Corrie ten Boom

Cornelia Johanna Arnalda ten Boom, is known to the world asCorrie ten Boom, (April 15, 1892 – April 15 1983). Corrie was rasied as a devout Christian, and believed fully in the equality and value of every person. Because of her strong faith, Corrie felt inclined to help the struggling and persecuted Jews during the Holocaust. Corrie was one of the leaders of the Dutch resistance during Nazi occupation in the Netherlands. She helped many Jews escaped and was eventually imprisoned in a concentration camp with her father and her sister, Betsie. Both her father and her sister died. Corrie was released due to a clerical error one week before all the women her age were sent to the gas chamber. Corrie dedicated her life to speaking about God's love and forgiveness, she traveled and spoke in over 60 countries.

Corrie was born on April 15, 1892 in Haarlem, North Holland. She spent the later part of her life in California, where she died on her birthday in 1983, she was 91 years old. In December of 1967, Corrie ten Boom was declared a member of the Righteous Among the Nations by the State of Israel.

Pre-war Life

Corrie Ten Boom was the youngest child born to Casper and

"My (parents). . . had opened a small jewelry store in a narrow house in the heart of the Jewish section of Amsterdam. There, in Amsterdam in that narrow street in the ghetto they met many wonderful Jewish people. They were allowed to participate in their Sabbaths and in their feasts. They studied the Old Testament together... (Ten Boom, 1974, p. 133)

Ten Boom reports in The Hiding Place that in 1918 the family took in the first of many children that they would take in over the years. She was the youngest of four children, and reports that her parents were loving and well respected by the community. She describes her mother as having been a generous woman, who baked bread baskets for people in times of need or on special occasions and that she continued to help others until she died as a result of a stroke. Her father, she reports, was a well-liked watch repairman. Her sister Betsie was born with pernicious anemia and never married. According to Ten Boom her brother Willem was obsessed with politics, graduated from a theology school, and always saw the dark side of things. He married and fathered four children. Her last sibling, Nollie, also married, and had six children. According to Corrie her sister was rigidly honest and truly believed God would help her if only she followed his ways. Ten Boom herself never married. She said in later life that she had had one love, Karel, from the age of fourteen to her early twenties, but that Karel married another woman, she vowed that she would never love another man.

Corrie was raised to believe in the equality and goodness of all people. Her parents were her greatest examples. She writes: "My (parents). . . had opened a small jewelry store in a narrow house in the heart of the Jewish section of Amsterdam. There, in Amsterdam in that narrow street in the ghetto they met many wonderful Jewish people. They were allowed to participate in their Sabbaths and in their feasts. They studied the Old Testament together... (Ten Boom, 1974, p. 133)

The Ten Boom family was by all accounts a family with strong Christian beliefs. Ten Boom relates that they frequently said prayers together, and in that in her later years she, Betsie and her father would read from the Bible at breakfast and again before bed.

She began training as a watchmaker in 1920 and in 1922 became the first female watchmaker licensed in the Netherlands. In 1923 she helped organize girls' clubs, and in the 1930s these clubs grew to become the very large Triangle club.^[1]

Activities during the Holocaust

In 1940 the Nazis invaded the Netherlands and banned Ten Boom's club organization. By 1942 she and her family had become very active in the Dutch underground, hiding refugees. Ten Boom was able to rescue many Jews from certain death at the hands of the Nazi SS. The family's work in saving Jews was motivated by their staunch Christian beliefs. They helped Jews without forcing conversion, and they even provided Kosher food and honored the Sabbath.

Corrie credits her father's example in inspiring her to help the Jews of Holland. She tells of an incident in which she asked a pastor who was visiting their home to help shield a mother and newborn infant. He replied, "No definitely not. We could lose our lives for that Jewish child." She went on to say, "Unseen by either of us, Father had appeared in the doorway. 'Give the child to me, Corrie,' he said. Father held the baby close, his white beard brushing its cheek, looking into the little face with eyes as blue and innocent as the baby's . 'You say we could lose our lives for this child. I would consider that the greatest honor that could come to my family'" (Ten Boom, 1971, p. 99).

Corrie describes a typical evening in which they would use their secreted Bible to hold worship services: "At first Betsie and I called these meetings with great timidity. But as night after night went by and no guard ever came near us, we grew bolder. So many now wanted to join us that we held a second service after evening roll call. . . (These) were services like no others, these times in Barracks 28. A single meeting night might include a recital of the Magnificat in Latin by a group of Roman Catholics, a whispered hymn by some Lutherans, and a sotto-voce chant by Easter Orthodox women. With each moment the crowd around us would swell, packing the nearby platforms, hanging over the edges, until the high structures groaned and swayed."

"At last either Betsie or I would open the Bible. Because only the Hollanders could understand the Dutch text we would translate aloud in German. And then we would hear the life-giving words passed back along the aisles in French, Polish, Russian, Czech, and back into Dutch. They were little previews of heaven, these evenings beneath the light bulb" (Ten Boom 1971, p. 201)

Betsie, never strong in health, grew steadily weaker and died on December 16, 1944. Some of her last words to Corrie were, "...(we) must tell them what we have learned here. We must tell them that there is no pit so deep that He is not deeper still. They will listen to us, Corrie, because we have been here." (Ten Boom, 1971, p. 217)

However, the Jews they had been hiding at the time of their arrests had been hidden so well that they remained undiscovered and all except one survived the Occupation.

The Germans arrested the entire ten Boom family on February 28, 1944 with the help of a Dutch informant (Corrie 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. Ten Boom was released in December 1944. ^[2]

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: it so happened that the women prisoners her age in the camp were killed in the week following her release.

Post-war

After the war Corrie returned to the Netherlands to begin rehabilitation centres. She returned to Germany in 1946, and many years of itinerant preaching in over sixty countries followed, during which time she wrote many books.

The Hiding Place

Ten Boom 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 of the same name 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.

Religious views

Her preaching focused on the Christian Gospel, with emphasis on forgiveness.

In her book Tramp for the Lord (1974), she tells the story of how, after she had been preaching 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 she was then able to forgive, and 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 so 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.

She is known for her rejection of the Pre-Tribulation Rapture doctrine. Her writings claim that it is without Biblical foundation, and she has claimed that the doctrine left the Christian Church ill-prepared in times of great persecution such as in China under Mao Zedong.

Later years and death

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

Legacy

Ten Boom was honoured by the State of Israel for her work in aid of the Jewish people by being invited to plant a tree in the Avenue of the Righteous Gentiles, at the Yad Vashem, near Jerusalem. Oskar Schindler is also honoured there. Rabbi Daniel Lapin has commented with regret on how little Corrie ten Boom is known among American Jews, and also how she has been ignored in the U.S. by the Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Ten Boom was knighted by the Queen of The Netherlands in recognition of her work during the war.

A museum in the Dutch city of Haarlem is dedicated to her and her family.

Ten Boom never married, and had no children.

She once said “Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow; it empties today of its strength.”

Bibliography

Corrie ten Boom with John and Elizabeth Sherrill, The Hiding Place, Guideposts Associates, 1971. ISBN 0-340-17930-9, ISBN 0-340-20845-7
Corrie ten Boom, Tramp for the Lord, 1974. ISBN 0-340-86376-5, ISBN 978-0-340-86376-3
Corrie ten Boom, Not Good If Detached, Christian Literature Crusade, 1980. ISBN 0-800-71765-1,ISBN 978-0-800-71765-0
Corrie ten Boom, Amazing Love, Christian Literature Crusade, 1982. ISBN 0-875-08856-2, ISBN 978-0-875-08856-3
Corrie ten Boom, Defeated Enemies, Christian Literature Crusade, 1983. ISBN 0-875-08021-9, ISBN 978-0-875-08021-5
Corrie ten Boom, Common Sense Not Needed-Revised, Christian Literature Crusade, 1994. ISBN 0-875-08309-9, ISBN 978-0-875-08309-4
Corrie ten Boom, Marching Orders for End Battle, Christian Literature Crusade. ISBN 0-875-08762-0, ISBN 978-0-875-08762-7
Corrie ten Boom, Plenty for Everyone, Christian Literature Crusade, 1980. ISBN 0-875-08023-5, ISBN 978-0-875-08023-9

Footnotes

↑ http://www.pietyhilldesign.com/gcq/biopages/tenboom.html
↑ Ten Boom, Corrie, with John and Eliabeth Sherrill (1976). However, the Jews they had been hiding at the time of their arrests had been hidden so well that they remained undiscovered and all except one survived the Occupation.

External links

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[1] ttp://www.pietyhilldesign.com/gcq/biopages/tenboom.html

[2] Ten Boom, Corrie, with John and Eliabeth Sherrill (1976). However, the Jews they had been hiding at the time of their arrests had been hidden so well that they remained undiscovered and all except one survived the Occupation.

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