Articles, Questions, & Answers

By Alice Smith

In the early 70s Eddie and I met Miss Corrie Ten Boom, at a dinner party while we were leading an evangelistic crusade in Memphis, Tennessee. I will never forget how my life was changed the several hours I was in her presence. On that cold winter night a small group of us sat by the fire and listened to Corrie talk to us. Her eyes danced with joy as she spoke to us, and then completely ignoring us, she would lift her head heavenward and begin to speak to the heavenly Father in her sweet Dutch accent. One of the phrases I can still remember Miss Corrie said to God in her broken English was, “Oh Father, help your children understand these things.”

To help you understand the price Miss Corrie had paid both with God and family, Ten Boom was born in Haarlem, North Holland, and the youngest of four children. Her mother died of a stroke. Her father was a well-liked watch repairman. Her sister Betsie was born with pernicious anemia and never married and according to Miss Corrie her brother Willem was obsessed with politics, and always saw the dark side of things. Willem married and fathered four children. Her last sibling, Nollie, also married, and had six children. However, Corrie never married.

The Ten Boom family was a family with strong Christian beliefs and in 1923, Corrie helped organize girls’ clubs. In 1940, the Nazis invaded the Netherlands and banned the Ten Boom’s club organization. By 1942, she and her family had become very active in the Dutch underground, hiding Jewish refugees. They rescued many Jews from death at the hands of the Nazi SS. They helped Jews without forcing conversions, and even provided kosher food and honored their Sabbath.

The Germans arrested the entire Ten Boom family on February 28, 1944 with the help of a Dutch informant (Ten Boom would later discover his name to be Jan Vogel). They were sent first to Scheveningen prison, then to the Vught political concentration camp (both in the Netherlands), and finally to the notorious Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany in September 1944, where Ten Boom’s sister Betsie died. Grieved and weary Corrie was released from prison in December 1944. In the movie The Hiding Place, Ten Boom narrates the section on her release from camp, saying that she later learned that her release had been a clerical error. All the women prisoners her age in the camp were killed the week following her release. We all know God ordered the steps of Miss Ten Boom and preserved her life so many of us would be transformed by her testimony.

She told the story of her family and their work during World War II in her most famous book, The Hiding Place (1971), which was made into a film by World Wide Pictures in 1975. The book and film give context to the story of Anne Frank, who was also in hiding in the Netherlands during the war.

Miss Corrie’s emphasis was on forgiveness. In her book Tramp for the Lord (1974), she tells the story of how, after she had been teaching in Germany in 1947, she was approached by one of the cruelest former Ravensbrück camp guards. She was reluctant to forgive him, but prayed that she would be able to. She wrote that, “For a long moment we grasped each other’s hands, the former guard and the former prisoner. I had never known God’s love as intensely as I did then.” She also wrote (in the same passage) that in her post-war experience with other victims of Nazi brutality, it was those who were able to forgive who were best able to rebuild their lives.

In 1977, Ten Boom, then 85 years old, moved to Orange, California. Successive strokes in 1978 took away her powers of speech and communication and left her an invalid. She died on April 15, 1983, her 91st birthday. She was said to have been happy about dying on her birthday because she could “celebrate it with the Lord.”

That winter night so long ago, nestled by the fireplace in Tennessee, God answered Miss Corrie’s prayer for us to understand what she was saying. The hunger for humility, brokenness and intimacy with God soared to a new level for me. What I had experienced from years past would never be enough any longer. I was desperate to know my heavenly Father like Corrie Ten Boom did.

Isn’t God amazing? Doesn’t he go to incredible extremes to draw us into an intimate connection with him? He orders our steps and we can look back and see the Lord’s quiet intervention in our lives. Even when we don’t understand why or what God is doing, remember to act on the truth that it is in our power to change sour lemon experiences of our lives into sweet lemonade. That’s what Miss Corrie did. That’s what I am doing and I pray you will too.