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Corrie ten Boom
Under His Wings You Shall Trust
Corrie and Betsie ten Boom. Being transported to Ravensbrück concentration camp.1
These eleven words, scrawled on a scrap of paper and squeezed through a slit in the boxcar and into a stranger’s hands, were Corrie and Betsie ten Boom’s only hope of getting a message to their family. The day before, more than seven hundred male prisoners had been executed at the work camp outside of Vught in occupied Holland, where the sisters had been imprisoned for the last few months. Now Corrie, Betsie, and hundreds of other women were herded into freight cars, where they would spend three days crushed by stench, filth, and the bodies of their fellow prisoners as they traveled deep into Germany toward one of the most notoriously brutal death camps in existence.
Only months earlier, Corrie and her older sister Betsie were living comfortably with their father, Casper, a watchmaker, in a cozy home above their watch repair shop in Haarlem, Holland (their mother had died several years earlier). From the outside, the ten Boom home, which they called the Beje, looked perfectly ordinary. But behind the brick walls and the tiny storefront, circumstances were anything but.
As the Second World War raged, the ten Boom home had become a refuge, part of the underground resistance movement for hiding and protecting Jews from the Nazis. The ten Booms hid as many as seven Jews and members of the Resistance in their “hiding place,” a secret room behind a hidden wall in Corrie’s third-floor bedroom. Some stayed for long periods, others for only a day or two before being transferred to another safe house. Corrie recalled hearing dire warnings from her father’s friends, who were worried that he would surely face imprisonment if he persisted in hiding Jews. She also remembered his determined reply: “I am too old for prison life, but if that should happen, then it would be, for me, an honor to give my life for God’s ancient people, the Jews.”2
The Raid
On the morning of February 28, 1944, Corrie, sick in bed with influenza, vaguely registered the sound of a buzzer ringing. Dulled by fever and a fierce headache, she struggled to make sense of the incessant noise. Suddenly she bolted upright in bed. The buzzing alarm wasn’t a drill. It was a raid.
Six refugees—four Jews and two members of the Resistance—dashed past her bed in a panicked frenzy and scrambled into the hiding place. Seconds after Corrie lowered the secret panel and leapt under the blankets again, a member of the Gestapo loomed at the foot of her bed. He demanded she dress and follow him downstairs, where she, her father, her two sisters, and other family members who’d gathered at the house that morning for a prayer meeting were beaten and interrogated while the officers searched for the hidden Jews. The Gestapo waited, seizing anyone who came to the shop under the auspices of watch repair. At the end of the day, thirty-five captives were hauled to prison. Although they ransacked the house, the Gestapo didn’t find what they sought most. The Jews were never discovered, and forty-seven hours later, they were freed from the cramped space behind Corrie’s bedroom wall and taken to new safe houses. Four of the six survived the war.
While being interrogated by the Gestapo, Corrie’s father was offered the opportunity for freedom. “I’d like to send you home, old fellow,” the chief officer said. “I’ll take your word that you won’t cause any trouble.” Corrie heard her father’s solemn answer: “If I go home today, tomorrow I will open my door again to any man in need who knocks.”3
In her preface to Prison Letters, Corrie wrote that as they huddled on the floor of the police station that night, “God used Father to prepare each of us in a special way for the unknown times that lay ahead. Father asked my brother Willem to read Psalm 91 and then Father prayed. ‘He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in him will I trust.”4
A few hours later, outside the gates of Scheveningen federal penitentiary, Corrie exchanged her last words with her father: “Father!” she called as she and Betsie were led to their cells, “God be with you!” Before the metal door slammed shut, she caught his reply: “And with you, my daughters.”5
Casper ten Boom died a prisoner ten days later.
Companionship and Grief
Corrie and Betsie spent four months at Scheveningen—Corrie in solitary confinement, Betsie in a cell with several other inmates. It was there they each learned by letter from their sister Nollie, who had been released, that their father had died in prison. “During my months of solitary confinement I often felt lonely and afraid,” Corrie wrote in the introduction to Prison Letters. “In such moments I recalled that last night with my father, sharing Psalm 91 and praying. I could remember some of those verses, especially that, ‘He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust . . .’ I would close my eyes and visualize that kind of protection . . . and with that thought in mind, I would fall asleep.”6
Four months after they arrived at Scheveningen, Corrie and Betsie were transferred to Vught, a German concentration camp for political prisoners in the southern part of Holland. Although living circumstances were more challenging at Vught, the sisters were overjoyed to be reunited. Corrie described her time at Vught as “a baffling mixture of good and bad.”7 On one hand, she was grateful for the clandestine prayer meetings she and Betsie held around their bunk at night, as well as for the companionship of other people after months in solitary confinement. But, she wrote, “What I had not realized in solitary confinement was that to have companions meant to have their griefs as well.”8
It wasn’t long before Corrie would endure a personal grief of her own. The relative ease of life at Vught came to an abrupt halt when the ten Boom sisters were loaded into the boxcar that transported them and eighty other prisoners—filthy, reeking from sitting in their own waste, and nearly perished from thirst—to Ravensbrück concentration camp, deep in the heart of Germany.
A Lamp unto Her Feet
“‘Ravensbrück!’ Like a whispered curse, the word passed back through the lines,” Corrie later wrote. “This was the notorious women’s extermination camp whose name we had heard even in Haarlem. That squat concrete building, that smoke disappearing in the bright sunlight—no! I would not look at it. As Betsie and I stumbled down the hill, I felt the Bible bumping between my shoulder blades. God’s good news. Was it to this world He had spoken it?”9
Corrie had carried her Bible with her all these months, stealthily hidden in a pouch that she suspended down her back beneath her threadbare dress. At Ravensbrück, she and Betsie clung to God’s Word as a lifeline. The reason they were there, engulfed by such seemingly pointless suffering, was clear to both the sisters: “From morning until lights-out, whenever we were not in ranks for roll call, our Bible was the center of an ever-widening circle of help and hope.”10
The suffering was relentless: brutal physical labor; little to no food; crowded, putrid sleeping platforms, with the women stretched feet-to-face without even adequate space to turn over or sit up. Each week they were paraded naked before leering guards for the “medical inspection.” But despite the ceaseless punishment and humiliation, God’s Word kept the sisters and dozens of other women steady. Corrie described the nights spent huddled under one weak lightbulb, the Bible open on her lap, as a preview of heaven. Women of all faiths and nationalities gathered around as Scripture verses were passed up and down the aisles in French, Polish, Russian, Czech, and back into Dutch.
When Corrie’s faith faltered, as it did more than once during her time at Ravensbrück, her sister steadfastly shone God’s light. “Betsie, how can we live in such a place!” Corrie wailed when she first glimpsed Barracks 28, where 1,400 women shared a flea-infested space designed to hold four hundred, with nine to a platform bed intended for four. When her sister answered, “Show us. Show us how,” Corrie realized Betsie was praying. “More and more the distinction between prayer and the rest of life seemed to be vanishing for Betsie.”11 Corrie observed her sister’s unfailing faith and found hope.
He Is Deeper Still
As the frigid December wind howled through the barren concentration camp, Betsie grew weaker and weaker, finally unable to stand on her own for the 4:30 a.m. roll call. It was then she began to speak about her plans for the future. First she talked excitedly about a home in Holland, where ex–war prisoners would recuperate amid peace and quiet. Later she spoke of refurbishing a German concentration camp where “the people warped by this philosophy of hate” would be rehabilitated and learn to love. And finally, the day before she died, Betsie pulled her sister down close to where she lay on the floor of the ramshackle hospital ward and whispered her last vision into Corrie’s ear: “We must tell them that there is no pit so deep that He is not deeper still. They will listen to us, Corrie, because we have been here.”12
The next morning, Corrie gazed through the filthy hospital window as the nurses lifted her sister’s emaciated body in a sheet and laid it on the floor next to the other corpses. Three days later, Corrie was called to the camp’s headquarters, where she was handed a certificate. She held it in her hand, reading the single word again and again, unable to process its meaning: “Entlassen.”
Released.
From Visions to Reality
Corrie later discovered that her release had been an accident, or, as she considered it, a miracle. In 1959, fourteen years after she was freed, Corrie visited Ravensbrück, where she learned that a clerk had mistakenly recorded her prisoner number on a list of those to be released instead of where it was intended: the execution list. One week after she gained her freedom, every woman Corrie’s age and older was executed at Ravensbrück.
In the months and years following her return to Haarlem, Corrie ten Boom concentrated on fulfilling her sister’s dying visions. With the help of a generous patron, she established a rehabilitation home in Holland for war victims and, later, a second rehabilitation facility for Germans at a former concentration camp in Darmstadt. Finally, at age fifty-three, Corrie launched a worldwide ministry that took her to sixty countries over thirty-three years to share her and Betsie’s story and to convey an unwavering message of hope in Jesus. Later, she funneled the proceeds from her books—A Prisoner and Yet, The Hiding Place, Tramp for the Lord, In My Father’s House, and Prison Letters—into her ministry. She died at her home, which she’d named Shalom House, in Los Angeles, California, on April 15, 1983—her ninety-first birthday.
Corrie ten Boom, her father Casper, her sister Betsie, and her entire extended family suffered unimaginable horrors for their convictions. Some of us may wonder if we would have made the same choices in such dire circumstances. Thankfully, most of us cannot even guess at an answer. What we can be sure of, though, is that the ten Boom family trusted entirely in God and his Word. Even when their faith faltered, even when darkness threatened to prevail, the Word of God cast a light of hope. Corrie and her sister Betsie lived deep in the pit and suffered more than most of us can possibly fathom. Only Corrie survived, but she lived to proclaim what her sister knew: that his love is indeed deeper still.13