The Hiding Place

Today is part of the holiest of days in both the Christian and the Jewish faiths. Today is Good Friday for Christians and the beginning of Passover for Jews. Both observances, in their own ways, revolve around the subjects of mercy and forgiveness and God’s love. “What might this have to do with the woman pictured here?”, you might well ask.

Corrie ten Boom was a Dutch Christian woman, who along with her father and sister, hid Jews in their home during WWII when the Nazis occupied Holland. The ten Boom family were a tight knit family, much loved by their community. Corrie’s father was a watchmaker as was his father before him. A wise and kind man. As a child, Corrie once asked him how she would be able to handle a difficult experience she was anticipating. She wondered when she would feel she was equipped to handle what she believed to be coming. “When we are taking a trip Corrie”, said her father, “when do I give you your ticket?”, he asked her. “When I get on the train”, replied Corrie. “And so it is with your Heavenly Father, Corrie.” He went on to explain to her that God gives us what we need when we need it, not before. When you are facing trouble and need wisdom and strength, He will give you what you need then. This message would be one Corrie would return to, and rely on again and again, for the wisdom in this lesson from her father.

As the Nazi occupation of Holland pressed on, the ten Booms were a family who was a vital part of the Nazi Resistance movement, with Corrie giving leadership and direction to the movement to assist, hide, and care for Jewish individuals and families who were being rounded up for imprisonment and execution under Hitler’s Nazi regime. Ultimately they created a secret room in their home with a false wall, to hide Jews they had taken in to live with them. When the Gestapo came looking and checking on them, their Jewish “guests” would escape to the room behind the false wall…escape to The Hiding Place.

When what they were up to was ultimately discovered, Corrie, her beloved sister Betsie, and their father Casper were taken away and imprisoned. The Jews hiding in their home were not found, they were all of them but one, eventually able to escape and find freedom.

Corrie’s father died in the first camp where they all were housed. Some time later, Corrie and Betsie were transferred to Ravenbruck, a Concentration Camp for women in Germany. During their imprisonment, using a very small Bible they had smuggled in with them, Corrie and Betsie held regular secret Bible studies and used Bible stories and Bible verses to encourage the women in the camp, to show them God’s love and to give them hope.

The two sisters often talked and planned for the home they would set up when they were eventually released and the war was over, to help those healing from the horrors of the concentration camps. Betsie told Corrie one morning that God had given her a dream the previous night that they were to have a mansion with inlayed wooden floors, tall leaded glass windows, a broad gallery around a central hall, and bas relief statues set around the walls. This, said Betsie, was where they would set up the home to help those God would bring to them. It was a most specific dream, one that seemed way beyond what Corrie could imagine or envision given their tiny, very modest family home in Haarlem, Holland that had been the site of The Hiding Place.

The sisters remained in Ravensbruck while the war raged on. It was there, under the harsh and inhuman treatment by the Nazi guards, that Betsie eventually succumbed to illness and died in December 1944. Very shortly before her death Betsie told Corrie, “There is no pit so deep, that the love of Christ is not deeper still.” Only 12 days later Corrie was released from Ravensbruck. Alone, now without her father or her sister, she returned to their little family home in Haarlem, and after a time, began giving talks about the horrors of the camps, as well as about God’s care and faithfulness to her. As the war ended, she began getting more and more requests to speak to groups about her experiences and about the dream to set up a home for those who survived the camps and who needed to heal from what had happened to them there.

One night when she had finished speaking, a very aristocratic looking lady approached Corrie. She explained to Corrie that she had 5 sons, all a part of the Resistance. She went on to say that 4 of the 5 had returned to her from the war, but that she had not heard for some time from the 5th, a young man called Jans. The woman went on to tell Corrie that she had been praying for her son’s safe return, and that while Corrie was giving her talk, she heard God speak to her and tell her that her son would be home soon, and that when he was, she was to turn over her home to Corrie to fulfill Betsie’s dream. Two weeks later Corrie received a message on a small slip of paper that simply read, “Jans is home”. The lady invited Corrie to come to her home to discuss how the house could now be used to help others. When Corrie arrived at the gates the lady was waiting and escorted her down a long driveway up to her 56 room mansion. Corrie stood in front of the house stunned and the woman invited her to follow her inside. There as she gazed up at the house, were tall leaded glass windows very visible from outside. Frozen in place and almost stammering, Corrie asked the lady “Are there inlaid wood floors and a broad gallery around a central hall and bas relief statues against the walls?” “Oh, you’ve been here then?”, said the lady. Just as Betsie had described the home…the mansion in her dream…here it lay in front of Corrie, being offered to her to do the work God had given them the vision to do.

At another of these talks she gave, there came the ultimate test of the forgiveness, God’s forgiveness, of which she spoke so often. When she finished speaking, she noticed a familiar figure and face approaching her, he was smiling. She became a statue as she realized the man coming ever closer was the very Nazi SS guard from Ravensbruck who had tortured her poor sister, Betsie and made their lives a nightmare. His face was glowing and he told her how wonderful it had been for him to experience the love and forgiveness of the God about whom she spoke. He was so very grateful for His mercy and forgiveness and had come to ask Corrie for hers as well. How? How could she possibly forgive this man who had been so cruel and hateful to her beloved sister and no doubt contributed to her illness and premature death? Yet she had spoken to large groups again and again about God’s forgiveness and our responsibility to forgive others because of what Jesus had done for all of us on the cross on that Good Friday long ago. Now she was coming face to face with having to show the very mercy and forgiveness she had so often encouraged others to show. In her book The Hiding Place, Corrie recounts how looking at this man she felt nothing but contempt and anger, yet in obedience to doing what God had said was the right thing to do, (but with no feelings of forgiveness of her own), she extended her hand to this former SS guard who was seeking her forgiveness. She recounts that as she physically took his hand in hers she miraculously felt a wave, a flooding of love and forgiveness towards him she could neither explain nor understand apart from it being God’s forgiveness coming through her and filling her heart.

Some years after the war was over, in 1959, Corrie returned to Ravensbruck for a ceremony to honor her sister, Betsie, and the 96,000 other women who had died there. It was then that she learned her own release from the camp all those years earlier had been a “mistake”… the result of a “clerical error”. One week after she had been freed to return home, all the women of her age group in the camp had been taken to the gas chambers.

We want to remember and celebrate this precious woman, a watchmaker, a Nazi Resistance organizer, an encourager, a lover of Jesus, for the thousands of lives she touched both during her life and even after with her book The Hiding Place. If you’ve never read it, now would be a good time to get a copy on Amazon or to listen to it on your mobile phone through the Audible app.

For as long as she was able, Corrie continued to speak all over the world about God’s goodness, His forgiveness and His love. This was her message and her mission. She died on her 91st birthday, April 15, 1983. Today would be Corrie ten Boom’s 130th birthday.

P.S. There are also two films regarding this story that you might be interested in watching. One is simply called The Hiding Place and is available on Amazon.

The second film was brought to our attention by our chum, Abbe and is called Return To The Hiding Place also available on Amazon.