A Father Among the Watches

“and I will bless them that bless thee, and him that curseth thee will I curse: and in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed.”

— Genesis 12:3, ASV

Casper

Casper ten Boom was born in Haarlem on 18 May 1859, the son of the watchmaker Willem ten Boom. He grew up in the Beje, learned his father’s trade at the bench in the back workroom, and, apart from his early married years in Amsterdam, spent almost his entire life within a few streets of the house where he was born. By the standards of the world, his life was small. He was a skilled craftsman and a respected shopkeeper. At one time, according to the Dutch war-graves foundation, he served as chairman of Haarlem’s chamber of commerce. He never grew rich, travelled little, and wrote nothing that has survived beyond family letters. Yet his daughter would spend forty years telling the world about him, and those who met him seem never to have forgotten him.

In October 1884 Casper married Cornelia Luitingh, a schoolteacher, whom the family called Cor. The young couple began their married life in Amsterdam, where Casper opened a watch shop of his own at Korte Prinsengracht 28. Their neighbourhood was home to many Jewish families, and family tradition remembers that Casper had close Jewish friends there. It says he sometimes joined them for their Sabbath and festival meals. We do not have the details, and later retellings may have warmed the picture. But it helps to explain what came later. To Casper ten Boom, Jews were not a distant religious category. They were neighbours, friends, and fellow lovers of the Scriptures.

“God’s Ancient People”

Casper’s view of the Jewish people was shaped by his reading of the Bible, and it was not complicated. God had chosen Israel, made promises to Abraham, and given them the law and the prophets. Through Israel the Messiah had come. God had not withdrawn his love.

The verse at the head of this chapter is God’s first promise to Abraham. “I will bless them that bless thee, and him that curseth thee will I curse: and in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed” (Genesis 12:3, ASV). Paul, writing to the church in Rome many centuries later, insisted that God’s calling of Israel still stood. He called them the people “whose is the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises; whose are the fathers, and of whom is Christ as concerning the flesh” (Romans 9:4-5, ASV). “Did God cast off his people?” he asked. “God forbid” (Romans 11:1, ASV). “For the gifts and the calling of God are not repented of” (Romans 11:29, ASV).

Casper had a phrase for the Jews that his daughter remembered all her life: they were “God’s ancient people.” It is not a phrase invented by later writers. It appears in Corrie’s first account, written in 1945. Friends had warned the old man that if he went on sheltering so many Jews he would end up in prison, and that in his frail state he would never survive it. He answered that if that happened, he would count it an honour to give his life for God’s ancient people. It did happen, and he did.

A Star He Meant to Wear

An incident from 1942, recorded by the Dutch war-graves foundation, shows how seriously Casper took his convictions. That spring the German authorities ordered every Jew in the Netherlands to wear a yellow star on their clothing, marked with the word “Jood.” Casper, then in his eighties, intended to go and collect a star for himself and wear it in solidarity with his Jewish neighbours. He was talked out of it, presumably by family members who could see where such a gesture would lead. But the intention tells us who he was. He did not think of the Jews’ suffering as their problem. He thought of it as his own.

A Father in the House

Most of what we know about Casper as a father comes from Corrie’s own memories, written down decades later, and they should be read as a daughter’s portrait. They are affectionate, and they may be idealised. But they are consistent, and they match what outsiders said of him.

In her telling he was gentle, humorous, and deeply prayerful. The household gathered every day to read the Bible and pray, and Casper read aloud from the great family Bible at meals. He was absent-minded about money and generous to a fault. He was known to spend more time talking with a customer about God than fixing the customer’s watch. He treated the children who came to the shop and the beggars who came to the back door with the same courtesy he showed the town’s wealthy families.

Corrie’s 1945 account gives two glimpses of him at eighty-four that ring true. In the busy months of 1943, when the house was full of Jewish refugees and young resistance workers, Mary, the eldest of the Jewish guests, taught an Italian class in the evenings. Casper came to the class with his notebook, because learning languages was one of his hobbies. And on the day of the raid, when a German officer, seeing a Bible in the room, demanded to know what it said about the government, the old man quoted Peter: “Fear God; honour the Queen.” When the officer protested that the Bible said nothing of the kind, Casper politely corrected himself. It said “the king,” he explained, but in the Netherlands that meant the Queen. The verse is 1 Peter 2:17, which in the ASV reads, “Fear God. Honor the king.” It was a quiet act of defiance, delivered with courtesy, in front of the men who were about to take him to prison.

The people of Haarlem seem to have loved him. Corrie’s first account says the town called him “Haarlem’s Grand Old Man,” and that as the prisoners were driven away from the police station, neighbours stood silently in the street with tears in their eyes.

“The Best Is Yet to Come”

Corrie recorded one of her father’s favourite sayings in her 1945 book: “The best is yet to come.” He said it often, she recalled. On the bus from Haarlem to the prison, when he was weak and confused and leaning heavily on her arm, she and Betsie spoke with him about heaven, and he agreed that whatever happened, heaven awaited them. After his death, a niece wrote to Betsie in prison telling her not to grieve. Grandfather’s motto had been “the best is yet to come,” and now the best had come for him.

It was not a naive optimism. Casper did not expect the best from the German occupation, and he was not surprised when it came for his family. His hope looked beyond this life. It was the hope Paul expressed from prison: “For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21, ASV). A man who truly believes that the best is yet to come is free to take risks that other people cannot take. He has already settled what matters most.

A Son Who Studied Antisemitism

Casper’s love for the Jewish people passed to all his children, but it took a scholarly form in his only surviving son. Willem ten Boom, born in 1886, became a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church. In 1928 he earned a doctorate at the University of Leipzig in Germany with a dissertation on the origins of modern racial antisemitism. He was studying, years before Hitler came to power, the very ideas that would soon be used to justify the murder of Europe’s Jews.

From 1925 Willem also served as a minister of the Dutch Society for Israel, a Protestant organisation whose work combined care for Jewish people with Christian mission among them. That combination can be uncomfortable for modern readers, and it should be named honestly. The ten Booms’ love for the Jewish people was a Christian love. They longed for Jews to know Jesus as their Messiah, and they said so. But in the years that mattered most, that love did not wait for anyone to agree with them. The ten Booms sheltered Jews as Jews, because they were people in mortal danger and God’s ancient people. They asked for nothing in return. Willem’s care home at Hilversum sheltered Jews during the war, and his son Kik worked in the resistance and died in a concentration camp.

For Reflection

Casper ten Boom was an old watchmaker with no power and no platform. What he had was a settled conviction, drawn from Scripture, that the Jewish people were beloved by God. He lived that conviction in the ordinary courtesies of a lifetime, long before it became dangerous.

Most of us hold convictions that have never been tested. We could ask which of them we would be willing to wear on our sleeve, as Casper wanted to wear the yellow star. And we could ask whether we are practising those convictions now, in small ways, so that they will be ready if the test ever comes.