The Legacy of Corrie ten Boom

“And a man shall be as a hiding-place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest, as streams of water in a dry place, as the shade of a great rock in a weary land.”

— Isaiah 32:2, ASV

The House in the Barteljorisstraat

On 15 April 1988, what would have been Corrie’s ninety-sixth birthday, the Beje opened as a museum. It is run by a foundation, and in recent years the old watch shop at the front has been brought back into it. Visitors from all over the world climb the narrow stairs to the little bedroom at the top of the house and look through the low opening under the cupboard shelf into the hiding place. The house appears in the official canon of Dutch history, the list of places and events that every Dutch schoolchild is meant to know.

On the front of the house is a memorial plaque. It records members of the family who died because of the war. Betsie’s entry gives her dates and the one word Ravensbrück. Christiaan’s, the nephew called Kik, gives April 1945, with the place of death recorded as unknown. For many years the plaque and the museum were among the few public reminders in Haarlem of what had happened in that house.

In 2007 Yad Vashem recognised Casper and Betsie ten Boom as Righteous Among the Nations, forty years after it had honoured Corrie. The whole household, not only its most famous member, had risked everything for their Jewish neighbours.

What Corrie Would Have Wanted Remembered

It is not hard to guess what Corrie herself would have wanted her legacy to be, because she spent forty years saying it. She would not have wanted people to remember her courage, which she always played down. She would have wanted them to remember the faithfulness of God, who had been with her in the darkest place human beings have ever made. She would have wanted them to remember Betsie. And she would have wanted them to hear the message the two of them had learned there: that God’s love is deeper than any pit, that Jesus is victor, and that forgiveness is possible because God gives it.

This book has tried to honour that wish while also telling the truth about the sources. It has noted which stories come from her earliest account and which appear only in the later books. It has corrected popular claims that the records do not support. It has refused to make her a plaster saint. None of that diminishes her. The core of her story, the rescue, the raid, the prisons, the deaths, the release, and the forty years of witness, is confirmed at every point by independent records. The famous scenes that rest on her own later memory are consistent with everything else she wrote and did. And the real woman who emerges is more encouraging than any legend. She was often afraid, sometimes selfish by her own admission, and always dependent on God.

Ordinary People

Perhaps the most important thing about the ten Booms is how ordinary they were. They were not political activists or heroes of the resistance in the usual sense. They were an elderly watchmaker and his two unmarried daughters, pious and old-fashioned, who had spent their lives on small things. They wound clocks, ran girls’ clubs, taught disabled people, took in foster children, and prayed each week for Jerusalem. When the crisis came, they did what they had always done, but at the cost of everything.

That should encourage anyone who feels that their own life is too small to matter. The courage the ten Booms showed in 1943 and 1944 did not come from nowhere. It was built over decades of ordinary faithfulness. Most of us will never face what they faced. But all of us are building, day by day, the kind of people we will be if a test ever comes.

The Two Hiding Places

The title by which the world knows Corrie’s story has a double meaning, and it is worth ending with both.

The first hiding place was a space behind a false wall in a bedroom in Haarlem. It was built by an architect whose real name is still unknown, and it did exactly what it was meant to do. Six people stood in it for two and a half days while the house was searched and then guarded, and they were not found. It was a real work of courage and skill. But it could not save everyone. It could not save Mary van Itallie, re-arrested within days and murdered at Auschwitz, or the family who built it. Every human hiding place, in the end, is like that. It is precious and partial, and it cannot finally protect.

The second hiding place was the one Corrie found when the first one could no longer help her. She was alone in a cell at Scheveningen, standing in the freezing dark at roll-call in Ravensbrück, and watching her sister’s body carried out in a sheet. There she found that God himself was her hiding place. That did not mean she escaped suffering. She did not, and Betsie did not. It meant that in the middle of suffering there was a presence that could not be taken away. “Thou art my hiding-place and my shield: I hope in thy word” (Psalm 119:114, ASV).

The verse at the head of this chapter joins the two. Isaiah looks forward to a righteous king, and to the kind of people who live under his rule: “a man shall be as a hiding-place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest, as streams of water in a dry place, as the shade of a great rock in a weary land” (Isaiah 32:2, ASV). Christians have long heard in those words a picture of Christ himself, the true hiding place. But the prophet also describes what human beings become when they live under God’s rule. They become hiding places for others.

That is what the ten Booms were. For a few months in 1943 and 1944, a narrow house in Haarlem was a hiding place from the wind for people being hunted to death. And for forty years afterwards, a woman who had lost almost everything became a shelter for others. She was a hiding place for former prisoners, for displaced Germans, and for collaborators no one else would take in. She was a shelter for guards who asked her forgiveness, and for anyone anywhere who needed to hear that there is no darkness so deep that God is not deeper still. She could be that for others because she had found her own hiding place in God.

For Reflection

The Portraits of Courage series began with Watchman Nee, who endured twenty years in a Chinese prison. It continued with John Hyde, whose courage was spent on his knees in the Punjab. Corrie ten Boom’s courage was different again. It was the courage of an ordinary household that opened its door when opening it could cost everything, and the courage of a survivor who chose forgiveness over hatred.

We are not called to her life. But we are called to be, in our own places, what Isaiah described: a hiding place from the wind, a shelter from the storm, and streams of water in a dry place. And we can only be that for others if we have first found, as she did, that God himself is our hiding place.