Corrie ten Boom (For Teens)

A Dutch watchmaker, born in Amsterdam in 1892, whose family hid Jews and resistance workers in their house in Haarlem during the Nazi occupation. After a raid in 1944 she was sent to prison and to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where her sister Betsie died. She spent the rest of her life speaking about God's faithfulness and forgiveness in more than sixty countries, and died in California in 1983.

Yes. It tells how her father died nine days after his arrest, how prisoners were shot and beaten at Vught and Ravensbrück, and how Betsie died. It also says plainly that not everyone in the hiding place survived the war, and that Corrie admitted her own fear, selfishness and struggle to forgive.

It was the motto on a wooden plaque over the fireplace at the Beje on the day of the raid, and Corrie's motto all her life. It looked as if the secret police had won. Her family believed that even then Jesus was the conqueror over every evil power, and she ended her talks with it for decades.

No. Six people hid behind the false wall during the raid and were let out two days later. But Mary van Itallie was arrested again within days and murdered at Auschwitz, and the sources disagree about some of the others. Eusie, the cantor, survived the war.

She worked hard at forgiving them, and said it was hard. She wrote to the man believed to have betrayed her family to tell him she forgave him, pitied women being humiliated by crowds after the war, opened a home for refugees in Germany, and preached to former camp guards. She admitted that small wrongs from friends were sometimes harder to forgive.

Nobody knows. She was told years later that it was a mistake, and she believed it. But no document shows an error, her first book written in 1945 never calls it one, and the gas chamber at Ravensbrück began a month after she left, not a week. The danger she escaped was real either way.

From the full-length biography of Corrie ten Boom, which compares her first account written in 1945 with her later books and checks both against independent records such as Dutch war-graves files, the Jewish memorial registers and Yad Vashem. Where a famous scene appears only in her later books, this edition says so.

That courage is built in ordinary habits long before it is needed; that you can open the door to the next person who needs help without seeing the whole road; that God can be near in loneliness and grief; and that forgiveness can start as a decision before the feelings come.