Introduction: The Story She Told, and the Story the Records Tell

“Ye are my witnesses, saith Jehovah, and my servant whom I have chosen; that ye may know and believe me, and understand that I am he”

— Isaiah 43:10, ASV

A Witness Who Told Her Story Many Times

Most of the people in this series left few words of their own. John Hyde wrote almost nothing, and his story survives mainly in two little books written by friends after his death. Corrie ten Boom is the opposite case. She told her own story for nearly forty years, to audiences in more than sixty countries, and she put it into print again and again. Few Christian lives of the twentieth century are so fully narrated by the person who lived them.

That is a great advantage for a biographer, and it is also a challenge. A story told thousands of times does not stay exactly the same. Details are sharpened, and scenes are arranged for the listener. A lesson that took years to learn is compressed into a single moment. Things understood only later are read back into the moment itself. None of this is dishonesty. It is simply what happens to memory, especially the memory of a preacher whose purpose is to help others meet God. But it means that the careful reader should know which version of the story is being told, and when it was first told.

The Earliest Account

Corrie’s first book was written within months of her return from Ravensbrück. It was published in Amsterdam in June 1945, a month after the liberation of the Netherlands, as Gevangene en toch …, “A prisoner, and yet …”. An English translation appeared in London in 1947 under the title A Prisoner and Yet, with a foreword by Norman Grubb of the Worldwide Evangelization Crusade. It is a short, vivid, sometimes unpolished book. It moves quickly from the busy underground household in Haarlem to the raid, the prison at Scheveningen, the camp at Vught, and the long nightmare of Ravensbrück. Much of it reads like notes made while the events were still raw. It even reproduces her discharge certificate from the camp, with her prisoner number on it.

This early book is precious because of its closeness to the events. It was written before Corrie became a famous speaker, before she had told the story to thousands of audiences, and before any ghostwriter shaped it. Where it agrees with her later accounts, and it does on nearly every essential point, it confirms them. Where it differs, it gives us a glimpse of the story before long retelling had smoothed it.

The Famous Account

Twenty-six years later, in 1971, Corrie published the book that made her world-famous. The Hiding Place was written with the American writers John and Elizabeth Sherrill, who interviewed her at length and shaped her memories into a gripping narrative. It became a bestseller, and in 1975 it was made into a film by World Wide Pictures, the film company of the Billy Graham organisation. For most readers since, The Hiding Place simply is Corrie ten Boom’s story.

The Hiding Place is far fuller than the 1945 book. It tells of her childhood, her father’s shop, the family’s life before the war, her lost love, and the long work of forgiveness after the war. It is beautifully written. But it was written a quarter of a century after the events, by professional writers, for an audience of American Christians, and some of its best-loved scenes do not appear in the earlier account. Comparing the two books is one of the ways this biography tries to be faithful to her.

What the Comparison Shows

The comparison is reassuring on the essentials. The 1945 book already has the busy household of refugees, with Eusie the cantor singing too loudly at the piano. It has the hidden room behind the false wall, the drills with a stopwatch, and the cream puffs afterwards. It has the raid on 28 February 1944, the slaps in the face, and the plaque on the fireplace that read “Jesus is Victor.” It has her father’s words about giving his life for “God’s ancient people.” It has the months of solitary confinement, the ants in her cell, and the vitamin bottle at Ravensbrück that went on giving drops long after it should have run dry. It has Betsie’s death, and the sisters’ plans for a home for released prisoners.

Some things appear only later. The 1945 book says nothing of the fleas that kept the guards out of the barracks where the sisters held their Bible readings. It mentions lice, and says that others avoided the barracks because of them. It does not tell of the man who came to the shop on the morning of the raid asking for money to free his wife, the man later named as the informer. It does not call Corrie’s release a clerical error. Rather, it shows the two sisters expecting their prison term to end at a fixed date. Betsie’s famous words, that there is no pit so deep that God’s love is not deeper still, are recorded in the later book. In the 1945 book a related thought appears in Corrie’s own mouth. Some of these later details may well be true memories that Corrie simply did not include in 1945. Others may have grown in the telling. This book will usually tell them, but will say where they first appear.

The Independent Record

Alongside Corrie’s own accounts there is a substantial independent record, and it confirms the core of her story at every point.

The Dutch war-graves foundation records her father’s death in The Hague on 9 March 1944, nine days after his arrest. It also records the death of her nephew Kik in Bergen-Belsen in 1945. Betsie’s death at Ravensbrück on 16 December 1944 is recorded on the memorial plaque at the family home. The Jewish memorial registers of the Netherlands record the fate of Mary van Itallie, one of the Jewish guests in the house. The prison memorial at Scheveningen records Corrie’s imprisonment there. Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, recognised Corrie as Righteous Among the Nations in 1967, and her father and Betsie in 2007. Hans Poley, one of the young men who hid in the house, published his own memoir with his wartime diaries in 1993. The museum that now occupies the house, opened in 1988, preserves the family’s papers and its own careful chronology.

This record also corrects some popular claims, and this book will follow it. Corrie was born in Amsterdam, not Haarlem. Not all of the six people who stood in the hiding place during the raid survived the war. One of them, Mary van Itallie, was arrested again within days and died at Auschwitz. The often-repeated figure of eight hundred people saved, Jews and others, is the museum’s estimate for the whole network of which the family was part, not a count of those hidden in the house. And the frequent claim that the informer was executed after the war is not supported by the records of Dutch postwar executions.

How This Book Proceeds

Part One, A House of Clocks, tells of the family and the fifty years of ordinary faithfulness that prepared them for the war. Part Two, The Hiding Place, follows the occupation, the underground work, and the raid. Part Three, Ravensbrück, follows Corrie and Betsie through prison and camp until Betsie’s death and Corrie’s release. Part Four, A Tramp for the Lord, follows the years of travel and witness that followed, and her last silent years.

The verse at the head of this chapter is God’s word to Israel through Isaiah: “Ye are my witnesses.” Corrie understood her life after Ravensbrück as exactly that, a witness. She was not a witness to her own courage, which she always played down, but to the faithfulness of God in the darkest place human beings have made. A witness should be heard in her own words. For that, readers should go to her books. What this book can offer is a careful, honest account of the life behind the testimony, told with gratitude, and with the hope that it points, as she always did, beyond herself.