The Youngest Daughter

“God setteth the solitary in families: He bringeth out the prisoners into prosperity”

— Psalm 68:6, ASV

Born on Good Friday

Cornelia Arnolda Johanna ten Boom was born in Amsterdam on 15 April 1892. That year the date fell on Good Friday. Family tradition, recorded by the museum that now occupies the Beje, adds that she arrived a month early and was so small and frail that no one expected her to live long. She lived to be ninety-one, and died on her birthday.

Many popular accounts say she was born in Haarlem. She was not. The Dutch women’s biographical lexicon, the museum’s own chronology, and the Holocaust memorial encyclopedias all give Amsterdam, where her father then had his shop. It is a small correction, but the kind of detail that shows how a famous story settles into a simpler shape over time. Corrie was brought to Haarlem as a baby, grew up there, and belonged to it so completely that the town has claimed her ever since.

She was the youngest of five children. The eldest, Elisabeth, always called Betsie, was born in August 1885 and was nearly seven years older. Then came Willem in 1886. A second son, Hendrik Jan, born in 1888, died in infancy. Arnolda, known as Nollie, was born in 1890. The family called the new baby Corrie, and the name stuck for the rest of her life, even on the covers of her books.

A House Full of Women

The Beje of Corrie’s childhood was crowded, loud, and full of strong personalities. Besides her parents and her brother and sisters, three of her mother’s sisters lived there for long periods. Tante Anna had lived with the family since the Amsterdam days and stayed until 1925. Tante Jans and Tante Bep joined the household in Haarlem.

Corrie’s later portraits of these aunts, written for The Hiding Place and In My Father’s House, are among the most vivid parts of her books. In her telling, one aunt ran committees and wrote religious tracts with great energy and not much tact. Another had spent her working life as a governess in wealthy homes and quietly resented her dependence on others. Another served everyone without complaint. These are a novelist’s sketches, affectionate and a little comic, and they should be read as a grown woman’s memories of childhood. But they tell us something important. Corrie grew up in a household where love had to make room for difficult people. That was a training ground for patience long before she had any idea she would need it.

Her Mother

Corrie’s mother, Cor, had been a teacher before her marriage. In Corrie’s memory she was warm, sociable, and generous, the kind of woman who made up baskets for poor neighbours and remembered every birthday. But she was not strong. A series of strokes marked her last years, and by Corrie’s account she was left able to say only a few words. She died on 17 October 1921, aged sixty-three.

Corrie was twenty-nine. She had watched her mother’s world shrink to a single room and a few sounds, and she later wrote that her mother’s love had gone on expressing itself through the little she could still do. The memory stayed with her. Nearly sixty years later, after her own strokes, Corrie lay in a room in California for five years, almost unable to speak. One of the women who cared for her then wrote a whole book about those silent years, and about the love that still came through them. The daughter had learned from the mother how to be helpless well.

School, and a Bible School

Corrie’s schooling was ordinary for a Dutch girl of her class. She went to primary school and then to a domestic-science school, the kind of practical training that was expected to prepare a young woman for running a household. Around 1910 she also spent some years at a Bible school in Haarlem. There is no sign that she was an outstanding student, or that anyone thought her destined for anything unusual. She loved music, played the piano, and was lively and talkative. She was much less orderly than her older sister Betsie, who was quiet, graceful, and meticulous.

Karel

Corrie never married, and the reason she gave, many years later, was a disappointment in love. In The Hiding Place she tells of a young man named Karel, a friend of her brother Willem from his student days. She came to hope that he would marry her. As she remembered it, he visited, walked with her, and seemed to return her feelings. But his family expected him to make a better match, a young woman with money and position, and in the end he did. He came to the Beje to introduce his fiancée.

This story rests entirely on Corrie’s own account. No independent record identifies Karel, and it would be wrong to guess at his surname. But the way she told it is worth attention. She remembered climbing to her room afterwards in misery. Her father came up to her and, as she tells it, spoke not of forgetting the young man but of what to do with love that has nowhere to go: rather than stifle it, she could give it to God and let him redirect it. Corrie told that story to many audiences. She believed it had shaped her whole life. The love she might have given to a husband and children went instead to the girls in her clubs, to the disabled people she taught, to the foster children who later came to the Beje, to the Jews she hid, and in the end to the whole world.

The Solitary in Families

The verse at the head of this chapter speaks of God as the one who “setteth the solitary in families” (Psalm 68:6, ASV). Corrie and Betsie both remained single all their lives. In the Dutch society of their day, an unmarried woman in her forties was often pitied, and sometimes quietly overlooked. The two sisters lived with their father and kept his house and shop. In the eyes of the town, they were simply the watchmaker’s daughters.

But they were never alone. The Beje was a family in the fullest sense. It was a household of aunts, nieces and nephews, and later foster children. In the war it held Jewish refugees and young resistance workers for whom the old watchmaker became “Grandfather.” God set the solitary in families, and he also made the solitary into a family for others. Isaiah, speaking to a desolate city, promised, “For more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married wife, saith Jehovah” (Isaiah 54:1, ASV). By the end of her life, people all over the world thought of Corrie ten Boom as a kind of spiritual grandmother. That was not the life she had hoped for as a young woman climbing the stairs after Karel’s visit. It was a larger one.

The second half of the psalm verse is also worth noticing, in the light of what was to come: “He bringeth out the prisoners into prosperity.” That line would take on a meaning in Corrie’s life that no one in the Beje of 1921 could have imagined.

For Reflection

Corrie’s early life contained two great losses: a mother who declined through a series of strokes, and a hoped-for marriage that did not happen. Neither made headlines, and both shaped her deeply.

Her father’s counsel is worth remembering. When love is disappointed, the easier course is to harden the heart so that it stops hurting. The harder course is to offer that love to God and let him direct it where he will. For Corrie, it led to a life of loving far more people than one household could ever have held.