CHAPTER 16

THE TEN BOOM FAMILY

Casper ten Boom and his wife, Cornelia, pose in the center of a family photograph surrounded by their four children. Left to right: Nollie, Corrie, Willem, and Betsie.

(CREDIT: YAD VASHEM)

 

“It would be an honor, for me, to give my life for God’s ancient people.”

SURROUNDED BY DOZENS of girls in uniform, Corrie ten Boom stood at attention and saluted the flag as tears streamed down her face. It was the summer of 1940, and the forty-eight-year-old Dutch woman was the founder and leader of the Nederlandse Meisjesclubs (Netherlands Girls Clubs), a Christian version of the Girl Scouts. Through Ten Boom’s organization, thousands of Dutch girls in Holland and its colonies had grown in their faith and developed a heart for the Lord and others, but after conquering Holland the Nazis had outlawed all such organizations. Now, at a final assembly, Ten Boom and her girls ceremoniously lowered the club flag, folded it, and prepared it for storage until a better day. “Girls, we mustn’t cry,” she told the numerous teary-eyed faces looking toward her. “We had great fun in the clubs, but it wasn’t just for a good time that we have come together. We have learned the important facts of what makes us strong, even in times of disaster. The Lord Jesus gives us security even in the insecurity of wartime.”1

Corrie ten Boom’s deep faith and her hope in Jesus Christ was typical—of her and her family. For generations the Ten Boom family had operated a watch and clock shop in the Dutch city of Haarlem, which was located twenty miles west of Amsterdam. The patriarch of the family and its highly regarded watchmaking business was eighty-one-year-old Casper ten Boom, who was assisted by Corrie and her oldest sister, Betsie. Corrie’s sister Nollie was a teacher, and her brother Willem was a pastor in the Dutch Reformed Church, to which all of the family belonged. Her mother, who had died early, had also been devout. A single woman who wore her dark blond hair in a bun, Corrie was a skilled watchmaker, but her greatest calling was serving the vulnerable and disadvantaged. Motivated by Jesus’s admonition that “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me,” she led the Netherlands Girls Clubs, tended to foster children, and taught Bible classes for learning-disabled children in Sunday school. Her father—who was her spiritual mentor—was especially supportive of her ministry to special-needs children. “Corrie,” he once told her, “what you do among these people is of little importance in the eyes of men, but I’m sure in God’s eyes it is the most valuable work of all.”2

From childhood Corrie and her siblings had been taught the biblical doctrine that the Jews were God’s chosen people—the elect—and her father believed that Nazi Germany would eventually suffer God’s punishment for abusing them. “I pity the Germans,” he said. “They have touched the apple of God’s eye.” In May 1942, a Jewish woman appeared at the Ten Boom home with suitcase in hand. The Nazis had seized her husband, she explained, and she had been told that the Ten Boom family had hearts for the Jews—could they help her? They promptly took her in, and the next night two more Jewish escapees appeared at the Ten Boom door. The family decided it was their biblical obligation to help protect “the apple of God’s eye” from persecution. The Ten Boom home was too close to the neighborhood police station to be a long-term hideaway, so they decided to use it as a halfway house, from which they would transfer refugees to safe houses through Pastor Willem, who had contacts with the Dutch resistance.³

Soon the entire family was assisting the resistance, and Corrie emerged as a key operative, directing an eighty-person network that operated safe houses for Jewish families, procured the ration cards required to buy food, and provided medicine for anyone who was ill. The flow of customers in and out of the family watch shop provided an effective cover for the arrival and departure of refugees. Although they aided anyone seeking safety from the Nazis, the family’s main calling was helping the Jews. On the third floor of the Ten Boom home—in Corrie’s bedroom—a resistance member who was skilled at constructing hideaways built a tiny secret room behind a false brick wall, and camouflaged it with stained paneling and an aged bookcase. It was about two and a half feet deep, and was accessed by a cleverly designed sliding panel. The family called it “the hiding place.” If the Gestapo suddenly raided the Ten Boom home, Jews and resistance members who might be sheltered there could scramble into the hiding place. For almost two years, the Ten Booms successfully conducted their clandestine operation, helping rescue more than eight hundred Jewish men, women, and children.4

Then, on February 28, 1944, Gestapo agents raided the Ten Boom home. Tipped off by a Dutch informant, they stormed into the watch shop and spread out through the family’s living quarters. At the time four Jews and two resistance members were staying in the Ten Boom home. With only seconds to spare, Corrie helped them scramble into the hiding place behind her bedroom. The raiders ransacked the house, but failed to discover the hiding place and its frightened occupants. They set up a trap, however, and took more than thirty people into custody, including friends attending a prayer service at the Ten Boom home. After a rough interrogation, the prisoners were marched to the nearby Haarlem police station, then transported to Gestapo headquarters in The Hague. Most were eventually released—but not Corrie, Betsie, and their father. The Gestapo commander took a long look at Casper ten Boom, who at eighty-four wore a long white beard. “I’d like to send you home, old fellow,” the officer said. “I’ll take your word that you won’t cause any more trouble.” The aging Ten Boom patriarch stood erect, looked the Nazi in the eye, and gently replied, “If I go home today, tomorrow I will open my door again to any man in need who knocks.”⁵

Soon afterwards, Casper ten Boom became ill and died in prison. Upon learning of his death, Corrie and Betsie found peace in the promises of Scripture that their dear father was in heaven and not in a concentration camp. They could remember the words he had spoken long before his arrest: “It would be an honor, for me, to give my life for God’s ancient people.” Corrie and Betsie were initially imprisoned in a penitentiary the Nazis had commandeered in the Dutch city of Scheveningen, then they were transferred to Vught, a Nazi transit camp located in southern Holland. Although Vught was a temporary camp for Jews, resistance members, and others awaiting deportation to labor or death camps, it too was operated by the SS, and conditions there were brutal. Prisoners were routinely starved and still forced to work at hard labor. Countless inmates died of illness, and any infraction of camp rules could result in hanging. At one point seventy-four women were crammed into a tiny cell as punishment, causing at least twelve to suffocate. A crematorium was kept busy disposing of prisoners bodies. Soon, however, conditions for the Ten Boom sisters worsened drastically: they were deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp, a notorious Nazi prison located about fifty miles north of Berlin. There more than 120,000 people from more than forty nations were imprisoned, including more than twenty thousand Jews. Over the course of six years, an estimated thirty thousand died—most of whom were women and children.6

“In the darkness God’s truth shines most clear.”

At Ravensbrück the Ten Boom sisters and other prisoners were forced to work as slave laborers, producing products for the Nazi war effort. Corrie and Betsy were housed in a filthy, overcrowded, and flea-infested barracks beside the room where prisoners were punished. “From there,” Corrie later recalled, “all day long and often into the night, came the sounds of hell itself. They were not the sounds of anger, or any human emotion, but of a cruelty altogether detached: blows landing in regular rhythm, screams keeping pace.” Soon after their imprisonment, Corrie and Betsie managed to obtain a small-sized Bible and took turns hiding it in a sack they wore under their prison uniforms. It became their daily saving grace. “Life in Ravensbrück took place on two separate levels, mutually impossible,” Corrie later wrote. “One, the observable external life, grew every day more horrible. The other, the life we lived with God, grew daily better, truth upon truth, glory upon glory.”7

With their precious contraband Bible—illuminated by the single dim lightbulb in their barracks—the sisters held secret nighttime Bible studies and worship services for the other prisoners. As they shared the Word of God in Dutch and German, the Scripture would race through the crowded barracks in a multitude of languages. “They were services like no others, these times in Barracks 28,” Corrie recollected years later. “They were little previews of heaven, these evenings beneath the light bulb.… And I would know again that in the darkness God’s truth shines most clear.” To Corrie her sister Betsie set an example of hope and truth in the sovereignty of God that modeled Christ’s love. As they prayed and talked together, they optimistically discussed what they would do when the war ended. Betsie’s vision was to build a center where they could minister to concentration camp victims—one with soothing green walls and beautiful flowers.⁸

Betsie sickened, and in December 1944 she died. Shortly before her death, she encouraged Corrie to persevere, even in Ravensbrück. “There is no pit so deep,” she said, “that He is not deeper still.” Two days after Betsie’s death, Corrie was summoned to Ravensbrück’s headquarters and told that her sentence was completed and she would be released. Two weeks later she was on a train back to Holland and the house above the watch shop. Later she would learn that her release from Ravensbrück had been the result of a clerical error, and that a week after she left, all the women of her age had been sent to the gas chamber. After the war she followed the vision that she and Betsie had received in Ravensbrück, and established rehabilitation centers for victims of Nazi brutality. One center was set up in a former concentration camp in Germany. In keeping with Betsie’s dream, she requested that the buildings be painted pastel green and all windows adorned with flower boxes.9

In the decades that followed, Corrie ten Boom felt called to share what God had shown her in prison, and she became a popular international speaker. Her message was a simple one: “Jesus can turn loss into glory.” She authored numerous books, including a best-selling account of her wartime experiences—The Hiding Place—which became a widely popular motion picture that helped expose the reality of the Holocaust to a new generation. She died in 1983, on her ninety-first birthday. Her story exposed countless people to the barbarity of the Jewish Holocaust, and also brought a message of personal forgiveness. In The Hiding Place, Corrie revealed that while speaking at a postwar church service in Munich, Germany, she was approached by a man from the audience whom she recognized as a brutal SS guard from Ravensbrück. He explained that he had recently come to accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. “To think,” he said, “that as you say, He has washed my sins away!” He then extended his hand and asked for Corrie’s forgiveness too. Anger and the desire for revenge welled within her: This monster had inflicted so much pain on so many—including her beloved sister Betsie. “I tried to smile,” she wrote, “I struggled to raise my hand. I could not.” Then she silently prayed, “Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me your forgiveness.” Immediately she felt an overwhelming peace and love that enabled her to take the former Nazi’s hand and forgive him. “And so,” she wrote, “I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on His. When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives, along with the command, the love itself.”¹⁰