1971
Corrie ten Boom was an unlikely hero, but a hero she certainly was. The humble daughter of a Dutch watchmaker, she stood up against the German Gestapo. She didn't have to do it, and {169} that made it even more remarkable. Some heroes have their circumstances thrust upon them, and in a time of crisis they rise to epic proportions. But Corrie deliberately chose to harbor Jews, defying the Nazis, knowing full well what would happen if she were caught.
The story of Corrie and her sister Betsie, along with Father ten Boom, as told in The Hiding Place, has become an enduring Christian classic, precisely because it is the story of an average Christian doing what a Christian should be doing. The book was made into a movie by Worldwide Pictures and it has also been translated into many different languages, making it available around the world. Total sales are in the millions.
When the film Schindler's List came out in the 1990s, some began comparing Corrie ten Boom's heroism with that of Otto Schindler. Yet in many ways Corrie's was even more remarkable.
Her story begins with the Dutch prime minister assuring his citizens that the Germans would not attack their peace-loving country. But that night Hitler attacked and suddenly the streets were teeming with German soldiers. In the town of Haarlem,
Corrie had operated clubs for girls and for mentally handicapped youth for nearly twenty years. But these she was forced to close down.
When German soldiers ransacked the shop of a Jewish merchant across the street, the ten Booms took him in. Soon other Jews were coming to the ten Boom home, which had several spare rooms. Eventually a secret room was built, a hiding place behind a false wall, into which the Jewish residents were herded
when the Nazis came to the door. Eventually, Corne and Betsie were arrested, along with their aged father, who died ten days later in a jail near The Hague. The sisters were sent to a labor camp in southern Holland and then (after the Allied invasion of Europe) to the Ravensbruck concentration camp, which housed thirty-five thousand women. This was known as "the concentration camp of no return," and it was here thaL Betsie ten Boom died.
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Before Betsie died, however, she had had a vision, and afterwards she told Corrie, "We must tell people how good God is. After the war, we must go around the world telling people. No one will be able to say that they have suffered worse than us. We can tell them how wonderful God is, and how His love will fill our lives, if only we will give up our hatred and bitterness."
During their imprisonment, that is what they did. The ten Booms kept telling others of God's goodness and of salvation in Jesus Christ. Finally, on New Year's Day 1945, under extraordinary circumstances, Corrie was released.
Back in Holland she established a rehabilitation home for vie-tims of concentration camps and a home for refugees on the site of a former concentration camp in Darmstadt. After the war, she became an ambassador of grace and forgiveness around the world, telling people of God's love and goodness, just as Betsie had prophesied.
Corrie wrote more than a dozen books, but her best-seller was The Hiding Place, and she used the proceeds to support missionary work. She was already o ver fifty years old when she was taken to the Nazi concentration camp, and no one would have blamed her for "retiring" after those experiences. But she remained active in her sixties, seventies, and even eighties, telling her story of God's love in the midst of crisis. She died in 1983, at the age of ninety-one.