Corrie ten Boom's Hiding Place and Unbroken Faith

The little watch shop on Barteljorisstraat smelled of oil and brass and ticking clocks. Corrie ten Boom had grown up in that shop, learning from her father how to hold a tiny gear with steady hands and a steady heart. But in 1942, something far more important than watches needed protecting. The Nazis had marched into Holland. They were rounding up Jewish families — neighbors, friends, people Corrie had known her whole life — and sending them away to places no one spoke about in daylight. Corrie's father, Casper, was already eighty years old, but when a Jewish woman knocked on their door one trembling night, he opened it wide. "In this house," he said quietly, "God's people are always welcome." Corrie got to work. Behind a false wall in her bedroom, just big enough for six people to stand shoulder to shoulder, she and a group of brave volunteers built a hiding place. They called it the Beje. Every inch had to be perfect. The Gestapo — the Nazi secret police — could arrive without warning, and if they found even one hidden person, everyone in the house would be taken. For two years, the ten Boom family sheltered dozens of Jewish men, women, and children. Corrie set up an alarm system using a buzzer. She trained her family to act calm, to answer questions without trembling. Every single night, before they slept, her father read from the Bible in the dining room. His voice was low and steady, like the tick of a well-made clock. Corrie would close her eyes and hold onto his words the way a sailor holds onto rope in a storm. Then came the day she had always feared. On February 28, 1944, a man came to the shop and said a Jewish woman needed help. Corrie felt something cold move through her, but she let him in. Hours later, thirty Nazi officers flooded through the door. They searched every room. Six people were hidden behind that false wall, barely breathing. The Gestapo never found them. But they arrested Corrie, her sister Betsie, and their elderly father. Casper ten Boom died in prison just ten days later. He was eighty-four years old, and he never stopped trusting God. Corrie and Betsie were sent to Ravensbrück, one of the harshest concentration camps in all of Germany. The barracks were dark and crawling with fleas. The women slept crammed together on wooden boards. Guards walked the rows with hard eyes. But something extraordinary happened in that dreadful place. Betsie had smuggled in a small Bible. Every evening, the sisters would gather other prisoners around them and read aloud — softly, carefully, in Dutch and German and French. Women who had given up hope began to lift their heads. The guards never bothered them in that particular corner, and Corrie always believed it was because of the fleas the guards refused to enter. Betsie grew weaker through that winter. Before she died, she whispered to Corrie, "There is no pit so deep that God is not deeper still." Corrie held those words like a lantern. Through a clerical error — a mistake in the paperwork — Corrie was released on December 28, 1944, just one week before all the women her age in that camp were killed. She walked out into the cold morning air a free woman. She was fifty-two years old, thin as winter birch, and more certain of God's love than she had ever been. Corrie ten Boom spent the rest of her life traveling the world, telling her story. She told it in churches and schools, in broken-down halls and grand auditoriums. She told people that faith is not the absence of fear. Faith is choosing to trust when fear says not to. And every time she told it, somewhere in the audience, a child would straighten up a little taller, hold a little steadier — and believe.