Sometimes God calls his children to trust and maintain their integrity under extreme circumstances and suffering. The Hiding Place (2006; Chosen Books), by Corrie ten Boom (1892-1983) and Elizabeth and John Sherril, is one such story. Corrie’s story reminds us that, though we mostly crave comfort and stability, God often molds and uses us, if we’ll let him, most effectively through suffering.
The ten Booms were long a watchmaking family in pre-WWII Holland. Corrie’s father, Casper ten Boom, was well known and loved throughout the country and was a celebrated fixture of their town of Haarlem. Renown as a watchmaker did not ensure financial comfort, as the family was constantly struggling to pay bills (partly because Casper often forgot to collect on bills for services rendered). But their small, old, quirky hodge-podge of a home, the Beje, was a hub of community activity. The ten Booms, devoted Christians, were comprised of Father, Mother, three aunts, and children Willem, Nollie, Betsie, and Corrie. By the time war, German occupation, and the Holocaust came to Holland in 1940, the household included Father, two aunts, Betsie, and Corrie.
The Hiding Place primarily is set during the devastating period of German oppression during and just prior to World War 2. Hollanders had held out hope that their nation would be left alone, as they had been in World War 1. It was a short-lived hope. Holland was too strategically valuable in Germany’s plans for conquest, domination, and genocide against Jews.
The ten Booms’ daily rhythms of morning and evening Bible reading, prayers, meals with whomever happened to be at the Beje at the time (or who came in need), serving the community in timepiece making and repairing, social comings and goings of townspeople—all were disrupted or halted altogether by the German invasion and conquest in May, 1940. Life for the ten Booms had changed forever, as it had for millions across Europe.
Corrie describes the family devotional rhythms in some detail. It’s therefore relatively easy to connect the dots between their faith patterns and subsequent choices to join the underground operations in saving Jewish lives. The reader does not get the sense that these were agonizing decisions for the ten Booms. They were as natural as Corrie’s daily stroll about town. Decisions to get involved that obviously presented great risk to themselves (and everyone they knew) were quickly made. Their choices came calmly from the character that had been deeply formed. One suspects that if you had asked Corrie ten Boom about that time, about how hard it had been to choose to do what she did, she might have been a little puzzled. She likely would have responded with some bemused version of, “Well, what else would I do?”
The connection of faith and actions under pressure for the ten Booms was illustrated aptly with the telling of Corrie’s father’s arrest. As Casper was being checked into the prison camp he was given the opportunity to go free if he would promise not to “cause any more trouble.” His immediate response: “If I go home today, tomorrow I will open my door again to any man in need who knocks.” Casper ten Boom died in prison ten days later.
For nearly two years unmarried Corrie and Betsie and their widowed father stayed a step ahead of the Nazi S.S. (secret police) and helped scores of Jews reach safe houses. It was harrowing work, as you might imagine. Typically, clients would spend time at the Beje, with its now-famous secret 30-inch x 10 ft secret room for emergencies, before a more permanent, safer, situation could be arranged. It got harder as the war progressed, as the Germans got smarter about the underground’s tactics and food shortages became acute.
Before the war, Corrie would have been astounded at the thought that she would assume such a pivotal, precarious role in the underground. She would not have considered herself to be especially brave or skilled at evading the cunning and paranoid German occupiers. Her role grew to include arranging the theft of food ration cards and identity cards. She had to develop her own network of clandestine rebels. She had to quickly learn to behave naturally in dangerous situations. You could never tell who would turn out to be an informer. But learn she did, relying on intensive prayer in every precarious encounter.
The Gestapo caught up to the ten Booms in early 1944. The last half of The Hiding Place mostly recounts Corrie’s and Betsie’s experience in German prison camps in Holland and, eventually, Germany. This part of the story is sometimes hard to read, as you might expect. It is also often an exquisitely beautiful description of faithfulness, Christlikeness, and seemingly impossible love for cruel enemies.
In Corrie’s telling, her frail sister Betsie’s approach to life and extreme circumstances often amazed her. At one point, pondering Betsie’s serene response to some hideous abuse, Corrie mused, “And I wondered, not for the first time, what sort of person she was, this sister of mine…what kind of road she followed while I trudged beside her on the all-too-solid earth.” Much of the attractiveness of The Hiding Place stems from Corrie’s admiration and deep love for her sister. Corrie adoringly describes Betsie’s responses to their ordeal. Some representative samples:
- “And then, incredibly, Betsie began to pray for the Germans, up there in the planes, caught in the fist of the giant evil loose in Germany. I looked at my sister kneeling beside me in the light of burning Holland. ‘Oh Lord,’ I whispered, ‘listen to Betsie, not me, because I cannot pray for those men at all.”
- “Betsie ten Boom is in cell 312. She says to tell you that God is good. ‘Oh, that was Betsie! That was every inch Betsie!’”
- Faced with the realization that they were to be in a Nazi prison camp for the foreseeable future: “’Betsie!’ I wailed, ‘how long will it take?’ ‘Perhaps a long, long time. Perhaps many years. But what better way could there be to spend our lives?’”
- Having been forced to strip in front of sadistic S.S. guards: “I leaned toward Betsie, ahead of me in line. Her shoulder blades stood out sharp and thin beneath her blue-mottled skin. ‘Betsie, they took His clothes, too.’ Ahead of me I heard a little gasp. ‘Oh Corrie. And I never thanked Him…’”
The truth is that both Corrie’s and Betsie’s faithfulness to Christ in those soul-deadening prisons were remarkable and fruitful. At the notorious Ravensbruck concentration camp, the sisters took advantage of the extreme overcrowding and the German guards’ fear of the rampant lice and fleas to hold a nightly, multi-lingual worship service. The absurdly overcrowded dormitory contained aisle after aisle of rickety platform beds, stacked three high and crammed together. The women, desperate for something transcending their bleak reality, would come, filling the nearby platforms to nearly the breaking point. They would sing or whisper hymns. Corrie had smuggled in a Dutch Bible that would be read and translated into German, French, Polish, Russian, Czech, and back into Dutch. Corrie described those times as “little previews of heaven.” Eventually, so many wanted to join the sisters added a second service after evening roll call.
Betsie died at Ravensbruck in December, 1944, two weeks before Corrie’s discharge. (Corrie later learned that her discharge had been due to a clerical error—all the women her age were executed the following week.) Betsie’s received vision of how to help heal survivors of the concentration camps or the years of hiding in attics and hidden rooms guided Corrie’s post-war life. Corrie soon opened Bloemendaal in Holland, a place of healing for those damaged souls. She would speak around the world, as much as twenty times in a week, about her experiences and God’s faithfulness amid darkness.
What are the lessons of The Hiding Place? Here’s my partial list:
- Pressure tends to reveal our true character. A strictly intellectual encounter with Jesus will not sustain you.
- God can use ordinary, faithful people in extraordinary ways.
- The love of Christ becomes more than an abstraction in extreme circumstances. It becomes the more precious and obvious as the norms of society disintegrate and human depravity and selfishness are loosed.
- Suffering can refine us like nothing else.
The foreward to The Hiding Place was written by Joni Eareckson Tada, another valiant servant of Christ, confined to a wheelchair as a quadriplegic for decades since a teenage diving accident. Joni says the book shows Corrie’s “ability to look straight into the terrifying jaws of a gas-chambered hell and walk courageously into the sunshine of the other side…”, crediting it as impactful in her own struggle against despair after her paralysis. The two eventually met, with Corrie proclaiming in her thick Dutch accent, “Oh, Joni, it will be a grand day when we will dance together in heaven!”
I imagine that the heavenly dance of Corrie, Betsie, and Joni will be sweeter and more worshipful than most.