The Hiding Place: It is All of Our Stories

We were living in Houston in the mid-1970s when I first heard of Corrie ten Boom and the story she had to tell in The Hiding Place. The book had been recently published, and a movie of the same title was released in 1975. It starred Jeannette Clift as Corrie, Julie Harris as her sister Betsie, and Arthur O’Connell as their father. I read the book but didn’t see the movie.

Forty years later, the story has stood the test of time. It is still a good story. It is still a heartbreaking story. And it is a story that keeps begging the question, what would I do in their situation? What question the story does not beg is could this happen here?

The answer to the second question is obvious – yes, it or something like it could happen here. Never underestimate the darkness of the human heart. We saw the same human lunge toward evil on Sept. 11, 2001. We see it in Syria and Iraq and Libya. We saw it in the killing fields of Cambodia, and with the tribal warfare in Rwanda, and in Bosnia. But this isn’t a problem limited to radical Islam or people in faraway countries. The same desire for authoritarian power and control can be seen all too close to home, and it isn’t an impulse limited only to governments.

In the Epilogue to the book, we read that Corrie and her family learn that her teenaged nephew Kik died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. He was caught helping an American parachutist escape to the Dutch coast. In 1959, Corrie herself returned to the Ravensbruck camp, where she was imprisoned and where Betsie died. And she learned something both familiar and profound. A Nazi guard or commandant or functionary had mistakenly released her late in 1944. She was supposed to have been killed with all of the other women her age the following week, but someone had made a clerical error.

A bureaucratic mistake.

Or the hand of God.

Perhaps both.

We often hear people ask, if there is a God, how could he allow so much evil in the world? The real, and perhaps surprising, question should be, why isn’t there more evil than what we see? My answer to that age-old question is simple: if there was no God, if there is no God, then our world at best would look much like what Corrie ten Boom experienced during World War II. That impulse to evil exists within each of us.

What also exists within each of us is the impulse to reach for God.

The Hiding Place is the two of two sisters in a small city in Holland, caught up in a gigantic turn of history. Because of their faith in God, they embark upon a course of helping Jews hide and escape from the Nazis. That course eventually leads to their arrest. Betsie comes through the story as something of a saint, the believer giving thanks in all things, in all circumstances. Corrie questions and kicks against what happens. She is the most recognizable of the two, the most familiar, at least to me. She gets angry at God, she shakes her fist at him, she refuses to believe that she should give thanks for fleas, of all things.

Corrie survives the horror of imprisonment and the concentration camp. She survived with a purpose. She knew what God would have her do. And her path started with forgiveness, as difficult as it was.

In so many ways, the story of Corrie ten Boom is all of our stories. Perhaps not as extreme, bit it is – and can be – our stories.


Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we've been reading The Hiding Place. This concludes the discussion. To see more posts, please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

Photograph: A scene from the 1975 movie The Hiding Place, with Julie Harris as Betsie (left) and Jeannette Clift as Corrie (right).

The Hiding Place: Entlassen!

In The Hiding Place, Corrie ten Boom describes a few of the last things her sister Betsie tells her before she dies in the hospital at the Ravensbruck concentration camp. One is that there will be a place with tall windows, for people to come and heal from the spiritual and psychological wounds of the war. And it’s clear that Betsie is not only talking about the people who suffered at the hands of the Nazis, but the Nazis themselves.

Another is that they will be free by the New Year – January of 1945. In a place like Ravensbruck, that likely would have seemed laughable to Corrie. The only way out from Ravensbruck seemed to be sent further east – to the death camps in Poland, although the prisoners had little firsthand knowledge of those.

Sometime after Betsie’s death, Corrie hears her voice shouted by a guard at the door of the barracks. She hurries after her as fast as she can, hobbling with swollen feet. She sites on a bench by a camp official with a few other women. One by one they’re called to the official, who looks at papers and says the word they likely thought they’d never hear.

Entlassen!

Corrie understood the German word for “released.” They were inexplicably being released. In Corrie’s case, the official looks at her feet and sends her first to the hospital; sick prisoners cannot be released. After a few days, he feet less swollen, she’s given a skirt and blouse and the articles taken from her when she arrived, including her mother’s ring (amazing, given the penchant the Nazis had for looting and stealing art and jewelry).

One thing she leaves behind – the small copy of the Scriptures in Dutch she and Betsie had used to read to the women and for worship services. She gives the treasured Bible to a young woman from Holland.

The train takes her first to Berlin, which has been heavily bombed. She finally gets a train for the Dutch border, but the journey takes days – so many delays because of torn up tracks and the movements of troop and supply trains. The last part of her journey to Haarlem is by truck – the train track is destroyed.

She finds family; and she returns to her home above the watch shop. She is a very different Corrie than the one who was arrested some 10 months before. She has seen death and destruction. She has seen people killed. She has seen brutality and what humans are indeed capable of. She has experienced the death of her beloved sister and father. Yes, it is a very different Corrie who returns to Haarlem, one who faith has been refined by fire.

Led by Sarah Salter and Jason Stasyszen, we’ve been discussing The Hiding Place. To see more posts on this chapter, “The Three Visions,” please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines. This is the last chapter in the book; there is an epilogue. I’ll have a few final thoughts next week.

Photograph by Lilla Frerichs via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Hiding Place: What the Fleas Did

Fleas were a constant pest in the barracks at Ravensbruck, the women’s concentration camp some 56 miles north of Berlin where Corrie and Betsie ten Boom were imprisoned in 1944. As described in The Hiding Place, Betsie had already reminded Corrie that they were to give thanks in all things. Including flea infestations in a camp whose hallmarks were deprivation, brutality, and death.  

Betsie’s health had always been problematic, and the conditions of prison confinement and being forced to be part of work gangs worsened her health problems. Even as she became sicker, her peace and spirit seemed to radiate hope and encouragement to Corrie and the other prisoners.

It is during one camp hospital stay that Betsie learns the reason for one of Ravensbruck’s few blessings – the guards stayed out of their large women’s barracks. Because the guards would not come in, Betsie and Corrie had been unimpeded in sharing the gospel and even conducting not one but two worship services.

The reason was the fleas, Betsie learned. The guards would not come into the barracks because they were afraid of picking up fleas.

And Corrie thinks of Betsie’s admonition to give thanks in all things, including fleas.

We often experience difficult, even terrible situations, without knowing why, without any rhyme or reason. It seems that life – or God – is simply toying with us to see how much we can stand. For Corrie and Betsie ten Boom, having to deal with fleas along with all the other horrors of a Nazi prison camp might seem over the top. Fleas, in addition to brutality and beatings, the smell of awful latrines, the hopelessness hanging over the entire site? Fleas, too, Lord?

In this case, there was a purpose. The fleas effectively kept the Nazi prison guards out, and allowed the gospel and worship to spread.

In a place as terrible as Ravensbruck, those fleas were the conduit for hope.

And Corrie will need hope. Betsie’s health worsens. She’s eventually taken back to the hospital. And the day comes when Corrie slips into the hospital through the bathroom and sees her sister’s body stacked against the wall.

She touches Betsie’s face for the last time.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Hiding Place. To see more posts on this chapter, “The Blue Sweater,” please visit Sarah at Reading Between the Lines.

Photograph: A view of the barracks of the Ravensbruck concentration camp. The reality of the camp was not what this photograph might suggest.

The Hiding Place: Thanking God for Fleas

We’ve reached the point in The Hiding Place where Corrie ten Boom and her sister Betsie have been arrested for helping Jews hide and escape the Nazis in World War II Haarlem, sent first to a jail in Holland and a few months later to their first prison camp. From there, they are herded with other prisoners on a train, traveling south for more than three days into Nazi Germany. This was a dreaded fate – no one had heard of anyone returning from Germany.

Finally, they arrive. And discover they have been sent to Ravensbruck, a women’s prison camp whose horrors had reached back to Holland.

Ravensbruck was some 56 miles north of Berlin. Over the course of its existence, it housed an estimated 130,000 to 150,000 women prisoners from various countries in Europe, including Germany. No one knows for sure how many died there, but estimates run as high as 96,000. Many were transported to death camps in Poland; more than 2,000 were killed in gas chambers on site. Approximately 15,000 women survived and were liberated at the end of the war.

Corrie and Betsie’s first resting place there is a large tent with no sides, inhabited by too many women prisoners and lice. They are eventually assigned to a barracks, sharing a bed with five other women. Corrie still has a small Dutch Bible given to her earlier and her sister’s blue sweater, which she makes Betsie wear for warmth.

Terrible food, terrible latrine-like bathrooms, lice, fleas, and brutality from the guards (including the women guards). That was daily existence in Ravensbruck. When Betsie is taken to the camp hospital, Corrie sneaks in through the bathroom, where she finds bodies stacked against the wall.

At one point, Betsie reminds Corrie that they are to give thanks to God in all things, including Ravensbruck. They hold hands and pray their thanks – for being together, for having the Bible with them, and for the crowded conditions in the barracks that more women might hear the gospel.

And then Betsie tells her to give thanks for the fleas. Corrie can’t do it. “Betsie,” she says, “there’s no way even God could make me grateful for a flea.”

But Betsie insists. And the two sisters give thanks for the fleas.

I can’t imagine it. Right there, in an absolutely horrible, death-filled environment, the two ten Boom sisters give thanks.

For fleas.

Their attitude makes other notice. Gradually, the ten Booms become the center of a widening circle of the gospel.

And they give thanks for fleas.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Hiding Place. To see more posts on this chapter, “Ravensbruck,” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

Photograph: Female inmates working at Ravensbruck in 1939. Photo courtesy Wikimedia; 

"Bundesarchiv Bild 183-1985-0417-15, Ravensbrück, Konzentrationslager" by Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-1985-0417-15 / CC-BY-SA 3.0. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 de via Commons.