Working with a committee of the German Lutheran Church, Corrie opened the camp in Darmstadt in 1946 as a home and place of renewal. It functioned in this way until 1960, when it was torn down to make room for new construction in a thriving new Germany.
The home in Bloemendaal served ex-prisoners and other war victims exclusively until 1950, when it also began to receive people in need of care from the population at large. It is still in operation today, in its own new building, with patients from many parts of Europe. Since 1967 it has been governed by the Dutch Reformed Church.
Willem died of tuberculosis of the spine in December 1946. He wrote his last book, a study of sacrifice in the Old Testament, standing, because the pain of his illness would not allow him to sit at a desk.
Just before his death, Willem opened his eyes to tell Tine, “It is well—it is very well—with Kik.” It was not until 1953 that the family learned definitely that his twenty-year-old son had died in 1944 at the concentration camp in Bergen-Belsen. Today a “ten Boom Street” in Hilversum honors Kik.
As a result of his wartime experiences, Peter van Woerden dedicated his musical gifts to God’s service. In addition to composing devotional songs, including a setting for the Psalms and Proverbs, he carried out an international music ministry. He eventually traveled with his wife and five children as a family singing group, bearing the message of God’s love throughout Europe and the Middle East.
In 1959 Corrie was part of a group that visited Ravensbruck, which was then in East Germany, to honor Betsie and the 96,000 other women who died there. There Corrie learned that her own release had been part of a clerical error; one week later all women her age were taken to the gas chamber.
When I heard Corrie speak in Darmstadt in 1968, she was 76, still traveling ceaselessly in obedience to Betsie’s certainty that they must “tell people.” Her work took her to 61 countries, including many “unreachable” ones on the other side of the Iron Curtain. To whomever she spoke—African students on the shores of Lake Victoria, farmers in a Cuban sugar field, prisoners in an English penitentiary, factory workers in Uzbekistan—she brought the truth the sisters learned in Ravensbruck: Jesus can turn loss into glory.
John and I made some of those trips with her, the only way to catch this indefatigable woman long enough to get the information we needed to tell her story. Even with an unscheduled evening ahead of us in some hotel room in Austria or Hungary, it was hard to get her to think back. She was impatient with questions about past events, all her attention centered on next morning’s breakfast meeting with local pastors or the coming rally for young people: “Oh, those teenagers will be so happy to know that God loves them!”
Our best talks came during the times she stayed in our home in Chappaqua. Our own teenage kids loved her visits, loved her ability to laugh at herself—like the time the chocolate ice cream from the first cone she had ever eaten kept running down her hand onto her blouse and shoes. “No, Aunt Corrie! You have to lick around the bottom of the scoop. Watch—like this!”
Most of all, they loved the fact that each of them was as important to her as the loftiest church leader or city mayor. They loved the simple, concrete way she could convey theological abstractions. I remember the time thirteen-year-old Liz and I were helping Corrie unpack. From the bottom of the suitcase, Liz lifted a folded cloth with some very amateur-looking needlework on it—uneven stitches, mismatched colors, loose threads, snarls.
“What are you making?” Liz asked, bewildered.
“Oh, that’s not mine,” Corrie said. “That’s the work of the greatest weaver of all.”
Liz looked dubiously at the tangled mess.
“But Liz,” Corrie told her, “you’re looking at the wrong side!” She took the sorry thing from Liz’s hand. “This is what our lives look like, from our limited viewpoint.”
Then, with a flourish, Corrie shook open the cloth and turned it around to display a magnificent crown embroidered in red, purple, and gold. “But when we turn over the threads of our lives to God, this is what He sees!”
In her mid-eighties, failing health brought an end to Corrie’s missionary journeys. Friends provided Corrie a “retirement” house in Orange County, California, but of course, even bedridden and for the last five years unable to speak, Corrie never stopped witnessing to God’s love. You would come to cheer her up, but you would be the one who would leave that silent bedroom, spirit mysteriously and gloriously renewed.
At 11:00 at night on her ninety-first birthday—April 15, 1983— Corrie, in the phrase she had always used, “went home” at last.
For readers of Guideposts who had followed Corrie’s adventures, and for myself most of all, I wrote down my reaction to the news of her death:
I tried to be glad for Corrie when the phone call came from California: she’d waited for her “homecoming” so long. But death, from the perspective of earth, means saying good-bye. Feeling my loss, I roamed our house, touching one by one the physical objects she’d given us over the years. An antique brass kettle. A small square picture frame. An even smaller round one.
Little things that recalled big truths our friend shared. . . .
The kettle spoke to me about priorities. It was Betsie who’d spied it, dented and soot-encrusted, in a junkyard one morning on her way to the market. She bought it with the meat money.
“Betsie!” cried Corrie, coming upstairs from the watch shop. “What are we going to do with that old thing? Look, it won’t even hold water!”
“It’s not meant to hold water,” Betsie replied with dignity.
“Well, what’s it for, then?”
“It’s not ‘for’ anything. Oh, Corrie, wait till I get the grime off! Can’t you just see the morning sun glowing on this spout?
“I got stew meat instead of a roast,” she hurried on. “You know stew is really easier for Father to chew, and I’m not hungry today. Oh, Corrie, this kettle will go on shining long after we’ve forgotten what we had for dinner tonight!”
And so it did. It shone for the hunted people who found shelter in the Beje. It shone for Corrie when she returned there alone from the concentration camp, and from her tireless trips to Russia, China, Vietnam. It shines in our home today, saying, What feeds the soul matters as much as what feeds the body.
In the square frame is a piece of yellow cloth cut in the shape of a six-pointed star. Across the star are four black letters: jood, the Dutch word for Jew. When I was in Holland researching Corrie’s story, she took me to the home of Meyer Mossel—“Eusebius” during the Nazi occupation. We sipped tea while Corrie and Eusie reminisced.
“You’d take your pipe with you,” Corrie reminded him, recalling the practice drills, “but you’d forget your ashtray, and I’d have to come running after you.”
Eusie set down his cup and crossed the room to a massive antique sideboard. From the bottom drawer, buried beneath a pile of table linen, he drew out a scrap of yellow cloth cut in the shape of a star.
“All these years I wondered why I saved this thing,” he said. “Now I know it was to give to you, Corrie.”
We picked out the frame for Eusie’s star that very afternoon. For years it hung on Corrie’s wall as it hangs now on ours—a symbol bittersweet as a cross. To me the star says, Whatever in our life is hardest to bear, love can transform into beauty.
And the little round frame? It holds a piece of cloth, too—ordinary white cotton, the kind underwear is made of. In fact, it is underwear, a fragment of the undershirt Corrie was wearing when the Gestapo raid came.
In solitary confinement in the prison at Scheveningen, the first place she was taken after her arrest, idleness was eroding Corrie’s courage. Nollie smuggled a needle and thread to her, but soon the thread was used up. Then Corrie remembered the undershirt. She unraveled a hem. And now! Animals, houses, faces—she covered the undershirt with embroidery.
The design in the round frame is a flower, with elegant curling edges and six leaves on a graceful stem. You have to look closely to see the flower (the thread, of course, is the same color as the cloth). And underwear—even a dear friend’s—well, it isn’t the most costly of the things Corrie gave us. But it was the one that spoke most clearly now that she was gone.
The circle of white cotton told me that when we’re feeling poorest— when we’ve lost a friend, when a dream has failed, when we seem to have nothing left in the world to make life beautiful—that’s when God says, You’re richer than you think.
Elizabeth Sherrill
Chappaqua, New York
September 2005
For a short time in the 1970s, Corrie’s home in Haarlem, Holland, was open as a museum. In this photo, Corrie stands in front of the hiding place. The hole in the bricks is for visitors to see inside the hiding place more easily. The original entrance is through the bottom of the closet. Since 1988, the Corrie ten Boom House is once again an inspiring museum.