Homes for the Broken

“Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.”

— Romans 12:21, ASV

A House in the Woods

Corrie’s 1945 book closes with a postlude that she clearly saw as an answer to prayer. She is shown a fine house in the woods near Haarlem that is to become a home for people coming back from the camps, and she remembers Betsie describing such a house in Ravensbrück, down to the beauty of its woodwork. She hoped it would be a place of real recovery, not merely of rest.

The house became a reality. According to the museum and the Dutch women’s biographical lexicon, Corrie opened a home for people recovering from the war in Bloemendaal, a wooded village just outside Haarlem, first in a villa called Schapenduinen and later in another house, Zonneduinen, bought by a foundation set up to support the work. In 1945 she already hoped that it might later serve others who needed healing too.

In The Hiding Place Corrie adds that among the people who came to the house were Dutch men and women who had collaborated with the Germans. After liberation, many of them were despised and rejected by their neighbours. She tells of former prisoners and former collaborators learning to live under the same roof. That detail comes only from the later book, but it fits entirely with what we saw in the town square in May 1945.

Plans Made in the Dark

It is striking how many of the plans the two sisters made in Barracks 28 came true. Corrie opened a home in the Netherlands for those coming out of the camps. She travelled to America and told the story of God’s faithfulness. The grand clubhouse in the centre of Haarlem seems not to have come about in the form they imagined, and Betsie was not there to see any of it.

There is a lesson here that Corrie often drew. Betsie’s faith had looked unrealistic in the camp. She had been sure they would both go home, and she was wrong about that. But she was right about far more than she was wrong about. The plans she made while dying in a lice-ridden bunk were not fantasies. They were, in their way, prophecies. God did not give her what she expected. He gave the work she had seen to her sister to carry out.

A Camp in Germany

In 1949 the work extended in a direction Corrie could hardly have planned in 1945. With the help of the Protestant church in Germany, she opened a home in Darmstadt, in the west of Germany. It was in a former camp, and it took in refugees and displaced people. Germany after the war was full of them: millions of Germans expelled from the east, bombed-out families, and people with nowhere to go. Some popular accounts say it was a former concentration camp. The sources are not clear about exactly what kind of camp it had been, and this book will not claim more than they do. The Darmstadt home ran until 1960.

In the later framing of The Hiding Place, this was the second of Betsie’s “visions.” Betsie had seen a camp in Germany, once used for cruelty, that would be painted bright colours and used for healing. Whatever words Betsie actually used in Ravensbrück, the fact is remarkable. Within five years of walking out of a German concentration camp, Corrie ten Boom was running a home for Germans.

Preaching to the Guards

Corrie’s 1953 book Amazing Love includes a story from these years that is less famous than the encounter in Munich, and in some ways more striking. After the war, the Allies held many former camp personnel in internment camps while they awaited trial or release. Among them were women who had served as guards at Ravensbrück. Corrie went to preach to them.

She tells of speaking in such a camp to a group of former women guards, the Aufseherinnen she had feared and despised. At first they received her coldly. She spoke to them, as she spoke to everyone, of the love of Christ that had reached her in the camp and could reach them too. She called the chapter “My Chocolate Sermon.” Readers who want the details should read it in her own words. What matters here is that she tells of it, and that she wrote about it in 1953, long before the more famous story of Munich reached print.

“Overcome Evil with Good”

The verse at the head of this chapter concludes Paul’s great passage about how Christians should treat those who harm them. “Render to no man evil for evil,” he writes. “Avenge not yourselves, beloved, but give place unto the wrath of God.” Then: “But if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him to drink.” And finally: “Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good” (Romans 12:17, 19, 20, 21, ASV).

Corrie’s postwar work is a practical commentary on those verses. A German camp had been a place of evil. She took a German camp and made it a place of healing. German guards had been the instruments of her suffering. She went to preach the gospel to German guards. Dutch collaborators had betrayed people like her family to the Gestapo, and according to her later account she took collaborators into her home. None of this denied that evil had been done. It simply refused to let evil have the last word, or to answer it in kind.

It should also be said that this was not easy for her, or quick. In her later books Corrie was frank about her struggles. She could preach forgiveness in public while nursing bitterness in private against people who had wronged her in small ways. She said that she had to learn forgiveness again and again. Overcoming evil with good was not a single victory but a long campaign.

For Reflection

It would have been entirely understandable if Corrie ten Boom had spent the rest of her life avoiding anything German. Instead, within five years of her release, she was running a home in Germany, preaching to former camp guards, and sheltering people her own neighbours despised.

Most of us have someone, or some group of people, whose wrongs against us or against those we love make us want to keep our distance for ever. Paul’s command does not require us to pretend the wrong did not happen. It invites us to do the harder, braver thing: to answer evil with good, and so refuse to let it define us.