The Hiding Place

The word “Nazi” is bandied about these days by people who don’t really know anything about the Nazis and how they operated. Corrie ten Boom and her family most assuredly did know since quite a few members of her family were imprisoned for a time and some of them died in the concentration camps. Corrie herself would have been gassed too if it weren’t for a mistake in bookkeeping releasing her days before. Or was it a mistake?

Corrie’s family were devout Christians and this belief in God was the only thing that kept them going. Throughout their ordeal seemingly little coincidences of goodness happened, only looking back on the whole thing would make one think that God decidedly had a hand in helping them.

But didn’t only Jews die at the death camps? No. Catholics, Protestants, converted Jews, homosexuals, people who had mental or physical handicaps, and people who just weren’t Aryans suffered and died at the hands of the Gestapo. We’ve all seen pictures and video of the emaciated naked bodies piled up and bulldozed into mass graves. The treatment of the survivors wasn’t much better. Corrie and her sister were given thin gruel to eat. Their prison uniforms became filthy and tattered. Their bedding was rancid straw full of fleas. They stood at attention at roll call sometimes for hours on end. Corrie’s sister Betsie had a bad heart and finally succumbed.

Why were they in the camp in the first place? Corrie, her sister, and their father lived in an old house in Haarlem in the Netherlands and because of their faith began taking in people in trouble and helping them escape to the countryside. It didn’t matter to the ten Booms what someone’s religion was; their faith taught them to help anyone who needed it. Slowly they became members of the underground.

Because of the structure of the house, an architect friend was able to build and disguise a room where people could hide whenever the Gestapo raided the house – the hiding place. A Dutch collaborator turned them in and the ten Booms were arrested – with a few people hiding in that room who did successfully escape a few days later.

The overriding theme of the book is faith and trust, and the belief that God could turn any evil to good. Didn’t He allow His Son to be crucified and die? And look what came from that – reconciliation with God and the opening of Heaven. The ten Booms believed that no matter what happened in this life, their perseverance in their faith would lead them to final salvation. We must do the same.