Betsie ten Boom and a Home after the Camp

In the twentieth century there lived two sisters from a watchmaker's house in Haarlem, in the Netherlands, who would teach the world how hope can survive the worst that human cruelty can build. Their names were Corrie and Betsie ten Boom. Their family was old and devout, and their shop kept the time for a whole city. When the Nazis came and the hunting of Jews began, the ten Booms did a dangerous, ordinary thing. They opened their home. Behind a false wall in an upstairs bedroom, they hid their Jewish neighbours from the men who wanted them dead.

Then, in 1944, the family was betrayed. The Gestapo came. The old father died within days of his arrest. And Corrie and Betsie were carried east, deeper into the machine, until they arrived at a place whose very name was a verdict. Ravensbrueck.

There the picture closes in, and there is no softening it. Ravensbrueck was a women's concentration camp, a place of starvation, beatings, lice, cold, and death without number. The sisters slept crammed on filthy, flea-ridden straw. They were counted in the freezing dark at roll call. They watched women break and die. Betsie's body, never strong, began to fail under the weight of it. And in that pit of engineered evil, something strange happened. Betsie did not grow bitter. She grew tender. As Corrie remembered it in the years that followed, Betsie began to speak of what should come after. Not revenge. Not even escape. Betsie imagined homes. Houses of healing, she said, where the people broken by this cruelty could be made gentle and whole again, the wounded and even, somehow, the cruel.

Betsie did not live to build them. She died in Ravensbrueck in December of 1944, worn out at last. Corrie was at her side near the end, and by her account Betsie's hope did not flicker even then. She believed there was no pit so deep that God's love was not deeper still. Days after Betsie died, Corrie was released. It is remembered that her release came through a clerical error, and that the women her age were sent to the gas chambers in the week that followed. She walked out of that place alive when she was never meant to.

Now pull back, and let the meaning stand without dressing it up. Corrie ten Boom carried her sister's dying vision out of the camp and spent the rest of her long life making it real. She opened a home in the Netherlands for survivors of the camps, a place to rest and recover. She travelled the world telling what had happened, refusing both to deny the evil and to be ruled by it. She wrote it all down in a book called The Hiding Place, and through it Betsie's voice reached millions who would never know her name otherwise.

It must be said plainly. Betsie's hope did not make Ravensbrueck less wicked. It did not erase the murdered, nor lighten by one ounce the suffering of the Jewish people under that monstrous machine. What it did was stranger and harder. It looked the evil full in the face, and still believed in mercy on the far side of judgement. That is not sentimentality. That is the costliest kind of faith there is.

Betsie ten Boom has no grand monument. She lies somewhere in the unmarked ground of a camp built to destroy her. But the homes of healing she imagined while she was starving, those came to be. And the deepest thing she is remembered for saying still stands over that whole dark place like a stubborn light. There is no pit so deep that He is not deeper still.