Betsie

“If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, thou art there.”

— Psalm 139:8, ASV

The Elder Sister

Elisabeth ten Boom, always called Betsie, was born on 19 August 1885, nearly seven years before Corrie. She was the eldest of the family. She was never strong. In Corrie’s later books she suffered all her life from anaemia, and she was often the one who stayed at home while others went out. She never married. For most of her adult life she kept house in the Beje, first for her parents and aunts and then for her father and younger sister. She kept the shop’s books, cooked, arranged flowers, welcomed guests, and made the crowded, shabby old house beautiful on very little money.

By every account she was gentle, orderly, and humorous, with a deep and quiet faith. Corrie, lively, impatient, and practical, admired her all her life, and sometimes felt rebuked by her. In the underground years Betsie ran the household of refugees, found beds for everyone, and fed them on ration cards. In prison and camp she became, in Corrie’s telling, the stronger of the two. That was not because she was physically stronger, since she was far weaker. It was because her faith seemed to rest on something that the camp could not reach.

“A Hedge About Her”

Corrie noticed again and again that horrors that overwhelmed her seemed not to touch Betsie. On the day of the executions at Vught, when Corrie laid her head on her sister’s shoulder in despair, Betsie’s face was serene, almost happy. When a frail Dutch woman was beaten to death in Barracks 28, Corrie turned to Betsie in horror and found her face peaceful, her eyes far away, apparently unaware of what had happened. Corrie thought of Satan’s complaint to God about Job: “Hast not thou made a hedge about him, and about his house, and about all that he hath, on every side?” (Job 1:10, ASV). There was a hedge around Betsie too.

It would be wrong to read this as indifference. Betsie was the one who organised the society against grumbling at Vught. She took the hand of a lonely Polish woman and said the name of Jesus to her, and she pitied the officer who beat her during the raid. Once she even went to invite a brutal barracks supervisor to the Bible reading. Her compassion was intense. But the camp’s evil did not seem to get inside her. Near the end, Corrie heard her say something that startled her: she was beginning to love the crowd. Corrie wondered whether her sister was ripening for heaven.

And there is one small line in Corrie’s 1945 book that turns the famous title of her later story around. Betsie depended on her, Corrie wrote, almost like a child, and did not like her to stay away too long. It was, Corrie wrote, as though she were Betsie’s hiding-place in that evil place. The sisters sheltered each other. Corrie gave Betsie practical care and protection. Betsie gave Corrie a faith that kept her from despair.

Plans

In the evenings in Barracks 28 the sisters made plans, and Corrie’s 1945 book records them. When they got home, they would open their house to women coming out of the camps with nowhere to go. If it proved too small, they would find a larger one. They would build a place in Haarlem for young people whose youth had been stolen by the war. And the two of them would go to America and tell what God had done for them.

In the 1971 book these plans became something more: three visions that Betsie saw before her death, of a house in Holland, a former camp in Germany, and a release before the new year. The earlier account gives them as the sisters’ shared hopes, dreamed together in the dark. Either way, a surprising amount of what they planned came true. But Betsie would not be there to see it.

Betsie’s Illness

In the late autumn of 1944 Betsie became seriously ill. Her hands and forehead were burning with fever, but she remained, Corrie wrote, as cheerful and courageous as ever. The sisters went together to the sick roll-call, where hundreds of sick women waited for hours in the cold to be seen, and many died of the waiting. A Dutch nurse brought Betsie to the front of the line, and with a temperature over forty degrees Celsius she was admitted to the hospital barracks. Betsie thanked God for how quickly she had been let in.

The next day Corrie climbed through a washroom window to visit her, and found her sharing a narrow cot with a French girl who kicked her until she fell out of bed. Betsie did not complain. There was such darkness in the heart of the poor French child, she said. It was no accident that she had been put beside her. A nurse caught Corrie and threatened to report her if she came again.

Walking back through the fog, Corrie felt rebellion rise in her. Why did God leave them there so long? Why must Betsie suffer? Why could she not even visit her? Then, she wrote, she heard three words, in French: rempli de tendresse, “filled with tenderness.” There was no one near her. She believed it was God speaking, not in rebuke of her rebellion but in love. She was ashamed and comforted at once.

“Remember Now, Both of Us”

Betsie grew weaker, until she could no longer stand at roll-call and then could not walk at all. The order was that even the dying must appear, and Corrie and a friend carried her out and held her up. Betsie would not hear of dying. She spoke of heaven easily and without fear, but she was sure the two of them would go home together and still do much for others.

In the end a barracks supervisor the sisters had once invited to their Bible reading arranged a stretcher to take Betsie to the hospital. As she was carried away, a Polish prisoner knelt beside her and prayed, a farewell, Corrie felt, from the women to whom Betsie had meant so much. That afternoon Corrie visited her once more. As she was sent away, Betsie called after her: “Remember now, both of us.”

16 December 1944

The next morning Corrie went to the hospital barracks and looked in at the window beside her sister’s bed. Nurses were carrying out a body, wasted almost beyond recognition. It was Betsie.

The date was 16 December 1944. Betsie was fifty-nine. Her death is recorded on the memorial plaque at the family home in Haarlem, and by the Dutch war-graves foundation.

Corrie’s first feeling was desolation. Then, to her own surprise, peace came, and something like joy. The words of Job came to her: “Jehovah gave, and Jehovah hath taken away; blessed be the name of Jehovah” (Job 1:21, ASV). When she went to see her sister’s body among the dead in the washroom, she found that the face looked peaceful and young again, and she took it as a glimpse of heaven in the middle of that place.

“No Pit So Deep”

The words most closely linked with Betsie ten Boom are from The Hiding Place. There Corrie recalls her sister saying, near the end, that they must tell people that there is no pit so deep that God’s love is not deeper still. It is a beautiful saying, and it has comforted countless people. It is always attributed to Betsie, as Corrie attributed it.

The 1945 book does not contain those exact words. It contains a related thought, and it is in Corrie’s own mouth. Speaking at a memorial for women who had died in the barracks, she told her fellow prisoners that for those who belong to the Saviour, death is not a pit into which they fall. It is a tunnel through which they pass into the glorious light of heaven. The two sayings belong together. Betsie may well have said the words the later book gives her, and Corrie may have remembered them clearly. Or the sisters’ shared faith may have found its sharpest expression over years of retelling. What is certain is that the faith behind both sayings was tested in Ravensbrück, and held.

The verse at the head of this chapter says the same thing in the psalmist’s words. “If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, thou art there” (Psalm 139:8, ASV). Sheol is the Old Testament’s name for the grave, the deepest pit there is. Even there, the psalmist says, God is present. There is no place so deep that he is not already there.

A New Sister

That day Corrie spoke at a memorial service in the barracks, on the great resurrection chapter, 1 Corinthians 15. The women had loved Betsie, and the grief was deep.

That night a Russian woman who had nowhere to sleep was being turned away from bunk after bunk. Corrie made room for her in the place beside her where Betsie had lain. They had no language in common, but when Corrie spoke the name of Jesus the woman embraced her. Corrie took it as a sign that God would give her others to love in place of the sister she had lost.

For Reflection

Betsie ten Boom did not survive Ravensbrück. She did not live to see the house in Holland or the home in Germany, or to travel to America. She died as a nameless number in a camp hospital, and her body was carried out in a sheet.

And yet she is remembered, by millions, as one of the great witnesses of the Second World War. That is not because of anything she accomplished. It is because of what she believed and how she believed it: gratefully, gently, and without fear, in the worst place on earth. Her sister carried her message out into the world for another forty years. It was the message of the psalm: even if we make our bed in Sheol, God is there.