The Watchmaker of Haarlem

He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much: and he that is unjust in the least is unjust also in much. LUKE 16:10

A house of clocks. Cornelia ten Boom was born in Amsterdam on 15 April 1892, the youngest of five children, and brought as a baby to Haarlem, where her father kept a watch shop in a narrow old house on the Barteljorisstraat. The family called the house the Beje, after the street. Her grandfather Willem had opened the shop in 1837; her father, Casper, had learned the trade at the same bench and would work there almost all his life. The household was Dutch Reformed, devout and warm, crowded with aunts, and ordered around the reading of the Bible at meals. Everyone called the youngest daughter Corrie, and the name stayed on the covers of her books.

A child’s prayer. She told audiences all her life that she had asked the Lord Jesus into her heart when she was five years old, and that He had never left her. Her mother, as Corrie remembered it, noticed at once that the little girl began to pray for other people — among them the drinkers in a street behind the house. It is a small, domestic beginning, and it is typical of her. Nothing in her story begins with a trumpet.

A sister and a father. Of her siblings, the one who mattered most to her was the eldest, Elisabeth, always called Betsie, born in 1885 — quiet, orderly, never strong, and possessed of a faith that Corrie admired all her life and sometimes found unsettling. Their brother Willem became a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church and a student of the roots of modern antisemitism. Their sister Nollie married and became a teacher. Their mother died in 1921 after a long decline through a series of strokes. And their father, Casper, was the fixed point of the house: gentle, humorous, prayerful, better at talking to customers about God than at sending them bills, and possessed of a settled love for the Jewish people drawn straight from the Scriptures he read aloud every day.

A disappointment in love. Corrie never married. In The Hiding Place she tells of a young man she hoped would marry her, and who instead married a woman his family thought more suitable. She remembered her father coming up to her room afterwards and counselling her not to kill the love she felt but to give it to God and let Him direct it elsewhere. The story rests on her own account alone, but she believed it had shaped her life, and the love she might have given to a family went instead to a very great many other people.

The first woman watchmaker. In the early 1920s Corrie moved from the kitchen to the shop, and learned her father’s trade in earnest, including a period of training in Switzerland. In the 1920s — 1924, by the museum’s record, though other sources give 1921 or 1922 — she became the first woman licensed as a watchmaker in the Netherlands. For twenty years she worked at the bench beside her father, repairing mechanisms so small that a grain of dust could stop them. It is a detail her later fame has overshadowed, and it deserves remembering. Before she was a rescuer or a prisoner or a preacher, she was a skilled professional woman, faithful in very small things.

The least of these. Alongside the shop she ran clubs for girls and young women, with camps, music and Bible study, and from about 1921 she taught the Christian faith to people with intellectual disabilities, whom most of the churches of her day overlooked entirely. The family also took in foster children. None of this made the newspapers. All of it, looking back, was preparation.

Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. MATTHEW 25:40

The hiding place. Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940. As the persecution of Dutch Jews tightened, the ten Booms were drawn into the underground, and the old house, full of odd corners and with a constant stream of customers to cover the traffic, became a link in a chain that moved Jews and resistance workers to safety. A secret room was built behind a false wall in Corrie’s own bedroom on the top floor. Guests were drilled until they could vanish into it in about a minute. Corrie, by then in her fifties, found herself organising ration cards, safe addresses and couriers. The museum that keeps the house today estimates that the family and the wider network of which it was part helped save some eight hundred people — most of them sheltered not in the Beje but at safe addresses elsewhere. It is an estimate for the whole network, not a count of those who passed through the house.

The raid. On 28 February 1944 the family was betrayed. The house was raided and two or three dozen people were arrested, Corrie, Betsie and their father among them. The police never found the secret room. The six people hidden behind the wall — four Jews and two resistance workers — stood there in silence for some two and a half days before they could be brought out. Not all of them survived the war. Mary van Itallie was arrested again within days at a new address and died at Auschwitz on 1 May 1944. Meijer Mossel, the cantor the household called Eusie, lived to see the liberation. Casper ten Boom, eighty-four years old, died in prison in The Hague about ten days after his arrest. He had told friends who warned him of the danger that he would count it an honour to give his life for God’s ancient people.

Scheveningen, Vught, Ravensbrück. Corrie spent months in solitary confinement in the prison at Scheveningen, then was held with Betsie at the camp at Vught in the Netherlands, and in September 1944 the sisters were taken east to Ravensbrück, the great women’s concentration camp north of Berlin. Corrie had managed to bring a small Bible with her through the search. In an overcrowded, vermin-ridden barracks the two sisters held Bible readings for the women around them, sometimes more than once a day, in several languages. Betsie, growing weaker, met the place with a faith that Corrie said unsettled everyone around her, including herself. She died in the camp on 16 December 1944, aged fifty-nine.

Released. At the very end of December 1944 Corrie was discharged. Years later she was told it had been a clerical error, and in The Hiding Place she tells it that way; her 1945 account suggests the sisters had expected a fixed term to run out, and no document confirms a mistake. Whatever the cause, the danger she escaped was real: within weeks the camp began gassing the sick and the old. She came home to Haarlem in the Hunger Winter, alone. Her nephew Kik would die in Bergen-Belsen; her brother Willem died of an illness contracted in prison in 1946.

A tramp for the Lord. What she did next is the reason this book exists. By June 1945 her first account of the camps was in print. That same month she wrote to the man she understood to have betrayed the family and told him she forgave him. She opened a home near Haarlem for people coming back from the camps, and later one in Darmstadt, in Germany, for refugees and displaced people. From 1946, when she first crossed the Atlantic with almost no money, she travelled for more than thirty years, in more than sixty countries, including behind the Iron Curtain, with no settled home, preaching the love of God and the forgiveness of enemies. She called herself a tramp for the Lord, and made it the title of a book.

The telling. In 1967 Yad Vashem recognised her as one of the Righteous Among the Nations. In 1971 she told the whole story in The Hiding Place, written with John and Elizabeth Sherrill; a film followed in 1975. The book made a Dutch watchmaker and her dead sister known all over the world.

The silent years. In 1977 she settled at last in Placentia, California. A stroke in 1978 took most of her speech, and further strokes left her bedridden. For five years the woman who had spoken to audiences on every continent could say almost nothing, and she was nursed by companions who later wrote of the love that still came through her silence. She died on 15 April 1983, her ninety-first birthday.

Even to your old age I am he; and even to hoar hairs will I carry you. ISAIAH 46:4

She would not have wanted her life remembered as a story of courage. She would have wanted it remembered as a story of God’s faithfulness to an ordinary household that opened its door, and to a frightened woman who found Him in the darkest place human beings have made.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Corrie was nearly fifty before the events for which she is remembered. Name one quiet faithfulness in your present life that you have been treating as a waiting room.

2. Consider who are the least in your own community — the people most churches overlook. Take one concrete step toward one of them this month.

3. Casper ten Boom’s convictions were settled long before they were tested. Write down one conviction you hold that has never yet cost you anything.

4. Read the account of the raid in The Hiding Place or in the Ochorus biography, and pray for those in your own day who hide the hunted at risk to themselves.

5. If you are in a season of loss or of silence, ask God to show you how He might still use you there.

A PRAYER

Father, You were in the narrow house in Haarlem, in the prison cell and in the barracks, and You carried Your servant to the end.

Make me faithful in small things, in the work no one praises, so that I may be found faithful if greater things are asked of me.

Give me a heart that opens its door to the stranger and the hunted, and a love for Your ancient people that does not wait until it is safe.

And when my own strength fails, carry me, as You promised, even to old age. Amen.