Corrie ten Boom’s family endured the darkness and the horrors of WWII in Holland and in concentration camps. Members of the family were some of Holland’s finest watch makers. After Holland’s queen left the country for a self-imposed exile in England in 1940, the citizens of Holland felt abandoned, and they soon came to realize that the Nazis would tear out their souls’ hope.
The Ten Boom family’s beliefs were strongly based in their Christian faith. When their Jewish neighbors were forced to wear stars, Mr. Ten Boom said, “I will wear a star until God tells me not to. It is no easy thing to stand in the palm of God’s hand, but we must do what we can for our brothers.” Mrs. Ten Boom’s viewpoint reflected another insight about man in general. “Men live together as brothers only in God’s kingdom.” As a teacher of mongoloid children, she believed that God fills us up with loving things when life is bad. The Ten Booms hid many Jews in their house behind a false brick wall in Corrie’s bed room; they aided the resistance in helping Jews escape out of Holland and into other countries. Mr. Ten Boom strongly believed that “there comes a time when we must choose between God and men.”
As lovers of pipe organs and the Baroque masters, the Ten Booms frequently attended the Haarlem cathedral services and drew comfort from knowing that God often blesses our souls with beautiful music to help us confront the darkness we encounter in the world. Until the Nazis closed the cathedral, the 5000 pipes of that pipe organ brought comfort and solace to many citizens, even the Germans who missed their church pipe organs back home.
In March of 1944, a neighbor turned the family into the Nazis, and individual members of the family were taken in cattle cars to different concentration camps in Europe. Carrie and her sister, Betsy, were taken to the Ravensbruck camp. Corrie was sick when she arrived in the camp but recovered enough to take part in the Nazi degradation of women. She found it hard to understand that God cares for all of His children, good or evil, healthy or sick, courageous or weak. She also realized that the Nazis savage work camps were actually death camps where only the most fit women managed to survive. When the women arrived at the camp, they passed through a metal gate that said, “Work Makes Freedom;” Corrie soon thought that the gate should have said, “Work Makes Death.”
The inmates started to loose their sanity and became more territorial about their few belongings. The female Polish guards were brutal keepers of the women in the barracks built for 400 people but now housing 1400. Deprivation eating often brought memories of home for Corrie and Betsy, but those memories began to fade for Corrie as she saw her sister gradually die from typhus. She began to hate God because she couldn’t protect the one person who kept her sane.
As long as Betsy could fight off the disease, she began her missionary work among the other inmates, and she said, “Jesus promises to be with us even in this darkness.” Betsy counseled Corrie not to hate, but two events caused Corrie to become more angry with each passing day. The inmate nurse assistant’s hands were broken with the butt of a rifle for taking some medicine to the women in the barracks. An angry inmate who was a renowned violinist challenged Betsy by saying, “What does your God do for these hands? I’ll never play again if I ever get out of this dark hole.” Seeing Betsy’s faith grow instead of fading, Corrie began to pray for God to change her hatred and replace it with love.
From standing in the snow and rain for four hours each day, Betsy could no longer fight the disease. She was taken to the infirmary where she died from typhus after a two week struggle. Even in her pain, she continued to teach that “suffering does not mean God has stopped loving us. Sometimes we just need to accept what’s happening.” Her last words uttered to Corrie were, “There is no pit so deep that Jesus will not go deeper in for us.”
As the Allies were coming closer to Germany’s borders and annexed countries, the Nazis were moving inmates around to other camps or summarily killing them in gas chambers. Corrie was shocked to be called out of the roll call lines and be taken to the commandant’s office, where she was told her time was completed as far as the Nazis were concerned. The other women looked to Corrie for re-assurance as they awaited their own selections for another camp or for the gas chambers. She turned to them and said, “God is with you.” She remembered what her father had told her before he was taken away to the police station. “When the time comes for your death, God will give you all the strength you need.”
Corrie did not know at the time if she had any family members still alive, but as more concentration camps were liberated by the Allies, she learned her entire family had died at the hands of monsters she fought so hard to love instead of hate. As the years went by, Corrie became a missionary to sixty countries, making it her duty to tell the world that the darkness, Satan, will continue to exist in the world as long as we do nothing to stop it or him. Each of us must play our part to bring the light, Jesus Christ, to this wonderful and beautiful world, yet impoverished in soul as it is. Corrie often said that Adolf Hitler was the anti-Christ and that he came to power by spewing out his hatred and poison on the unsuspecting world. She continued to pray for peace in Jerusalem and considered it an honor to have given a part of her life to save God’s children. She often said that “until God’s colors come back into the world, we must continue to fight the darkness because the light lives in our souls.”
Learning about Corrie ten Boom in the movie, “The Hiding Place,” I have come to treasure her thoughts as tenets that shine in my own words, actions, and deeds. I sometimes doubt that I have the strength of the courageous people who have gone before me, but I know that God walks with me on the sunny days as well as the dark ones. It is our responsibility to take up our crosses whenever and wherever they lead us and to follow Jesus Christ with all of our hearts. He will give us the grace and joy to walk our paths, and His light will cover us with a shield of love. We can only see a little of God’s love here on earth, but on His horizon, there is so much more.
Anna Hartt
