Corrie ten Boom and the People She Would Not Abandon

In the old city of Haarlem, in the Netherlands, there stood a narrow house above a watch shop. For generations the ten Boom family mended clocks there, and for generations they loved the Jewish people as their own. The grandfather had prayed for the peace of Jerusalem. The father, Casper, an old man with a long white beard, read his Hebrew Scriptures and welcomed his Jewish neighbours like family. And then came the Nazis, and the love that had been quiet for a hundred years was put to the test.

Corrie ten Boom was past fifty when the war came. An unmarried woman, a watchmaker like her father, a teacher of children. Not a soldier. Not a fighter. But when the trucks came and the Jewish families of Haarlem began to vanish, the ten Booms did not look away. They opened their door. They became part of the resistance. And in the wall of Corrie's own bedroom, hidden builders constructed a secret room, a hiding place, barely deep enough to stand in.

Think of what that meant. To shelter a hunted neighbour was to gamble your own life. And night after night, the doorbell rang, and frightened people slipped inside. The ten Booms fed them. They got them papers. They hid them behind a false wall when the danger came close. By most accounts, this old watchmaker's family helped save hundreds of lives. Casper was asked if he knew the risk. As the story is remembered, he answered that it would be an honour to give his life for God's ancient people.

Then, in February 1944, an informer betrayed them. The Gestapo stormed the house. They tore at the walls, they questioned, they threatened, but they never found the hiding place. Behind that false wall, six people stood frozen in the dark, breathing as quietly as they dared, while soldiers raged in the room beyond. They were not found. They lived.

But the family was taken. Corrie, her sister Betsie, their old father Casper, all arrested. Casper was eighty-four. Ten days after they took him, he died in a prison corridor. Corrie and Betsie were sent on, deeper into the machinery of death, to a concentration camp called Ravensbruck. There, in the cold and the filth and the hunger, the two sisters held to their faith. Betsie, frail and gentle, kept saying that no pit was so deep that God was not deeper still. And in that pit, she died.

Corrie survived. She walked out of Ravensbruck in the last days of 1944, released, it is said, through a clerical error, days before the women her age were put to death. She came home to the empty house above the watch shop. Father gone. Betsie gone. The Jewish friends scattered into the storm. She had lost almost everything a person can lose.

And here is the wonder of it. She did not lock the door and grieve in silence. She carried the story out into the world. For the rest of her long life she travelled and spoke, telling what her family had done and what God had done in the darkest place she had ever known. She spoke of forgiveness so costly it could only come from heaven. She spoke of a love that had not stayed warm words in a comfortable house, but had become shelter, and risk, and prison, and death.

The ten Boom love for the Jewish people was never sentiment. It was a hiding place built into a bedroom wall. It was an old man dying for neighbours who shared his Scriptures. It was two sisters in a death camp who would not stop believing that God was deeper than the pit. What the world remembers is not the broken family, nor the betrayed house. It is this. When love is real, it does not flee the danger of the ones it loves. It moves in beside them.