PDF Summary:The Hiding Place, by Corrie ten Boom

The Hiding Place is an autobiographical memoir by Corrie ten Boom, a devoutly religious woman who lived in the Holland city of Haarlem during the Nazi occupation. Compelled by her unshakeable Christian morality, she defied tyranny to rescue her Jewish neighbors who faced annihilation during the Holocaust. She was ultimately caught and sent to the notorious Ravensbruck death camp, where she witnessed scenes of unimaginable cruelty. In the camp, it was Corrie’s bedrock faith in the glory of God that sustained her. She discovered that love was a far more powerful force than hate—for God’s love was truly unconquerable.

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The danger Corrie faced was immense. If caught, she and her whole family risked being thrown into a concentration camp or even being summarily executed by the Nazis. Corrie came to believe that self-sacrifice in the service of rescuing others was the deepest expression of love. And she was prepared to face death in order to show that love, just as Christ had on the cross.

Corrie’s rescue and hiding operation was growing rapidly by spring 1943. What started out as a small network of friends and family now included 80 co-conspirators. Many of these contacts were people in positions of authority in Haarlem, including a Haarlem police officer. Corrie began to worry that the circle was growing too large and unwieldy.

In 1943, a Jewish man named Meyer Mossel, a former synagogue cantor in Amsterdam, came to live as a permanent resident at the Beje. He delighted everyone with his humor and cheerfulness, despite the obviously fraught circumstances. He struck a particular chord with Casper, with whom he shared an abiding love for the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. Eventually, the Beje hiding place became home to six Jews who lived there on a permanent basis, along with Corrie, Betsie, and Casper. The six Jews and the ten Booms became a true family unit. They ate, laughed, sang, and prayed together, retaining their humanity in the face of nearly unimaginable fear.

Despite the cohesiveness, circumstances were fraught—the group had to hold regular drills to practice escaping to the hiding place from anywhere in the house at a minute’s notice without leaving behind any trace. These drills always provoked severe anxiety, because they brought home the awful reality of what would happen if they were caught. Corrie, meanwhile, prepared herself for being questioned by the Gestapo—she needed to master the sin of lying by being able to tell the Gestapo that there were no Jews hiding at the Beje.

In Prison

On the morning of February 28, 1944, the Beje was raided by the authorities after one of Corrie’s operatives was caught by the Gestapo. Both Corrie and Betsie were savagely beaten during the home interrogation, as the Gestapo attempted to force a confession.

Although Corrie gave no information and the officers failed to find the Jewish fugitives in the hiding place, the ten Boom family—Corrie, Betsie, and Casper, in addition to Willem, Nollie, and Peter (Corrie’s nephew), all of whom were present at the Beje that morning for a meeting of their prayer group—was loaded into a van and taken to the federal prison at Scheveningen.

The authorities offered to release Casper and allow him to return home to the Beje. But Casper refused this offer of mercy, telling the Germans that he would never close his door to anyone seeking help—if he went home, he would simply continue hiding fugitives. Even the Nazi terror could not rob Casper of his humanity.

Corrie was separated from her family and placed into an overcrowded and filthy cell with a group of other inmates. She was sick with the flu when she was arrested and became even sicker under the inhumane conditions. Two weeks after her arrival at Scheveningen, Corrie was taken to the prison hospital, where a kindly nurse managed to smuggle her a package containing two bars of prewar soap; a packet of safety pins; and the four Gospels, in four small, separate booklets. Two nights later, for unknown reasons, Corrie was placed in solitary confinement.

She begged for word of her family, especially her father, but no one would share information with her. The Gospels, however, provided Corrie with the spiritual nourishment she so desperately needed. She remembered that Jesus had also suffered loss and defeat, far worse than what she and her group at the Beje had suffered—but He had ultimately triumphed and redeemed all mankind.

In April 1944, Corrie received word that all the members of her family were free—except for Betsie, who was still in Scheveningen. She also learned that all six Jews were safe. But just a few weeks later, Corrie learned that Casper had died after ten days in prison. Corrie took comfort in knowing that Casper was now with God and Mama, free from the agony and suffering of the mortal world, having lived a life committed to serving God and upholding his abiding faith.

In June 1944, Corrie was taken to a small room at the prison, where, to her surprise, she found her family waiting for her. Willem, Flip, Nollie, and even Betsie were there! A sympathetic guard used the loose pretext of the reading of Casper’s last will and testament to briefly reunite Corrie with her family, claiming that it was Dutch law that the full family had to be present for such an event. This unexpected reunion was a bright spot in Corrie’s otherwise dreary sojourn in Scheveningen. Willem was severely ill with jaundice due to the unsanitary conditions, malnutrition, and lack of medical care during his stay in prison. Betsie, too, was gaunt and pale from her ordeal. Corrie learned that her nephew, Kik, had been sent to a prison in Germany after being arrested in connection with his work with the Resistance. Before Corrie left her family and was forced to return to her cell, Betsie used the opportunity to present her sister with a new Bible (Corrie having given away the four gospels she received from the nurse)—this Bible was to be Corrie’s strength in the ordeals ahead.

A New Test of Faith

In early summer 1944, Corrie was transported to the Vught concentration camp for political prisoners. During the journey from Scheveningen to Vught, she was reunited with Betsie, who was seriously ill from her ordeal in prison.

When the sisters arrived at Vught, they were shown the torture centers for recalcitrant inmates who failed to obey camp rules. If they stepped out of line, Corrie and Betsie would be taken to one of these buildings, stuffed into a room the size of a gym locker, have their hands bound above their head, and left to wait in this condition indefinitely.

Corrie was assigned to a slave labor unit in the Philips factory at the camp, assembling parts for radios for German fighter planes; Betsie, in her weakened condition, was assigned to duty sewing prison uniforms with the other sickly inmates. The Philips factory was run by a foreman named Moorman, a fellow prisoner who organized slowdowns and sabotage efforts among the workers, in an effort to hamper the German war machine.

The conditions of the camp put Corrie’s religious beliefs to the test. One day, Corrie learned that a man named Jan Vogels had betrayed the ten Boom family to the Gestapo. She fantasized about killing this man if she ever saw him. But Corrie ultimately saw the error and sin of her vengeful thoughts. She saw that she faced the same judgment before God as Vogels did. Corrie prayed to God to forgive Vogel and herself as well. In forgiving him, she found herself at peace.

Although Corrie and Betsie found community with the women in their barracks, the sheer brutality of the camp was impossible to ignore. One day in September, a fellow prisoner in their barracks went into labor with a child and was forced to give birth on the floor; the baby lived a mere four hours. One evening, the women listened as seven hundred prisoners in the neighboring men’s camp were shot to death.

That fall, the women were herded onto an overcrowded railcar and sent on a harrowing two-day journey east. When they disembarked, they saw that they were at Ravensbruck, the notorious women’s extermination camp in Germany. Corrie never forgot the sight of the smokestack from the crematorium as the camp loomed into her view for the first time.

Conditions were even worse than those at Vught. The barracks were flea-infested, with overflowing toilets spilling their vile contents onto the floor. The prisoners were at the psychological breaking-point, with fights and squabbles a common experience in the barracks. Upon arrival, Corrie and Betsie were forced to strip naked and shower in front of the SS men. Miraculously, Corrie managed to retain her Bible, which was to serve as her spiritual nourishment in Ravensbruck.

With the arrival of Corrie and Betsie, the barracks became a spiritual sanctuary for the women living there. Corrie and Betsie led daily prayer sessions, giving their fellow prisoners the strength they needed to persevere through their ordeal. Corrie described the moving power of these barracks religious services, as women translated the Bible to each other across the Dutch, German, French, Polish, Russian, and Czech languages. The women were of all different Christian denominations, but they shared in the redeeming strength of God’s word.

Corrie and Betsie began to formulate an idea for a home they would establish after the war, for survivors of Nazism. It would be a place of healing and love, where the persecuted and terrorized could heal their physical, psychic, and spiritual wounds. Betsie even envisioned transforming former concentration camps like Ravensbruck into places of restoration.

Betsie was in poor health when she arrived at Ravensbruck—her condition only grew worse in the harsh circumstances of the concentration camp. Shortly before Christmas, she took a turn for the worse. At last, Betsie was removed to the hospital. The next morning, Corrie snuck off to the hospital and made her way to Betsie’s window. What Corrie saw was an emaciated, yellowed body. Betsie was dead.

But Corrie witnessed a miracle. When Betsie’s body was laid down on the pile of corpses, it was transformed. No longer emaciated and yellow, Betsie was healthy-looking and beautiful again. Corrie believed she was seeing a vision of her sister as she looked in heaven. Betsie, like Casper, had passed through the suffering of the mortal world and ascended to Heaven in a state of beauty and grace.

Corrie’s Final Mission

Mere days after Betsie’s death, Corrie was issued release papers. Her sentence was finally up. Before she could leave, however, she was forced to spend two awful weeks in the camp hospital to recover from the swelling in her legs caused by edema.

The Nazi nurses in the hospital took little care for their patients, often mocking their tortured cries or yelling at them to shut up and stop complaining. Corrie did what she could to ease the suffering of others, bringing bedpans to the patients who were too weak to make it to the ward’s filthy latrine.

Finally, at the end of December, the doctors cleared Corrie for release. She was given back the possessions she’d been arrested with and, on New Years Day 1945, was placed on a train bound for Berlin. Corrie saw the awful devastation of war as she journeyed through bombed-out German cities and rail stations. After a ten-day sojourn in a hospital at the Dutch border town of Groningen, Corrie boarded a food truck headed to Willem’s town of Hilversum.

Reunited with her family, she learned that her nephew Kik had disappeared after being apprehended by the Germans in connection with his work with the Dutch Resistance. Years later, they learned that Kik had died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1944.

Upon her return, Corrie found that she had no more energy for underground work. She sensed that God had a different calling for her. She began preaching in the streets of Haarlem in early spring 1945, while the city was still under occupation. Corrie delighted in sharing the message of the unconquerable power of Christ’s love. She was driven to finally bring her and Betsie’s vision to life. She wanted to create a home that would bring healing to the wounded and suffering.

After one of her preaching sessions, a wealthy woman offered her house as the place for Corrie’s home for concentration camp survivors. Almost immediately after the liberation of Holland in May 1945, the first wave of what would become hundreds of people scarred by the war began making their way to Corrie’s recovery house. It became a place of refuge, where the wounded and weary could heal their psychological wounds and process the experience of their war trauma. Corrie saw it as her mission to tend to all those who were destroyed by the war—including the perpetrators and collaborators.

She believed that God had given her certain experiences in life, as a concentration camp survivor, to prepare her for her true mission and purpose. Corrie first traveled to war-torn Germany, the home of her persecutors, to share the message of Christ the redeemer to a traumatized people. Later, Corrie spearheaded the efforts to open a rehabilitation center in Germany—on the site of the former Darmstadt concentration camp.

Corrie ten Boom went on to travel the world as a renowned public speaker, visiting more than 60 countries in her lifetime. She went to far-flung and dangerous places, including Russia, China, Cuba, and other Communist-aligned countries. She saw scenes of dire poverty and oppression, just as she witnessed in the concentration camps—but she also saw hope and love. In Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Europe, she shared her personal story and delivered her constant, unchanging message: that Jesus’s love was unconquerable.