The Hand in Munich

“and hope putteth not to shame; because the love of God hath been shed abroad in our hearts through the Holy Spirit which was given unto us.”

— Romans 5:5, ASV

The Most Famous Handshake

Of all the stories Corrie ten Boom told, none has been retold more often than this one. It is also, like several of the best-known scenes in her life, a story that rests entirely on her own later account, so it deserves to be told carefully and briefly. Readers who want it in her own words will find it in The Hiding Place and Tramp for the Lord.

As she told it, the year was 1947 and the place a church in Munich, where she had just spoken about God’s forgiveness. As the audience left, a man came forward whom she recognised as one of the guards at Ravensbrück. It was a man from the place where new prisoners had been processed and humiliated. He did not recognise her. He told her that he had since become a Christian and believed God had forgiven him, but he wanted to hear forgiveness from one of the women who had suffered there. He held out his hand.

Corrie found, to her dismay, that she could not take it. She, who had been preaching forgiveness all over Europe, felt nothing but the memory of Betsie and that room. So she prayed silently, telling Jesus that she could not forgive this man and asking him to supply what she lacked. Then, as an act of obedience rather than feeling, she put out her hand. As their hands met, she said, she felt a warmth of love flow through her that she knew was not her own, and she was able to tell him from her heart that she forgave him.

The lesson she drew from it was that forgiveness is not something we manufacture. God, who commands us to love our enemies, also gives the love we need to obey.

What We Can Know

It is important to say what kind of evidence this story is. It is Corrie’s own account, and there is no other. The man is never named. No one else who was present has ever come forward, and no record of the meeting exists apart from her telling of it. The story first appears in print about twenty-five years after the event: at the end of The Hiding Place in 1971, and in a magazine article the following year. It appears again in Tramp for the Lord in 1974. By then Corrie had told it many times from the platform, and the versions differ in small details, as spoken stories do.

Her 1953 book Amazing Love, written much closer to the time, does not tell this story. It tells the different story, described in the last chapter, of preaching to former women guards in an internment camp. That does not mean the Munich encounter did not happen. Corrie may simply not have written about it for many years, or may have found it too personal. But it does mean that the famous version, with its vivid details of the grey overcoat and the current of warmth, reaches us as a memory shaped by many retellings.

None of this makes the story less true in the sense that matters most. Corrie told it as her own experience, again and again, to people who knew her. And the central claim of the story fits everything else we know of her life. She could not forgive by her own strength. When she obeyed anyway, God supplied the love. That is exactly what she had written in Ravensbrück, when she said that her Saviour’s love filled her heart so that she could not hate. It is exactly what she had done in June 1945, when she wrote to the informer before she could have felt much forgiveness at all. The Munich story is the most dramatic version of a pattern that runs through her whole life.

“The Love of God Shed Abroad”

The museum that now occupies the Beje connects this story with the verse at the head of this chapter, and it is well chosen. “Hope putteth not to shame; because the love of God hath been shed abroad in our hearts through the Holy Spirit which was given unto us” (Romans 5:5, ASV).

Paul’s point is that the love of God is not only something we learn about. It is something poured into us. The Holy Spirit fills us with a love we could not produce. In the next few verses Paul explains what kind of love this is: “But God commendeth his own love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8, ASV). It is love for enemies. What Corrie felt in Munich was, in her understanding, exactly this love. It was God’s love for the guard, passing through her because she could not supply it herself.

Forgiveness as Obedience

Corrie drew practical lessons from the story, and she taught them wherever she went. Forgiveness, she said, is an act of the will, and the will can act whatever the heart happens to feel. We do not wait until we feel forgiving. We obey, and trust God to change our feelings.

This is a teaching with deep roots in Scripture. When Peter asked how often he must forgive a brother, as many as seven times, Jesus answered, “until seventy times seven” (Matthew 18:22, ASV). He then told the parable of a servant who had been forgiven a vast debt and then refused to forgive a fellow servant a small one. The parable ends with a warning: “So shall also my heavenly Father do unto you, if ye forgive not every one his brother from your hearts” (Matthew 18:35, ASV). Forgiveness is not optional for those who have been forgiven. But neither is it something we must manufacture alone. The same Lord who commands it gives it.

Corrie was also honest that forgiveness is not a single event. In later years she told stories against herself about Christian friends who had wronged her in small matters, whom she found much harder to forgive than the Ravensbrück guard. She said that she forgave them, and then found the bitterness coming back, and had to forgive again. That honesty is part of what made her testimony believable. She never claimed to have mastered forgiveness. She claimed only that God had given it to her when she could not give it herself.

For Reflection

The story of the handshake in Munich has helped countless people who were struggling to forgive. It helps precisely because Corrie did not pretend to be a saint. She stood there, a famous preacher of forgiveness, and found that she could not do it. What she did next is open to anyone. She told God the truth about her heart, asked for his love, and obeyed with her hand before her feelings followed.

Whom do we find it impossible to forgive? Corrie’s answer would be simple. Tell God you cannot, ask him for his forgiveness, and hold out your hand. The love of God, she would say, has been shed abroad in our hearts through the Holy Spirit. It is not ours to produce. It is ours to receive, and to pass on.