Preface

“Thou art my hiding-place and my shield: I hope in thy word.”

— Psalm 119:114, ASV

The first volume of this series told the story of Watchman Nee, a Chinese church leader who spent his last twenty years in a Communist prison. The second told the story of John Hyde, an American missionary in the Punjab whose courage was mostly hidden, spent on his knees in prayer rooms and village huts. This third volume tells the story of a woman whose courage was hidden in a different way, behind a false wall in a bedroom at the top of a narrow house in Haarlem.

Corrie ten Boom is probably the best-known person in this series. Millions of people have read her story or watched the film made from it. Her name is familiar far beyond the churches: on lists of people who rescued Jews during the Holocaust, in the Dutch national canon of history, and in the tree planted in her honour at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. That familiarity is a gift, and it is also a difficulty. A life that everyone knows tends to become a set of famous scenes: the secret room, the fleas in the barracks, the bottle of vitamins that did not run dry, and the handshake with a former guard in Munich. Each scene is told so often that it can come loose from the life around it.

This book tries to put the scenes back into the life. It follows Corrie from her birth in Amsterdam in 1892 to her death in California on her ninety-first birthday in 1983. It gives full room to the nearly fifty years of quiet, unremarkable life she lived in a Dutch watch shop before the war. It also follows her through the ten months of prison and concentration camp that made her famous, and through the more than thirty years of travelling and preaching that came after.

Why Courage?

It may seem obvious why Corrie ten Boom belongs in a series called Portraits of Courage. She and her family broke the laws of an occupying power to hide people whom that power meant to murder. They were caught, and her father and sister died because of it. That is courage of the most visible kind.

But the longer one looks at her life, the more it seems that her most important courage came before and after the dramatic part. Before the war there was the courage of ordinary faithfulness: the small, repeated choices of a family who, by their own tradition, had prayed for the Jewish people every week for generations, and who kept their door open to anyone in need. After the war there was the courage it took to forgive. That was not a single heroic act. It was a costly habit she had to learn again and again, beginning with a letter to the man who had betrayed her family. It is harder to film than a raid, and it is the heart of what she spent the rest of her life trying to say.

How This Book Is Written

Corrie ten Boom told her own story many times, in many books. The best known, The Hiding Place, was written with John and Elizabeth Sherrill and published in 1971. Earlier and less known is the account she wrote in the months after her release, published in Dutch in June 1945 and in English two years later as A Prisoner and Yet. All of her books remain in copyright, and they should be read in her own words. This book does not reproduce them. It tells her life in its own words, quoting her only in a few brief phrases. It draws on the independent historical record wherever possible: Dutch war-graves records, the Jewish memorial registers, the Yad Vashem file, the archives of the prison where she was held, and the museum that now occupies her home.

Like the Hyde volume before it, this book tries to be honest about its sources. Some things about Corrie’s life are documented in records made at the time. Some rest on her own testimony, which is precious evidence but is still one person’s memory. Some are later additions, the natural growth of a story told thousands of times over forty years. This book will try to say which is which. It does not do so to cast doubt on her. The core of her story is confirmed at every point by independent records. It does so because she herself would have wanted the glory to go to God and the truth to be told straight.

Scripture in This Book

As in the earlier volumes, all Scripture quotations are from the American Standard Version of 1901, which is in the public domain. Each chapter opens with a passage that carries its theme, and further passages are woven through the narrative.

The verse at the head of this preface is from Psalm 119: “Thou art my hiding-place and my shield: I hope in thy word.” The title by which the world knows Corrie’s story, The Hiding Place, has a double meaning, and she intended both. There was the secret room in her bedroom, where six people stood in the dark for two and a half days while the house was searched and then guarded. And there was the hiding place she found when that room could no longer protect her, when she was alone in a cell or standing on a frozen parade ground at Ravensbrück. She found it in God himself, and in his word. The first hiding place was built by an architect whose real name we still do not know. The second was not built by human hands at all. This book is the story of how an ordinary woman came to know both.