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. All personal belongings were confiscated at the outset and the prisoners were issued numbers, by which they were henceforth known. Corrie became prisoner 66730.
In her possession she had a Bible and the davitamin bottle she had received from the Red Cross that she somehow needed to smuggle inside. With Betsie she prayed.
“Oh Lord, You have given us Your word and gotten it through everything. Please now get it through the gates of hell.” Seeing eyes were made blind and both items got through.
She and Betsie were assigned to lice infested barracks 28. Roll call was at 4:30am, seven days a week. Back-breaking work until nightfall, frequent beatings, and too little food began to take their toll. The early fall morphed into the biting cold of winter and the grounds became covered in snow. Still the guards relentlessly drove the women to work every day. Betsie’s health began to fail. Every evening Corrie put a few drops from the davitamin bottle onto her sister’s daily ration of bread to help keep her alive. But other mal-nourished women also were weakening.
“My instinct,” wrote Corrie, “was always to hoard it. Betsie was growing so very weak. But others were ill as well. It was hard to say no to eyes that burned with fever, hands that shook with chill. I tried to save it for the very weakest, but even these soon numbered fifteen, twenty, twenty-five. And still, every time I tilted the little bottle, a drop appeared at the top of the glass stopper. It just couldn’t be! I held it up to the light, trying to see how much was left, but the dark brown glass was too thick to see through.
“Well, but wonderful things happened all through the Bible. It was one thing to believe that such things were possible thousands of years ago, another to have it happen now, to us, this very day. And yet it happened, this day, and the next, and the next, until an awed little group of spectators stood around watching the drops fall onto the daily rations of bread.
“And then one day Mien pushed her way to us in the evening food line. ‘Look what I’ve got for you!’ Mien was assigned to the hospital and often managed to bring to Barracks 28 some stolen treasure from the staff room, a sheet of newspaper to stuff in a broken window, a slice of bread left untouched on a nurse’s plate. Now we peered into the small cloth sack she carried.”
“Vitamins!” I cried, and then cast an apprehensive glance at a camp policeman nearby. ‘Yeast compound!’ I whispered.
“Yes!” she hissed back. There were several huge jars.
“We gulped the thin turnip water, marveling at our sudden riches. Back at the bunk I took the bottle from the straw. ‘We’ll finish the drops first,’ I decided. But that night, no matter how long I held it upside down, or how hard I shook it, not another drop appeared.”
Bible reading was forbidden, but because of the lice, the guards would never set foot in the barracks. Therefore, every night in their dimly lit, overcrowded barracks, Corrie and Betsie read from the Bible to their fellow mal-nourished, hope starved prisoners. “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword. Just as it is written, ‘For Thy sake we are being put to death all day long; we were considered as sheep to be slaughtered.’ But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Romans 8:35-39 NASB During that time many of the women found their hope in Christ.
The two sisters conferred about founding a place of healing for both persecuted and persecutors after the war. “We must go everywhere,” spoke Betsie. “We must tell people that no pit is so deep that God is not deeper still. We will be free by the new year. I have seen it in a dream.”
Betsie was growing weaker by the day, until finally she received her freedom by going to be with Jesus on December 16, 1944. Twelve days later, on December 28, 1944, Corrie was handed a summons to the camp office. On her way to the office, she remembered her childhood talk with her father about death and wondered if that was about to be her fate.
Instead of being put to death, Corrie was unexpectedly released. Years later, she learned that her release had been due to a clerical error, and that a week later, all of the women in the camp her age had been put to death. Corrie returned to Holland, which was suffering its worst winter of starvation after nearly five years of Nazi rule. Still not enough food, yet somehow, she survived until the spring and Holland’s liberation.
After the war she set up a rehabilitation center in Bloemendaal, Holland, where they housed concentration-camp survivors like herself. There was another group of people who now, instead of the Jews, had become the hated outcasts. These were Dutch who had collaborated with the Nazis during the occupation in order to live better. Many of the men were killed. Dutch partisans went easier on women who had committed the crime of falling in love with German soldiers. They shaved the hair from their heads to mark them. Some had Nazi swastikas branded into their foreheads. Few would do business with or shelter them. But at Corrie’s refuge she insisted that they be taken in too.
In 1946 she set up a similar rehabilitation center in Darmstadt, Germany to help war-scarred Germans. She also met with and forgave two Germans who had been guards at Ravensbrück, one of whom had been particularly cruel to Betsie.
“Even as the angry vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. Jesus Christ had died for this man. Was I going to ask for more? ‘Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me to forgive him….Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me your forgiveness….’ And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on His. When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives along with the command, the love itself.”
Later on, she traveled the world as a public speaker, appearing in more than sixty nations, including the old Soviet Union, Communist Cuba, and China. She wrote a book called “Tramp for the Lord,” which tells of her travels around the world, sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Her message always included forgiveness, hope, love, and salvation through the saving grace of Christ.
Her story became a bestselling book called “The Hiding Place” in 1971. It was then made into a 1975 film by the same name, starring Jeannette Clift as Corrie and Julie Harris as Betsie.
In 1977, eighty-five-year-old Corrie moved to Placentia, California. There she passed into the arms of her Savior on April 15, 1983, her 91st birthday. A boring life? I think not.
