The first forty-eight years of Corrie ten Boom’s life might be considered boring to some. She was born on April 15, 1892 in Amsterdam, Holland, the youngest child of Casper and Cornelia ten Boom. Her older siblings were Betsie, Willem, and Nollie.
Casper ten Boom was a jeweler and watchmaker, who owned a shop in the city of Haarlem. His business was on the bottom floor, while his family lived above. Casper often became so engrossed in his watchmaking work that he would forget to charge customers for his services. They were a God-fearing family that belonged to a Dutch Reformed church.
“Papa, what is it like to die?” asked Corrie when she was about six years old.
“Corrie,” he began gently, “when you and I go to Amsterdam, when do I give you your ticket?”
“Just before we get on the train.”
“Exactly. And our wise Father in heaven knows when we’re going to need things too.
Don’t run out ahead of Him, Corrie. When the time comes that some of us will have to die, you will look into your heart and find the strength you need—just in time.”
Corrie, she never married. She had one chance at romance with a man named Karal, whom she loved deeply. But Karal’s parents didn’t think that Corrie was “cut from fine enough cloth” for their son. He ended up marrying another woman and Corrie’s heart was broken.
Her father came to comfort her. “I was afraid of what Father would say,” wrote Corrie years later. “I was afraid he would say, ‘There’ll be someone else soon—and that forever afterward this untruth would lie between us. For in some deep part of me I knew already that there would not…ever be anyone else.”
But Casper instead spoke words to her that forever altered the course of her life. “Corrie, do you know what hurts so very much? It is love. Love is the strongest force in the world, and when it is blocked, that means pain. There are two things we can do when this happens. We can kill the love so that it stops hurting. But then…a part of us dies too. Or we can ask God to open up another route for that love to travel.”
From that counsel Corrie chose to love by another route. She established a youth club for teenage girls, teaching them performing arts, sewing, handicrafts, and the Bible. She also did ministry with mentally handicapped children. On October 17, 1921, twenty-nine-year-old Corrie had to draw upon her father’s wisdom regarding death when her mother unexpectedly slipped into a coma and died, leaving her father Casper a widower for the remainder of his life. She continued to work in her father’s shop and in 1922 became the first woman to be licensed as a watchmaker in Holland.
Corrie’s activities that some might consider boring, continued until that fateful day of May 10, 1940, when Nazi Germany invaded Holland and forced her surrender four days later. Immediately, the Germans exerted an iron grip control over the Dutch. Corrie’s ministries to teenagers and to the handicapped were forbidden. Radios were confiscated. Food rationing began. Jews were forced to wear yellow stars in public.
Corrie’s seemingly boring life was about to drastically change. “One day as Father and I were returning from our walk, we found the Grote Market cordoned off by a double ring of police and soldiers. A truck was parked in front of the fish mart. Into the back were climbing men, women, and children, all wearing a yellow star.”
“Father! Those poor people!” I cried.
“Those poor people,” my father echoed. But to my surprise I saw that he was looking at the soldiers, now forming into ranks to march away.’ “I pity the poor Germans, Corrie. They have touched the apple of God’s eye.”
Then in May, 1942 a well-dressed Jewish woman with a suitcase came to the ten Boom’s shop. She informed Casper that her husband had been arrested and that her son was in hiding. She was afraid to return home, for fear of arrest and deportation and asked if they could help her.
“In this household, God’s chosen people are always welcome,” spoke Casper ten Boom. From that small beginning, more Jews began to show up at their doorstep.
Their work became known to the Dutch Resistance, which sent an architect to their home to design a secret room that could hold up to six people. Corrie’s bedroom, at the very top of their three-story dwelling, was the chosen location. The secret room was built behind a false wall and equipped with a ventilation system. An alert buzzer was also installed to warn the household of when a raid was coming.
Food was scarce. All Dutch people, except Jews, were issued ration cards in order to obtain food. Since Jews were denied ration cards, there wasn’t enough food to feed everyone in the house. Corrie remembered a family with a disabled daughter, whose father was in charge of the local ration-card office. She went to his house one evening intent on asking for five extra cards.
“But the number that unexpectedly came out was 100,” she later wrote. She got them. The ten Boom household was to receive many more ration cards in strange, anonymous ways over the next twenty-one months. It is estimated that during that time, the ten Boom family, along with Dutch resistance workers who worked with them, saved some 800 Jews from deportation to the death camps.
But on February 28, 1944, a Dutch informant named Jan Vogel betrayed them for a sum of money. At 12:30pm that same day the Nazis raided their home. The alarm had been sounded and the six Jews currently living with them scurried to their hiding place. They went undetected, but the entire ten Boom family was arrested. Just before a truck hauled them away, the German officer in charge of the raid offered Casper ten Boom a chance to stay home and die in his bed, if only he would promise not to make any more “trouble.”
“If I go home today,” he informed the officer, “tomorrow I will open my door to anyone who knocks for help.”
Upon his word he was taken away with the others. Soon afterwards he became sick and was taken to a hospital, which lacked enough beds for all their patients. He was parked in a hallway and ignored. There eighty-four-year-old Casper ten Boom died only ten days after being arrested, on March 9, 1944.
At the time of the raid Corrie was severely ill with pleurisy. Nollie and Willem were released, but Corrie and Betsie were sent to the Scheveningen Prison. There she lay in solitary confinement in a dim, desolate cell with no window to the outside. Cut off from the world, with only the ants for companionship, she did not know the fate of her other family members or of the Jews they had hidden. Slowly, she recovered from her illness, helped in part by a davitamin bottle she obtained from the Red Cross.
After three months of solitary confinement, Corrie had her first hearing. Walking from her cell to the hearing place she passed into a courtyard. The sun, fresh air, singing birds, and trees in spring blossom overwhelmed her senses. But her experience was fleeting, as the German guard prodded her forward with the stock of his rifle.
She was led to the office of Lieutenant Rahms, who asked about her work. He spoke kindly to Corrie, which she rightly surmised as an attempt to charm information out of her that could be used to arrest Jews and resistance workers. He shook his head when Corrie told him about her work with mentally handicapped children. The Nazis simply did away with such people.
“If you want converts, surely one normal person is worth all the half-wits in the world!”
Corrie responded. “In the Bible I learn that God values us not for our strength or our brains, but simply because He has made us. Who knows, in His eyes a half-wit may be worth more than a watchmaker—or a lieutenant.”
They were to meet several times. In between she prayed for Lieutenant Rahms. During their last encounter, she spoke to him about God’s word. “It says…that a light has come into this world, so that we need no longer walk in the dark. Is there darkness in your life, lieutenant?”
After a long silence Lieutenant Rahms answered. “There is great darkness in my life. I cannot bear the work I do here.” Afterwards he did what he could to make prison life a little more bearable for her. Corrie never discovered what became of him.
One day she received a letter from her sister Nollie. In it she informed Corrie of their father’s demise. The handwriting on the address subtly pointed to the stamp in the upper right-hand corner. She pealed back the stamp. Under it was written “All the watches in your closet are safe,” meaning that the Jews they had hidden had escaped. Later she learned that they remained in the hiding place for four days until Dutch resistance workers got them out and spirited them to safety.
Corrie and her sister Betsie were reunited and sent from Scheveningen to Kamp Vught in Holland, where, because of their watchmaking skills, they were given the job of making radios. There they met and befriended a pretty young Dutch woman named Mien. Conditions at Kamp Vught were tolerable. But after a couple of months in Vught there they were sent to the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp in Germany. There the Nazi guards made cruelty an artform and worked people to death before replacing them with new arrivals.
Part Two next week
