Corrie ten Boom

Corrie ten Boom was a forty eight year old Dutch watchmaker and lay Christian when the Germans invaded the Netherlands in May 1940. She and her sister Betsie lived with their elderly father Casper ten Boom in the family’s combined home and watch shop at Barteljorisstraat 19 in Haarlem, a few streets from the Grote Markt. The ten Boom family had been Protestant Christians of the Dutch Reformed Church for several generations and had been actively involved in the Haarlem Jewish community for more than a century, on the basis of a family theological reading that the Jews were the people of God and that the church owed them a particular pastoral debt. Casper ten Boom prayed daily for the Jews of Israel in the family’s morning devotions. The pre-war family had hosted Jewish neighbours regularly in their home and had been respected figures in the Haarlem Jewish community for two generations.

The family began sheltering Jewish refugees in late 1942, after the Dutch deportations to Westerbork had begun in July 1942 and after a Jewish neighbour had appealed for help. Corrie set up a hidden room behind a false brick wall in her own bedroom on the third floor of the Beje, the family’s name for the Barteljorisstraat house. The room, around two feet wide and four feet long, was accessed through a small panel low on the bedroom wall and could hold up to six adults standing upright in cramped conditions. The family also sheltered Jewish refugees in other rooms of the house and rotated them through the hidden room when raids were imminent. The Beje became a clearing house for the Haarlem Jewish underground, with around eight hundred Jewish refugees passing through it between 1942 and the family’s arrest in February 1944. Most of the refugees stayed only a few days before being moved on to longer-term hiding places in the surrounding countryside; six refugees were in the house, and four of those were in the hidden room, on the day of the arrest.

The arrest came on 28 February 1944 after a Dutch informer, Jan Vogel, had tipped the Gestapo to the family’s underground work. The Gestapo searched the Beje for two days but did not find the hidden room. The four Jewish refugees in the hidden room remained inside for the duration of the search, were freed by Dutch underground colleagues two days later, and survived the war. The two Jewish refugees in the rest of the house were captured along with the entire ten Boom family. Casper ten Boom died of pneumonia at the Scheveningen prison in The Hague on 9 March 1944, ten days after the arrest, aged eighty four. Corrie and Betsie ten Boom were sent to Vught and then to Ravensbrück. Betsie died at Ravensbrück of disease and exhaustion on 16 December 1944, aged fifty nine. Corrie was released from Ravensbrück on 28 December 1944 through what was later determined to be an administrative error in the camp office that the SS had not corrected before her release. The other women in her age cohort were gassed in early January 1945. Corrie ten Boom returned to Haarlem in early 1945 to find that her elderly mother had died and that the watch shop had been looted but that the building was intact. The hidden room was still there.

Corrie ten Boom became after the war one of the most widely read Christian writers of the twentieth century. Her memoir The Hiding Place, written with John and Elizabeth Sherrill and published by Chosen Books in 1971, sold around six million copies in English alone and was translated into more than thirty languages. The 1975 film of the same title, directed by James F. Collier and starring Jeannette Clift, was distributed by Billy Graham’s evangelistic association and became a standard film in evangelical Protestant churches. The case is, by some way, the most read account of Holocaust rescue in the evangelical Christian world.

The wider influence of the case in the evangelical world has been on the level of religious testimony as much as historical record. Corrie ten Boom’s writings and lectures, in the United States, Britain and the Netherlands, took the catastrophe and the rescue work of her family as the occasion for a Christian witness on the themes of forgiveness, divine providence and the duty to love one’s enemies. The most quoted passage in her postwar work is her account of meeting one of the former Ravensbrück guards at a church service in Munich in 1947, of recognising him, of struggling with the impulse to refuse to take his offered hand, and of finally taking it on the basis of a felt prompting that the duty to forgive was the central Christian work and that her own forgiveness of the man would be the only way to allow her sister Betsie’s death to mean something. The passage is the most influential single piece of postwar Holocaust writing in evangelical Christian publishing.

Corrie ten Boom died at her home in Placentia, California, on her ninety first birthday, 15 April 1983. Yad Vashem named her Righteous Among the Nations in 1967. The Beje at Barteljorisstraat 19 in Haarlem is preserved as a museum, the Corrie ten Boom House, and is open to visitors. The hidden room is in place behind the false brick wall and visitors can stand inside it.

See also

Sources

  • Corrie ten Boom, John Sherrill and Elizabeth Sherrill, The Hiding Place, Chosen Books, 1971
  • Corrie ten Boom, Tramp for the Lord, Christian Literature Crusade, 1974
  • Corrie ten Boom, Prison Letters, Fleming H. Revell, 1975
  • James F. Collier, director, The Hiding Place, World Wide Pictures, 1975
  • Yad Vashem, file on the ten Boom family, Righteous Among the Nations, 1967
  • Corrie ten Boom House, Haarlem, archive and exhibition