the violations of religious dietary laws to which he was sometimes forced to submit in hiding. The general privations of wartime plus the rationing system made it increasingly difficult to secure kosher food. One evening, the only meat Corrie was able to procure was pork. After trying a sausage with some initial reluctance, Eusie humorously declared that there was probably a Torah passage which justified eating non-kosher under such circumstances—but that he would wait to start looking for it until he finished his meal!
At its peak in 1943-44, the Beje hiding place was home to six Jews who lived there on a permanent basis, along with Corrie, Betsie, and Casper. But because it was now functioning as a permanent safehouse instead of a temporary refuge, the leaders of the Dutch Resistance began to demand that Corrie tighten her operation and instill more strict discipline at the Beje.
Pickwick was dismayed to learn that Corrie had not taken some basic precautions to protect herself, the Jews living in her home, or her wider circle of accomplices in the increasingly likely event that the home was raided by the Gestapo. He insisted that Corrie hold regular drills—she needed to make sure that all six Jews were able to get into the hiding place from wherever they happened to be in the house in under one minute.
They needed to be able to do this without leaving behind any trace that they had been there. The Gestapo, Pickwick warned, would be thorough in checking a suspected safehouse for any signs that additional people were living there. Even seemingly innocuous things like left-behind ashtrays, overfilled wastebaskets, or a warm spot on an empty bed could arouse their suspicions.
He also told Corrie that she needed to implement an alarm and warning system. This would alert the six fugitives that the Germans were on their way and that they needed to make their way to the hiding place in Corrie’s room immediately. Pickwick installed a buzzer system that could be pressed if the Beje was tipped off about an incoming raid—the buzzer was installed at strategic points throughout the house and was loud enough to be heard from anywhere inside, but not outside. Whoever answered the door would have to stall the officers as long as possible, to allow the refugees as much time as possible to escape.
Eventually, the permanent guests at the Beje became quite effective at getting to the hiding place, though they never quite got their routine down to less than a minute. The group had a set routine for scrambling up into Corrie’s room and escaping behind the false wall, leaving behind no trace of their presence. As the refugees practiced getting up to the hiding place, Corrie, Betsie, and Casper would set to work rearranging the house to give the appearance that only the three of them lived there.
The very first drills, however, showed just how disorganized the group was. Far from Pickwick’s ideal of a one minute interlude between the sounding of the buzzer and the completion of the escape and concealment, the residents of the Beje took four minutes. The drills frightened the group because they reminded everyone of the true danger they were facing.
Nonetheless, they recognized the importance of mastering this regimen. Although they never got it down to a one-minute routine, they did eventually manage to achieve a two-minute time. Even the elderly and asthmatic Mary Itallie, one of the six Jews in hiding at the Beje, managed to master this routine, though her loud coughing and wheezing threatened to betray the entire group.
Corrie herself needed to prepare for being harshly interrogated by the Gestapo. Her nephew Kik arranged drills for her, in which he and Rolf would burst into Corrie’s room while she was still sleeping and bark questions at her, just as would happen if she were to find herself face-to-face with the German police. “How many Jews are you hiding?” they would scream at her. But Corrie, who had been raised to believe that lying was a sin, was honest to a fault in these mock interrogations, often giving the literal answer, “Six.” Or sometimes, the mock interrogators would trick her with a question like, “Where are you hiding your nine Jews?” to which Corrie would respond, “We have only six Jews here.”
Allies told Corrie that she needed to give the correct answers to these questions, not the true ones, lest she inadvertently betray herself and everyone else at the Beje. She must deny that there were any Jews there. Her honesty, while genuinely motivated by her unshakeable Christian faith, was a serious hazard. With time, however, she learned how to calmly and coolly give the correct answer to these questions: “I don’t know what you’re talking about. There are no Jews here.”
As time went on, the six Jews and the ten Booms became a true family unit. They ate, laughed, sang, and prayed together, retaining their humanity in the face of nearly unimaginable fear. The cohesion of the group and their overwhelming regard for one another showed when Mary was first brought to the house. It was obvious that sheltering her posed a serious risk to everyone. The issue of whether or not to admit her at the Beje was put to a vote—and, on a unanimous, 9-0 vote, they chose to let her stay.
Despite the sense of community and genuine bonds of love and affection that had formed between the people living at the Beje, it was still an environment fraught with fear and anxiety. If anyone on the street were to see the group gathered together for a meal, for example, it could prompt suspicion that Jews were hiding in the house. Everyone was aware of the grave dangers they faced. Any unexpected spotting by neighbors or passersby on the street necessitated quick thinking to avert suspicion.
On one occasion, when the group feared that people in a neighboring house had spotted them, Corrie made the snap decision to start loudly singing, to create the appearance that everyone in the house was merely gathered there for a birthday party. Even the normal appearance of the window washer at the Beje triggered Corrie’s worst fears about the people in her care being captured by the Germans—to say nothing of herself.
One night, a familiar face returned to the Beje—Otto Altschuler, the cruel and odious young German who had worked as an apprentice at the watch shop before the war. Back then, he had loudly propagated his anti-Semitic and fascist views. Now he was in a position to put these principles into action.
As a German soldier stationed in Haarlem, Otto paid an unexpected visit to the Beje. In characteristic fashion, he mocked and threatened the ten Booms, darkly musing at how the tables had turned: he had once been their subordinate, but he was now in charge and would make sure they obeyed his orders. He sneered upon learning that Christoffels had died during the winter’s food and fuel shortage and expressed his same contempt and disgust for the family’s religious piety. After Corrie made him some tea and politely sat with him, Otto suddenly demanded to inspect the area upstairs—where the six Jewish fugitives were hiding.
Otto’s visit was an opportunity for Corrie’s group to test the effectiveness of their drills. When he first came to the door in his uniform, Corrie set off the buzzer to alert the six to the imminent danger. Otto heard the buzzer go off, but Corrie was able to wave his suspicions away by.... Corrie stalled him as long as possible before the young captain forced his way upstairs. To her great relief, the constant drilling had paid off. There was no trace of the group when Otto made his way upstairs. Finding only Casper and Betsie, Otto angrily stormed out of the house. The group was safe—for now.
In early 1944, one of Corrie’s operatives, a man named Jop, was captured by the Gestapo. Rolf warned Corrie that this likely signaled the beginning of the end for her rescue operation—the Germans would get information out of Jop one way or the other that was almost certain to result in the arrest and capture of everyone involved. Corrie had been concerned about the growth of her operation for some time and how difficult and complex it had become to maintain it. With a network of dozens of people delivering supplies and information, only one domino needed to fall for the whole operation to collapse.
On the morning of February 28, 1944, Corrie was in bed, sick with the flu and flushed with fever. As she opened her fluttering eyelids, she thought she saw Eusie and two of the other fugitives scrambling into the hiding place. Dismissing it as a fever dream (they hadn’t planned a drill for that day), she drifted off back to sleep.
Suddenly, officers burst into Corrie’s room, interrogating her exactly as Kik and Rolf had said they would. The practice had paid dividends. When they asked where the Jews were hiding, Corrie feigned ignorance and claimed she had no idea what they were talking about. As the officers brought her downstairs, Corrie witnessed a scene of absolute chaos unfolding at the Beje. Gestapo officers were ransacking the house and the watch shop, tearing them apart as they looked for Jews.
Corrie and Betsie were savagely beaten during the home interrogation, as the Gestapo attempted to force a confession. Betsie, characteristically, later said she felt sorry for the officers who had hurt her, that they were so devoid of God’s love as to behave this way. All the while, Corrie was terrified for the six Jews hiding behind the false wall in her room—although they had successfully made it to the hiding place, surely it was just a matter of time before they were discovered.
She was also horrified to discover that the Gestapo had extensive knowledge about the workings of her operation and even knew about her warning signal. The officers falsely placed the “all clear” triangle in the sign to lure more conspirators into the Beje for interrogation, torture, and arrest.
In the course of their ransacking, the officers tore the walls of the Beje apart with sledgehammers in their search for the hiding Jews while Corrie and Betsie sat and listened, bloodied and helpless. Although the six fugitives were not discovered during the course of the raid, the arresting officer vowed to Corrie that he would post a permanent guard at the Beje to wait until the six emerged from wherever they were hiding.
After hours of brutality at the hands of the Gestapo, the ten Booms—Corrie, Betsie, and Casper, in addition to Willem, Nollie, and Peter—were loaded into a van and hauled off to the local Haarlem police station. On the night of the German invasion in 1940, Corrie had had an awful premonition of her family being carted away through the streets of Haarlem on their way to an unknown and terrifying destination—now, this dark vision was being fulfilled.
The ten Booms were placed in a small holding cell together while they awaited whatever fate lay in store for them. Peter advised Corrie to lie down and not say anything, lest she betray any information to one of the Gestapo plants in the cell with them. At last, Rolf arrived at the station. Still operating as an ordinary Haarlem police officer and undetected by the occupation authorities, Rolf discreetly told Willem that he would be able to flush any incriminating documents or evidence down the toilet.
In their hour of need, the family turned to what had always sustained them in dark times—their Christian faith. As they waited in the dank cell in the Haarlem jail, Casper recited from memory Psalm 119:114, “Thou art my hiding place and my shield: I hope in thy word.”
The family was transported by bus that afternoon to the Duch city of The Hague for processing and further questioning. There were other prisoners loaded onto the bus, including the bloodied and bruised Pickwick. They arrived at an administrative building, the Gestapo headquarters for The Netherlands. Due to his advanced age, the authorities offered to release Casper and allow him to return home to the Beje. But Casper ten Boom refused this offer of mercy, telling the Germans that he would never close his door to anyone seeking help—if he went home, he would simply continue hiding fugitives. Even the Nazi terror could not rob Casper of his humanity.
After being processed and registered by the Gestapo, the family was transported to the federal prison at Scheveningen. First, the female prisoners were separated from the men, and then Corrie was separated from her sisters. Corrie was at last placed in a cell with several other women. She made her way to a filthy cot, where she managed to fall asleep sick, hungry, and miserable.
The boredom and lack of stimulation in the prison was unbearable. The women spent their days entirely within the cramped walls of the cell, only interrupted by the delivery of meager and barely edible portions of food. After talking with her cellmates, Corrie was dismayed to discover that several of the women had been imprisoned for as long as three years in the cell. While Corrie languished, she tried to block out the thought of what had become of the Jews in the hiding place. She couldn’t bear to confront the idea that they had been captured.
Despite the occasional distractions, pastimes, and the company of her cellmates, Corrie’s flu grew worse under these conditions of malnourishment and lack of access to proper medical care. Two weeks after her arrival at Scheveningen, Corrie was taken to the prison hospital.
When she was being admitted to the hospital, a nurse surreptitiously asked Corrie if there was anything she could do to help her. Astonished by this unexpected display of kindness, Corrie asked her if she would be able to procure a needle and thread, soap, toothbrush, and, most importantly of all, a Bible. The nurse told Corrie that she would see what she could do.
The doctors diagnosed Corrie with pre-tuberculosis. When she got back to the waiting room, the nurse covertly pressed a small package into Corrie’s hand as she walked by. When Corrie returned to her cell, she eagerly opened the package. To her delight, the package contained two bars of prewar soap; a packet of safety pins; and the four Gospels, in four small, separate booklets. Corrie, characteristically, distributed the goods among her cellmates, but they refused to accept the Gospels. The veteran prisoners told Corrie that there would be severe consequences for anyone caught with them. Their sentences would be doubled and they would receive kalte kost—bread rations with no hot food. But Corrie was willing to take this risk, for there could be no more precious gift than having access to the holy word.
Two nights later, the guards called Corrie to come out of the cell. She was brought deeper and deeper into the prison, where she was finally escorted into a cell. There were no other inmates with her. She had been placed in solitary confinement.
The conditions were even worse than in her first cell. The cot was revolting, and it was clear that someone had recently vomited on it. She wondered why she had been put in solitary. Had they found out about the contraband the nurse had smuggled in for her? Had the Jews in the hiding place been found? How long would she be in here?
The days became a monotonous hell. The fever with which she had entered Scheveningen grew worse under these conditions. The only care she received was from a medical trustee who would deliver her some mysterious yellow medicine administered from a filthy bottle. In all these interactions, Corrie begged for word of her family, especially her father, but no one would share information with her.
Corrie’s only source of comfort was a small window, from which she could see a small piece of sky. Occasionally, when the wind blew the right way, she could hear the sea. Gradually, her health returned, despite the inhumane conditions and grossly inadequate medical care. The Gospels provided her with the spiritual nourishment she needed.
In these agonizing circumstances, Corrie was reminded of Christ’s suffering. She remembered that Jesus had also suffered loss and defeat, far worse than what she and her group and that Beje had suffered—but He had ultimately triumphed and redeemed all mankind. She took comfort in this knowledge, and saw that her faith would be rewarded—for Christ’s love would conquer all.
Corrie kept track of time by using an improvised knife (made from a corset pin she had sharpened against the cement floor) to scratch a calendar on the wall of her cell. On April 15, 1944, a month after entering solitary confinement, Corrie marked her 52nd birthday.
Two days later, on April 17, Corrie was taken to the shower room to bathe for the first time in weeks. There, to her delight, were other women, brought there for the same purpose. Although she did not see her sisters, she rejoiced to experience the company of others for the first time in over a month. She resolved that, the next time she was brought out to shower, she would bring three of her four Gospels, to share God’s love and glory with her fellow prisoners.
On April 20, 1944, Corrie heard her fellow inmates shouting up and down the cell blocks. This was unusual, as the guards would typically never allow such a blatant act of disorder and insubordination. But, as she learned, it was Hitler’s birthday, which meant that most of the guards were away at a celebration honoring the Fuhrer.
This was a rare opportunity for the inmates in solitary confinement to share information with one another and with the prisoners in the non-solitary units. The entire prison was soon playing an elaborate game of “telephone” as each cell acted as a link in a communication chain, shouting through the cell blocks and passing information to one another. They shared personal information and relished in the opportunity to finally get to know one another, regaining a small sliver of their humanity.
Corrie shouted through the halls for word of Nollie, Betsie, Willem, and Casper. Corrie learned that all the members of her family, as well as Pickwick, had been released—except for Betsie, who was still in Scheveningen. Although this was wonderful news, she still had no idea what had happened to her father after he had bravely refused the offer of release. No one had any news of what had befallen Casper.
One week later, Corrie received a care package from Nollie, consisting of a sweater, cookies, vitamins, a needle-and-thread, and a bright red towel. But Nollie’s package also contained a secret note, written behind the postage stamp. It said, simply, “All the watches in your closet are safe.” This was code—it meant that all six Jews had safely escaped from the Beje. This was blessed news for Corrie, showing her that the risks she had taken and the suffering she and Betsie were enduring had not been in vain after all.
A few days later, in early May, 1944, Corrie received yet another letter from Nollie, this one bearing terrible news: Casper was dead. He had died at Scheveningen a mere ten days after the arrest, with his date of death marked March 9, 1944. Nollie had no idea where he was buried.
Corrie agonized and mourned the loss of her father and the fact that she had no place to go to honor his memory. But she also remembered what Casper had always told her—that death was in God’s hands, and only He could determine when someone’s time on Earth had ended. She took comfort in knowing that Casper was now with God and Mama.
He was free from the agony and suffering of the mortal world, and he had lived a life committed to serving God and upholding his abiding faith. Corrie sketched a new date, March 9, 1944, on her prison cell calendar. Its inscription was simple, but powerful: “Father released.”
The weeks in solitary confinement continued, with no clear end in sight for Corrie’s suffering and loneliness. In late May 1944, after three months in Scheveningen, she was finally called for her hearing. She feared what would happen to her as the guards escorted her to the infamous interrogation huts.
When Corrie arrived, her interrogator was nothing like what she’d imagined. Lieutenant Rahms was different than the other Nazi officials she had encountered. Where they had been harsh, violent, and outwardly cruel, Rahms was gentle, disarming, and even seemed to express concern for Corrie. His first act, upon seeing that she was shivering, was to light a fire in the hut’s stove to help her warm up and get comfortable.
But, by this point, Corrie was enough of a veteran of Nazi persecution to see through his ruse. Rahms’s disarming nature was merely a ploy, a tactic he was using to attempt to coax information out of her. He was trying to get Corrie to confess and betray the accomplices who hadn’t yet been apprehended by the Gestapo, reassuring her that he would help her if she agreed to cooperate and told him everything she knew. Corrie prayed that her gullibility would not put the lives of others at risk.
In the course of the hour-long interrogation, it became clear to Corrie that the Gestapo had been mistaken about the true nature of the workings at the Beje. They seemed to think that it was the headquarters of a food ration card fraud and theft scheme, as Rahms’s questions mostly seemed to focus on this topic. Corrie genuinely had little knowledge of this, and she had little information to share with Rahms.
Despite his disarming style of questioning, Rahms’s cruel Nazi ideology did express itself during the interrogation. When he asked Corrie about the good works she did in accordance with her faith, she talked about her work with mentally handicapped children. Rahms scoffed at this work, claiming that God would surely value an able-minded convert over a “half-wit.” Corrie rebutted his ideas about the uselessness (from the perspective of fascist society) of disabled people, claiming that they, too, were creatures of God and no different in His eyes than anyone else.
The interrogation resumed the next day. This time, Rahms attempted to appeal to Corrie by asking her about her family and her faith. Rahms spoke about his distaste for the grim work he was engaged in at Scheveningen and his fears for what might happen to his family at home in Germany. Corrie told him that Jesus Christ could be his light and salvation, even in a dark and cruel world.
Over the next two days’ interrogations, Corrie sensed that Rahms was genuinely enjoying their conversations, as he no longer asked her any questions about her underground activities. Rahms struggled to understand why a supposedly loving and benevolent God put a devout Christian like Corrie in a filthy solitary confinement cell. Or why He would allow such a good and pious man like Casper ten Boom to die alone in prison, separated from his family and everyone he knew.
Corrie, of course, knew that these were the workings of God, not for humans to question or try to understand. Like her father’s metaphor about the bag at the train station being too heavy for her to bear, she knew that there was some knowledge that mankind could not bear—so God would bear it for us.
As Rahms escorted Corrie back to her cell following their final session together, he provided Corrie with one remarkable act of kindness—he allowed her to see Betsie. In what was surely a break from protocol, he walked Corrie past Betsie’s cell, allowing her to linger long enough for her to catch a glimpse. To Corrie’s astonishment, Betsie had decorated and brightened her cell, just as she had done at the Beje. Even in the grim circumstances of Scheveningen, Betsie’s warmth and cheer could find expression.
In June 1944, Rahms brought Corrie to a small room at the prison, where she found her family waiting for her. Willem, Flip, and even Betsie were there! The occasion was the reading of Casper’s last will and testament. This unexpected reunion was a bright spot in Corrie’s otherwise dreary sojourn in Scheveningen.
She learned some important details about the six Jews’ escape from the Beje. After a few days, the soldiers on duty at the Beje had been replaced with ordinary Haarlem police. Rolf then arranged to have the fugitives freed from the hiding place and transferred to other safehouses. Unfortunately, however, the elderly and asthmatic Mary Itallie had been apprehended while she was out walking the streets. Corrie struggled to understand why Mary would have ever exposed herself (and her fellow fugitives) to such danger by moving around in public that way.
Willem, meanwhile, was severely ill with jaundice due to the unsanitary conditions, malnutrition, and lack of medical care during his stay in prison. Betsie, too, was gaunt and pale from her ordeal. Her nephew Kik, Corrie learned, had been sent to a prison in Germany after he was arrested in connection with his efforts to help a downed American airman reach the North Sea to escape to Britain. Clearly, the family had suffered unimaginable hardship because of their refusal to submit to the Nazi terror.
But Corrie did receive something at this meeting which was to comfort her greatly in the ordeals and tribulations that were soon to come: a Bible from Nollie. It was to be her rock and strength through the storms that lay ahead.
Think about the circumstances that might cause you to defy authority.
Have you ever been in a situation where an authority figure asked you to do something or behave in a way that was in conflict with your beliefs? Briefly describe the situation.
In a few sentences, share how you responded to this situation.
When do you think defiance of authority is justified?
One day early in the summer of 1944, Corrie was abruptly ordered by the guards at Scheveningen to pack out and form a line with the other women to evacuate the prison immediately. As she saw the prison being emptied, it became clear what was happening—the Allied armies had landed in Europe and were beginning the process of liberating the occupied countries!
In response, the Germans were moving their political prisoners out of the path of the rapidly advancing Allied forces and deeper into the interior of Europe. Corrie stuffed her few possessions—her sweater, pajamas, toothbrush, and Bible—into a pillowcase and awaited further orders as she was taken to a freight yard on the outskirts of The Hague. She was happy to be getting out of Scheveningen, but she was deeply fearful that something even worse might be in store for her. She was particularly terrified of being transported out of The Netherlands into Germany.
At last, their train arrived. The guards marched and shoved the prisoners onto the train, refusing to tell their human cargo where they were headed or what would happen to them when they arrived. But there was one ray of hope: Corrie and Betsie were at last reunited. They had endured terrible hardship, but they would no longer be alone. Betsie was without the Bible that Nollie had given her—she had given it away to others, as she did with all things.
Corrie could only see a tiny bit of the outside world from inside the cramped train. But she saw enough to know that they weren’t being sent to Germany when she saw that the train did not take a turn east at a trestle. They would be staying in Holland, and, for her, this was a source of comfort.
The train disembarked, but not at a rail station or even a camp. The guards forced them off the train in the middle of the woods. Once the suffering and half-starved prisoners had all cleared off the train, they were ordered to march on foot, at gunpoint. Betsie was ill and was having difficulty breathing, so Corrie helped her make the journey through the dark woods. At last, Corrie saw where she and the other women were being taken: the Vught concentration camp for political prisoners.
They were ushered into a quarantine compound just outside the camp, languishing in this holding area for two weeks before being processed for admission into the main camp. When Corrie and Betsie’s names were called, they were issued pink forms. The inmates from the main camp told them that this meant that the ten Boom sisters were being processed for release!
These hopes were soon dashed, however, when they arrived at the administration building. They were not being released, but merely transferred to the main camp, where fresh horrors awaited them. They arrived in a yard flanked by concrete buildings. There, they were told by a veteran inmate what the function of these buildings was: torture centers for recalcitrant inmates who failed to obey camp rules. If they stepped out of line, Corrie and Betsie would be taken to one of these buildings, be stuffed into a room the size of a gym locker, have their hands bound above their head, and be left to wait in this condition indefinitely.
Betsie, however, never lost her faith in the redeeming power of Christ’s love. She saw the goodness—or potential for goodness—even in the concentration camp guards. She would not seek revenge, but she would turn the other cheek at her persecutors. She saw it as her Christian duty to show these wayward souls the error of their ways and that, through Christ, it was never too late to embrace love.
In July, Corrie was assigned to a slave labor unit in the Philips factory at the camp, assembling parts for radios for German fighter planes. Corrie was deemed healthy enough for this form of manual labor; Betsie, in her weakened condition, was assigned to duty sewing prison uniforms with the other sickly inmates.
(Shortform note: The legacy of the Dutch electronics giant Philips during the Nazi occupation is a complex one. The company, under Nazi pressure, did open a factory inside the Vught camp in 1943. This factory used slave labor from political prisoners and materially contributed to the German war effort. On the other hand, the company hired as many Jews as possible to work in this factory, telling the German occupiers that these laborers were too valuable to be sent to Auschwitz to be killed. According to company history, 382 out of the 469 Jews who worked in the Vught factory survived the war. In 1996, the government of Israel awarded company president Frederik Jacques Philips the Yad Vashem “Righteous Among the Nations” medal, given to non-Jews who helped to rescue Jews during the Holocaust.)
The Philips factory was run by a foreman named Moorman, a fellow prisoner. Moorman was a veteran of the concentration camp system and knew what it took to survive in such a place. He worked hard to ensure that those whom he supervised were protected from the worst excesses and random brutalities of the guards and advocated as much as he could for better rations and provisions for the workers. Moorman assigned Corrie the dull and monotonous job of measuring small glass rods and arranging them in piles according to their measurement.
Moorman was an expert operator within the camp system. He skillfully presented a subservient and obedient face to the Germans, while covertly organizing sabotage and work slowdowns among his workers in an effort to hamper the German war machine. On one occasion, Moorman even admonished Corrie for being too diligent and conscientious with her work, reminding her that they were, after all, making radios for German airplanes.
But Corrie was still becoming hardened by her experiences. The ordeal of the concentration camp took a clear physical and psychological toll on her. The days were marked by an early roll call out of the barracks, during which prisoners were forced to stand at attention for agonizingly long periods of time. After a thin breakfast, they were marched to work detail.
Many of the women tried to peer into the adjacent men’s camp, hoping to catch a glimpse of a son, brother, or husband. They knew that discipline and punishment were far harsher in the men’s camp. Every day, the women would hear rifle shots ringing out from the men’s camp, prompting speculation about who, and how many, had been killed.
These oppressive conditions put Corrie’s religious beliefs to the test. One day, Betsie told her that a new woman had been transferred on to the sewing detail. Betsie shared that this woman had been betrayed to the Gestapo by a man named Jan Vogels—the man whom, according to Betsie, had also betrayed the ten Booms to the Gestapo. Corrie’s mind began to wander to places it never had before. She even believed that she was capable of killing Vogels if she ever saw him. Knowing that this murderous hatred existed within her caused Corrie to experience great physical and spiritual anguish.
But, in the end, she hung on to her humanity—thanks to Betsie’s inexhaustible well of Christian mercy and forgiveness. Betsie told Corrie that this man must have been wracked with guilt over what he had done, that he was as tormented as they were. Through Betsie’s example, Corrie saw the error and sin of her vengeful thoughts. She saw that she faced the same judgment before God as Vogels did. He had caused the deaths of others through his deeds; but Corrie had murdered this man with her tongue and in her thoughts. That night, she prayed to God to forgive Vogel and herself as well. In forgiving him, she found herself at peace as well.
Corrie and Betsie found community with the women in their barracks. One of them was the pregnant Mrs. Floor, a Communist whose husband was imprisoned in Vught’s men’s camp, as were those of many of the other women. Corrie feared for Mrs. Floor’s health, and that of her baby, noting how dangerously thin she was for an expectant mother. Mrs. Floor told Corrie that ration-card offenders (which was what the authorities believed Corrie and Betsie to be) usually received a six-month sentence. If this was true, this would mean a September 1 release date. Corrie clung to this date in her mind, although Betsie warned her one evening in August not to get her hopes up.
But the sheer brutality of the camp was impossible to ignore. As the long summer of 1944 wore on, the women heard snippets of news (or possibly rumors) that the Allied forces were rapidly pushing east across Europe, liberating occupied towns and cities and driving the German armies further and further back. The guards seemed to be acutely aware of this state of affairs, becoming more brutal toward the prisoners with news of every German setback. Notably, the rifle fire from the men’s camp became more and more frequent.
At last, September 1 arrived—but it did not bring the freedom for which Corrie had hoped. On that day, Mrs. Floor went into labor. With no access to basic gynecological or post-natal care, she was forced to deliver her child, a girl, on the floor of the filthy and infested barracks. The girl lived a mere four hours.
One evening that September, the women heard the loudspeaker from the men’s camp calling the names of the male prisoners to report for roll call, though they could not make out the specific names from the women’s camp. Suddenly, the sound of rifle fire erupted. The men had been called to die in a mass execution. As the Allied armies drew near, the guards were performing summary executions on the male prisoners. Seven hundred men were murdered by the Nazis that night, including, they later learned, Mrs. Floor’s husband.
The next day, one thousand women, including Corrie and Betsie, were ordered to gather their personal effects. The sisters took toothbrushes, needle and thread, Nollie’s blue sweater, and their precious Bible. By this time, Betsie was astonishingly weak, barely able to carry her meager possessions or stand under her own power. Corrie helped Betsie make the march to a rail depot, where they herded onto a freight train. The car was packed with 80 women, stuffed into the train like cattle. The guards jabbed and pistol-whipped the women to force them onto the increasingly crowded freight car.
Conditions were awful inside the train and many women fainted from exhaustion and overcrowding. In the cramped conditions, with no provision made for bathrooms or sanitation, the air soon became foul, particularly as the temperature rose. The women had to stay in crouching conditions just to accommodate the mass of human cargo that had been stuffed into the car. Their only view of the outside world was from a hole in the wall of the railcar that one of the women had managed to gouge open. The train began its long journey out of Vught.
No one on board knew exactly where they were headed, but, from looking out of the crude window they had gouged into the side of the train car, they knew what direction they were traveling—east, out of Holland and towards Germany, as Corrie had always feared. The journey wound on for two days as the women languished in the fetid and unsanitary conditions of the freight car. At last, after two days and two nights, the doors opened and the prisoners emerged. As she disembarked, Corrie knew immediately where they had arrived: Ravensbruck, the notorious women’s extermination camp.
When she stepped off the train, Corrie saw a ghastly image: the tall smokestack rising like a spire from the camp. A strange smoke wafted up from it. She knew all too well that it was not coal or wood being burned there—it was the bodies of murdered Jews, political opponents, and other “undesirables” being cremated. She could scarcely bring herself to lay eyes on it.
The camp was a world of squat, ugly concrete barracks, far worse than Vught or Scheveningen. The barbarism and brutality of Corrie and Betsie’s new home soon became apparent. When they arrived, the women began cutting each other’s hair to prevent lice infestation. The new prisoners now looked just like the old ones: bald, emaciated, sick, and terrified. For the first two nights, no provision was made for the incoming women from Vught. Corrie and her fellow transports slept under a crude tent that had been set up, with straw covering the ground. To her horror, Corrie saw that her straw was infested with lice.
After these first miserable nights out in the rain and cold, Betsie’s condition had grown even worse. She had a lingering cough and was soon suffering from intestinal cramps. Her only option to relieve herself was in a ditch that had been dug to serve as a latrine for the newcomers. On the third night, the new arrivals were at last processed into the main camp.
The ordeal was unimaginably degrading. Corrie and the other women were forced to strip naked and shower in front of the SS men, in cockroach-infested showers. Deprived of proper sanitary facilities, they were ordered to relieve themselves using the drain holes in the shower as toilets. There was no privacy, no dignity. Corrie managed to hold on to her Bible by concealing it in her blue sweater. Miraculously, the guards overlooked it when they searched the women as they emerged from the showers. It was her spiritual nourishment in this place that seemed so far removed from God. But she knew that God was with her, even in Ravensbruck.
Conditions were worse in the rodent and louse-infested barracks, temporary housing for the new arrivals. Corrie and Betsie had to share a bed with three other women, who were already asleep in the bed when they arrived. The cabin was overcrowded, with women scrambling over one another to find a place in their beds, kicking and jostling one another. If someone needed to relieve themselves in the middle of the night (using one of the filthy and overflowing toilets) they needed to climb over their bedmates.
Roll call was at 4:30 am. Corrie and Betsie’s barracks were located next to the punishment barracks—the place prisoners were sent if they violated the camp rules. Screams of torture from beating and whipping could be heard from inside. For Corrie, they were the very sounds of hell.
When the women were returned to their barracks after roll call, they had one source of hope and comfort—Corrie’s Bible. The message of the conquering power of God’s love came through to all the women in the barracks, even in a place like Ravensbruck. The Bible told them that nothing, not torture, or even death, could separate them from Christ’s love. Ultimately, through that love, they would triumph.
Corrie remembered that Christ, too, had been beaten and tortured, just as the prisoners at Ravensbruck had been. She saw in His agony on the cross—and ultimate redemption—a parallel for her own experiences. Like Him, she had been beaten, whipped, and stripped naked. And like Him, she would rise up and conquer.
As the fall grew colder, Betsie grew sicker. The appalling living conditions only worsened Betsie’s rapidly deteriorating health. The arrivals from Vught were moved into permanent barracks in October 1944. The ten Boom sisters—now, Prisoner 66729 and Prisoner 66730—took up residence in Barracks 28. When they arrived, they were struck by the revolting stench of the place. The plumbing had backed up and the straw bedding was filthy. Worse, it was infested with fleas.
The inmates of Barracks 28 were from all the occupied countries of Europe—Belgium, France, Holland, Poland, Austria, the Soviet Union—and spoke a multitude of languages and dialects. The difficulty of communication, combined with the general misery of their conditions, exacerbated tensions among the prisoners and made quarrels a constant feature of camp life. But, gradually, the women learned to cooperate and share what few resources they had. They were all in it together.
Corrie and Betsie were assigned to a work detail in the Siemens factory, where they were forced to unload heavy metal plates from the railroad depot and transport them inside the factory. Their only meal during the grueling 11-hour workday was a boiled potato and thin soup. Once back in the barracks, prisoners would receive a small portion of turnip soup.
But the barracks became a spiritual sanctuary for the women living there. Corrie and Betsie led daily prayer sessions, giving their fellow prisoners the strength they needed to persevere through their ordeal. Corrie recalled the moving power of these barracks religious services, as women translated the Bible to each other across the Dutch, German, French, Polish, Russian, and Czech languages. The women were of all different Christian denominations, but they shared in the redeeming strength of God’s word.
Corrie noticed that during these clandestine prayer sessions, the guards never seemed to wander near Barracks 28. Everyone was grateful for this, as anyone carrying on Bible readings would have been either sent to the feared punishment barracks or possibly executed right on the spot. But the guards always seemed to stay away—almost as though some benevolent, divine force was protecting the congregants of Barracks 28.
There were other miracles. Corrie’s Davitamon bottle, containing medicinal oil, never seemed to run dry. Whenever Betsie or any of the other ailing women needed a drop, more always seemed to be there. Betsie, unable to explain the seemingly inexhaustible supply of oil, told Corrie it was a gift from God who loved them. One day, a prisoner arrived with an even greater bounty—a bottle of yeast compound vitamins that would provide the prisoners with life-saving nutrients to supplement their starvation diet.
But the brutal conditions were still taking their toll on Betsie, miracles or no miracles. All throughout November, Betsie grew sicker and weaker, with her fever continuing to rise. Finally, when her temperature reached 104 degrees, Betsie was admitted to the camp hospital.
Corrie missed Betsie terribly after she was sent to the hospital. She had to see Betsie. One of her fellow inmates told her that there was a window in the hospital’s latrine that never fully shut. It was possible to get into the building through this window. As the guards would never let her actually visit Betsie, this was Corrie’s only chance of catching a glimpse of her sister.
Corrie made it to the window and wriggled her way into the filthy latrine, which featured rows of overfilled, overflowing toilets. The stench made Corrie gag. But there was something far worse than this inside. Against the wall, there was a pile of emaciated corpses, their dead, unblinking eyes staring at the ceiling. Corrie ran from the room in horror. She eventually found her way to Betsie. Corrie noticed that her sister’s condition did seem to have improved somewhat, even if it was just the result of a brief break from hard labor (there certainly wasn’t any serious medical treatment being offered at the hospital).
Three days later, Betsie returned to Barracks 28. She was no longer assigned to hard labor, but would instead be working as part of the “knitting brigade,” sewing prisoner uniforms. This work detail gave Betsie a greater degree of freedom than she had enjoyed before, and she relished the opportunity to read aloud from her beloved Bible during her knitting.
Betsie’s mere presence rejuvenated Barracks 28 with warmth and vitality. She helped ease the constant quarreling and restore some semblance of order and community to the group. She even pointed out to Corrie that the fleas were actually a blessing—they kept the guards out of the dormitories and the indoor work areas. God truly did have a purpose for all creatures, even the fleas that Corrie had so despised.
By December 1944, winter had fully set in at Ravensbruck. The early morning roll calls became even more brutal, dehumanizing affairs. During one roll call, a guard beat unconscious a mentally challenged girl who had soiled herself while being forced to stand at attention. Corrie was grateful when the beating finally stopped and the girl lay motionless and bleeding on the ground. The sheer contempt for human life was simply unimaginable.
One day Corrie shared with Betsie her idea to create a home for survivors of the Nazi persecution after the war. It would be a place of healing and love, where the persecuted and terrorized could heal the physical, psychic, and spiritual wounds. Betsie heartily agreed, saying that she wished to show that love is always greater than hate. It dawned on Corrie that while she was talking about helping the victims, Betsie was talking about helping the perpetrators.
Shortly after this conversation, Corrie joined her sister in the “knitting brigade.” She would later recall these weeks working alongside Betsie as the most joyous time she ever spent at Ravensbruck. During their days together, Betsie fleshed out her vision for what God wanted them to do after the war.
They were to operate a house, larger than the Beje, and open it to all the souls whose lives had been destroyed by the concentration camps. In her vision, Betsie could even picture what the house looked like—floors of inlaid wood; a broad staircase; and grounds filled with gardens, where the former prisoners could plant and nurture the flowers, giving them exposure to beauty after years of ugliness. In merely describing this future house, Betsie transported them outside the squalid barracks.
Shortly before Christmas, Betsie took a turn for the worse. When Corrie’s pleas to have her readmitted to the hospital fell on deaf ears, she did what she could on her own in the barracks to help ease her sister’s pain and discomfort. Betsie was delirious with fever and was clearly on death’s door. Yet even in this state, Betsie continued to describe her vision for after the war. This time, she spoke of converting a former concentration camp in Germany into a home for those who had been destroyed by Nazism. She would turn the death camps, the most visible manifestation of this brutal ideology of hate, into places of healing and love.
At last, Betsie was removed to the hospital. The nurses, however, would not permit Corrie to enter, so she had to wait until they left before talking to Betsie through the outside window. Betsie was barely conscious during this meeting, only murmuring, “so much work to do…”
The next morning, Corrie snuck off to the hospital and made her way to Betsie’s window. What Corrie saw was an emaciated, yellowed body being transported to the washroom, the same awful place where she had previously seen the stacked pile of corpses. The body was Betsie’s, dead at last from illness, neglect, and cruelty.
Corrie knew that Betsie’s body would be transported to the ghastly washroom with the pile of corpses that she had seen on her previous visit. A fellow inmate met Corrie on the other side of the hospital exterior and helped push her in through the washroom window. There, a sympathetic nurse allowed her to watch as Betsie’s body was stacked along with those of the other victims.
But then, Corrie witnessed a miracle. When Betsie’s body was laid down on the pile, it was transformed. No longer emaciated and yellow, Betsie was healthy-looking and beautiful again. Corrie believed she was seeing a vision of her sister as she looked in heaven. Betsie, like Casper, had passed through the suffering of the mortal world and ascended to Heaven in a state of beauty and grace.
Mere days after Betsie’s death, Corrie was ordered to stand to the side during roll call and report to the administration barracks. When she arrived, the clerk stamped her papers, which bore the words “CERTIFICATE OF DISCHARGE.” Next, she was handed a rail pass that would take her out of Germany and back into Holland.
Corrie was stunned—her ordeal was really coming to an end! But before she could walk out of the camp, she had to submit to one more humiliating, dehumanizing medical inspection. Much to her dismay, the doctor immediately looked at the swelling in her legs and feet and declared her unfit for release. Apparently, she was suffering from edema. Before she could walk out of Ravensbruck, Corrie would need to report to the camp hospital—the same place where her sister had died.
The hospital was a dreadful place, filled with dying and suffering women, languishing from untreated injuries and illnesses, many of them delirious from the combined effects of fever, malnutrition, and neglect. Some of the women had been on transport trains that had been hit in Allied bombing raids and were suffering from third-degree burns and severed limbs.
The nurses took little care for their patients, often mocking their tortured cries or yelling at them to shut up and stop complaining. On Christmas Eve 1944, Corrie’s first night in the hospital, four women fell from the top bunks onto the floor, where they died from shock. The sounds of pain rang throughout the ward. Corrie did what she could to ease the suffering, bringing bedpans to the patients who were too weak to make it to the ward’s filthy latrine.
One night, Corrie saw that the bedpans she had laid out for the patients were missing. She discovered that two Hungarian gypsies had stolen them, secreting them under their cots to save themselves the trip to the latrine. Corrie pleaded with these women to return them so that everyone could use them, but seemingly to no avail. That night, one of the gypsies threw her bandage at Corrie’s face—a bandage that had been used to cover this woman’s gangrenous wounds. Traumatized and disgusted, Corrie contemplated giving up on the bedpans, but she ultimately realized it was her Christian duty to help those in greater need. She dutifully went under the gypsies’ beds to retrieve them and share them with the other patients.
Finally, at the end of December, the doctors cleared Corrie for release. She was given back the possessions she’d been arrested with and, on New Years Day 1945, was placed on a train bound for Berlin. Only years later did Corrie learn that her release had been the result of a clerical error—the rest of the women at the hospital in Ravensbruck were murdered in the gas chambers a mere week after Corrie left the camp.
On her train journey, Corrie saw the devastation that war had wrought on Germany. The towns and countryside lay in bombed-out ruins. The Nazi menace, and the global war it had provoked, had wrought unimaginable physical destruction on Europe. After making her way to Berlin, she boarded another train bound west, for Holland. During the random stops in bombed-out rail stations, Corrie would sleep in deserted cafes and waiting rooms. At last, her train made its way across the border into Holland.
The train only took her as far as the Dutch border town of Groningen. When she got off the train, she had nowhere to go. With her remaining strength, Corrie limped to a hospital, where a kindly nurse took her in. Recognizing that Corrie was suffering from severe malnutrition, this woman gave her a hot bath and shared with her the small amount of food she still had left. After nearly a year in prison and in the camps, Corrie was deeply grateful and joyous to be treated with kindness and humanity. The staff at the hospital also managed to get word to Willem and Nollie that Betsie had died and that Corrie was on her way home.
After a ten-day sojourn in the Groningen hospital, Corrie made it onto a food truck headed to Willem’s town of Hilversum. The trip was illegal, as, by this time, the German authorities only allowed military transport and supply vehicles on the roads. But Corrie was willing to take this risk—her only desire now was to reach Willem and Nollie and whatever else remained of her family.
She finally made it to Willem’s nursing home, where she was joyously reunited with her brother, nieces, and nephews. Willem was in a deeply unhealthy state and could now only move around with a cane. He had never recovered from the jaundice he had been suffering from when she saw him at Scheveningen. Indeed, although he would survive the war, he would die of tuberculosis just a year later.
Willem told Corrie that they had received no word on Kik. He had simply disappeared after being apprehended by the Germans in connection with his work with the Dutch Resistance. Years later, they learned that Kik died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1944.
After two weeks in Hilversum, Corrie bade farewell to Willem and began the journey home to the Beje. Willem had to arrange a special car ride for Corrie, disguising it as an official nursing home trip, as travel was severely restricted by the German authorities. But she was accompanied on her journey by an old friend—Pickwick!
The former Resistance leader told Corrie that all the Jews she had hidden at the Beje were safe, except for the unfortunate Mary Itallie. The rescue operation was still running, with several people who had been made homeless by the war now sleeping at the Beje. When she arrived back in Haarlem, she was joyfully reunited with Nollie and the watch shop saleslady, Toos. To her astonishment, Corrie also saw that Toos had kept the shop going in the time since the arrest. With her help and the kindness of her neighbors in Haarlem, Corrie managed to get the business fully back in order—she was soon at work repairing watches and picking up orders from suppliers and customers. Life was resuming a normal rhythm.
The Beje continued to be a safehouse for the persecuted. Mentally challenged people were being hidden in the house to avoid the Nazi extermination program aimed at these people, deemed to be dangerous to German racial hygiene. Upon her return, however, Corrie found that she had no more energy for underground work. She sensed that God had a different calling for her.
She began preaching in the streets of Haarlem in spring 1945, sharing the message of the unconquerable power of Christ’s love. In the war-torn city, this was a powerful message, one that resonated deeply with a community yearning for hope in a hopeless world. In her new role as a crusader and missionary for the Lord, Corrie was driven to finally bring Betsie’s vision to life. She wanted to create a home that would bring healing to the wounded and suffering.
After one of her preaching sessions, Corrie was approached by the widowed Mrs. Bierens de Haan, an aristocratic woman who lived in the wealthy Haarlem suburb of Bloemendaal. As the two women spoke, Mrs. de Haan shared that her mother had been a friend of Tante Jans, years before. Mrs. de Haan had always admired Tante Jans’s charitable work and Christian writings and had known of the Beje as a place of refuge and Christian charity. And Corrie, too, had known of the de Haan estate as the most beautiful home in all of Haarlem.
Mrs. de Haan offered the house as the place for Corrie’s home for concentration camp survivors. Here was the beautiful place where Betsie’s vision would at last be fulfilled. Mrs. de Haan even suggested having the survivors replant the dilapidated and neglected gardens on the estate—just as Betsie had envisioned!
Liberation finally came to Haarlem in May 1945. For the first time in five years, the Dutch flag hung from the windows and the once-forbidden Dutch national anthem played non-stop on the radio. Almost immediately after, the first wave of what would become hundreds of people began making their way to the house in Bloemendaal. Everyone who came was scarred by the war, either physically or psychologically. These were people who had lost husbands wives, siblings, and even children. Many of them had spent years in concentration camps or in hiding.
The house became a place of refuge, where the wounded and weary could heal their psychological wounds and process the experience of their war trauma. Corrie saw it as her mission to tend to all those who had been destroyed by the war—including the perpetrators and collaborators.
Indeed, former NSB operatives had been ostracized and publicly humiliated by their neighbors, who often forcefully shaved the heads of the former collaborators and paraded them through the streets in revenge for the suffering and pain they had caused during the war. Corrie understood this need on the part of survivors for emotional release, but she also knew that even former Nazis were creatures of God, deserving of love and forgiveness.
Corrie knew that she could not keep her efforts to spread the word of Jesus Christ confined to Haarlem, or even to The Netherlands. She was compelled by Christian duty to take the message to all corners of the world. And for the next four decades until her death in 1983, this is precisely what she did.
She believed that God had given her certain experiences in life, as a concentration camp survivor, to prepare her for her true mission and purpose. Corrie first traveled to war-torn Germany, the home of her persecutors, to share the message of Christ the redeemer to a traumatized people. She helped people whose lives had been destroyed by war and hate find hope and meaning in the world.
One day in Munich, after a church service, Corrie encountered a man she didn’t expect to see: one of the former SS guards she had known at Ravensbruck. This presented Corrie with one of her hardest challenges yet. This man had caused her untold suffering. When he reached his hand out to Corrie, she struggled to accept it and found herself searching for the strength to forgive this man. And yet, she did—for Corrie had come to understand that the world hinged on God’s love and forgiveness. If God could see a way to salvation for this man, so could Corrie ten Boom.
Later, Corrie spearheaded the efforts to open a rehabilitation center in Germany—on the site of the former Darmstadt concentration camp. This was the ultimate fulfillment of Betsie’s dying dream at Ravensbruck, to transform a symbol of hatred and destruction into one of love and renewal.
Corrie ten Boom went on to travel the world as a renowned public speaker, visiting more than 60 countries in her lifetime. She went to far-flung and dangerous places, including Russia, China, Cuba, and other Communist-aligned countries. She saw scenes of dire poverty and oppression, just as she had witnessed in the concentration camps—but she also saw hope and love. In Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Europe, she shared her personal story and delivered her constant, unchanging message: that Jesus’s love was unconquerable.
Explore the main takeaways from The Hiding Place.
In a few sentences, explore the conflict between Corrie’s Christian ideals and her defiance of the Nazi occupation authorities.
Explain how Corrie’s belief that God’s divine plan determined the course of all human events sustained and strengthened her during the Holocaust.
Why do you think Betsie was so able to forgive her persecutors and even see them as victims?