My son has been reading The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom this past month. He's reading it for school. I've read the book a couple of times. I've also read Corrie ten Boom’s other books—In My Father's House, which are recollections of her childhood and young adult years, and Tramp for the Lord, stories of her travels after the war.
My son needed me to find a copy of the book because he forgot to bring home his school copy. The problem is, I loaned the book to a friend last month, along with In My Father's House and Tramp for the Lord.
I have a friend whose parentage is German and French, and she was interested in borrowing these books. She said something interesting when she was visiting one day. With her German side of the family, there's a gap. There's a silence and no stories from that era. So, she was interested in reading Corrie ten Boom’s books—stories from someone who had firsthand experience.
The Hiding Place narrative begins in 1937. Corrie, the daughter of a Dutch watchmaker, is 45 years old and still living in her upstairs childhood home, while the watch shop is downstairs. Her older sister Betsie is also unmarried and they operate the shop with their father, who is in his 70s.
Then Holland is occupied by Germans and they have to decide if they are going to respond to the need when Jews start getting rounded up and taken away. So these simple people, two women in their fifties and their father begin a new life of secrecy, hiding Jews in a little hiding space upstairs. Their extended family is also involved and the activities lead to their arrest.
Corrie’s father dies after only 10 days in prison. The last time Corrie is with her father is while they are being questioned:
Suddenly the chief interrogator’s eye fell on Father. “That old man!” he cried. “Did he have to be arrested? You, old man!” The Gestapo chief leaned forward. “I’d like to send you home, old fellow,” he said. “I’ll take your word that you won’t cause any more trouble.”
I could not see Father’s face, only the erect carriage of his shoulders and the halo of white hair above them. But I heard his answer. “If I go home today,” he said evenly and clearly, “tomorrow I will open my door again to any man in need who knocks.”
Corrie and Betsie are separated at first but eventually reunited when they are taken to Ravensbruck, a women’s concentration camp in Germany.
One thing that stands out to me throughout the story is the way Corrie contrasts her older sister Betsie. Corrie’s mind and heart rage with fear and doubt, bewilderment and anger and frustration while Betsie seems to flow over with graciousness, faith, and a refusal to complain even in the very worst circumstances.
As Betsie's health declines, she continues to make plans and whispers to Corrie about what they will do once they get out. She envisions a place of healing for people who are broken by the war, a place with a garden where they can find new life by planting things in the soil and watching them grow.
Betsie was always very clear about the answer for her and me. We were to have a house, a large one … to which people who had been damaged by concentration camp life would come until they felt ready to live again in the normal world.
“It’s such a beautiful house, Corrie! The floors are all inlaid wood, with statues set in the walls and a broad staircase sweeping down. And gardens! Gardens all around it where they can plant flowers. It will do them such good, Corrie, to care for flowers! … It’s ready and waiting for us ... such tall, tall windows! The sun is streaming in—”
At some point, Corrie realizes these plans Betsie has are not just for the prisoners but for the captors as well. Time and again, when they witness some brutal treatment, while Corrie has sympathy for those who are suffering, she has nothing but rage and anger toward the prison guards. But her sister's heart is broken for both the captives and the captor; her heart wants to see healing on both sides.
Betsie doesn't make it out of the concentration camp. Three days after Betsie's death, Corrie receives her release papers. It is only years later that she realizes this release was due to a clerical error. Ten days after she left Ravensbruck, every woman her age was killed.
The book says that 96,000 women were killed in Ravensbruck during World War II. I am crying as I write this number because I can't grasp it—that staggering number of mothers, grandmothers, and daughters who were killed for no other reason than that they were the “wrong” race, or they held the “wrong” beliefs or they refused to remain silent and stood up against a system that was brutally exterminating entire races of people.
After Corrie's release, after the end of World War II, she is able to fulfill her sister’s dreams. And she realizes it wasn't just the vague dreams of a dying woman but the visions were so remarkably accurate, down to the exact appearance of the estate where she ends up homing hundreds of people who need healing.
Mrs. Bierens de Haan met me at the entrance to her estate. Together we walked up an avenue of ancient oaks meeting above our heads. Rounding the final bend, we saw it, a fifty-six room mansion in the center of a vast lawn.
“We’ve let the gardens go,” Mrs. Bierens de Haan said. “But I thought we might put them back in shape. Don’t you think released prisoners might find therapy in growing things?”
I didn’t answer. I was staring up at the gabled roof and the leaded windows. Such tall, tall windows. . . . “Are there—” my throat was dry. “Are there inlaid wood floors inside, and a grand gallery around a central hall, and—and bas-relief statues set along the walls?”
Mrs. Bierens de Haan looked at me in surprise. “You’ve been here then! I don’t recall—”
“No,” I said, “I heard about it from—” I stopped. How could I explain what I did not understand?
“From someone who’s been here,” she finished simply, not understanding my perplexity.
“Yes,” I said. “From someone who’s been here.”
Throughout the story, I found myself relating far more to Corrie than to Betsie. I would have been filled with rage and anger; I probably would have given up altogether. Forgiveness and grace would have been the last thing on my mind when seeing the ill-treatment of other people, the brutality.
But the two sisters needed each other; I don't think Corrie would have made it without Betsie, and Betsie would not have survived as long as she did without Corrie.
Corrie writes of the way her sister’s presence transformed the huge barracks they were assigned to in Ravensbruck, where 1,400 women were crammed into a place made for 400. In the beginning, there were scuffles and fights and frustration and anger with women being sent there from so many different countries, but eventually, things began to change.
Corrie had managed to smuggle a Bible into the concentration camp, and they began holding services that would probably not resemble the services of any single denomination:
Betsie and I made our way to the rear of the dormitory room where we held our worship “service.” … They were services like no others. A single meeting might include a recital of the Magnificat in Latin by a group of Roman Catholics, a whispered hymn by some Lutherans, and a sotto-voce chant by Eastern Orthodox women. With each moment the crowd around us would swell, packing nearby platforms, hanging over the edges, until the structures groaned and swayed.
At last either Betsie or I would open the Bible. Because only the Hollanders could understand the Dutch text, we would translate aloud in German. And then we would hear the life-giving words passed back along the aisles in French, Polish, Russian, Czech, back into Dutch. They were little previews of heaven, these evenings beneath the lightbulb. I would think of Haarlem, each substantial church set behind its wrought iron fence and its barrier of doctrine. And I would know again that in darkness God’s truth shines most clear.
Corrie ten Boom spent decades traveling, speaking of her experiences and of the power of forgiveness. For her, it wasn’t a vague or light thing, to forgive. She knew the cost—and power—of that act. She writes of forgiveness time and again.
My son, who finished reading the story last week, has been interested in World War II for years. He could probably name every aircraft and tank and battleship they used in the war. He's a boy who has always been interested in vehicles, so I suppose it makes sense that his interest in World War II also rests along these lines but sometimes I find myself frustrated or grieved that it's the war machines he seems interested in and not the people, their stories.
I'm glad he read this book. I'm glad he was able to read the story of a simple woman and her family who, when faced with the question of whether they would close their eyes to the need around them because it didn't affect them and they didn't really have to respond, they opened their hearts and their homes even though it cost some of them their very lives.
Corrie ten Boom passed away in 1983, the year after I was born. She is no longer a traveler and speaker, no longer a “tramp for the Lord” yet I can’t help but feel her story is more important than ever today.
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