The Hiding Place Read online

  “I will never forget the first time I read The Hiding Place. My heart was riveted by the fact that the love of God is the greatest power of them all. Today the truth remains the same, and I pray we are challenged and inspired again by Corrie ten Boom’s powerful story of faith, triumph, and unconditional love.”

  Darlene Zschech, worship leader

  and songwriter

  “One of the most remarkable stories of one of the most remarkable women I’ve known. I recommend it most enthusiastically.”

  Chuck Colson, founder and chairman,

  Prison Fellowship

  “The Hiding Place is a classic that begs revisiting. Corrie ten Boom lived the deeper life with God, exchanging love and forgiveness for hatred and cruelty, trusting God in the midst of fear, horror, and uncertainty. This gripping story of love in action will challenge and inspire you!”

  Joyce Meyer, best-selling author

  and Bible teacher

  “Ten Boom’s classic is even more relevant to the present hour than at the time of its writing. Not only do we need to be inspired afresh by the courage manifested by her family, but we are at another watershed moment in the history of global anti-Semitism, and we need a strong reminder of God’s timeless covenant with His ancient people and of our obligation as believers to stand with them as Corrie’s family did in their generation.”

  Jack W. Hayford, president, International

  Foursquare Church; chancellor,

  The King’s College and Seminary

  “The Hiding Place is the heart-wrenching, powerfully inspiring story of the triumph of God’s love and forgiveness in the heart of Nazi concentration camp survivor Corrie ten Boom. Beautifully penned by Elizabeth and John Sherrill, it will always sit on the top shelf of Christian classics.”

  Peter Marshall, author, The Light and the

  Glory and From Sea to Shining Sea

  “A groundbreaking book that shines a clear light on one of the darkest moments of history.”

  Philip Yancey, author of

  What’s So Amazing About Grace?

  and The Jesus I Never Knew

  “In Corrie ten Boom, self was visibly crucified, and her sacrifices and genuine mercies demonstrated themselves to the convictions of men in every nation and tongue. Her disinterest in the spirit of this age convinced even the heathen. She truly manifested the spirit of Christianity.”

  David Wilkerson, founding pastor,

  Times Square Church;

  founder, Teen Challenge

  “Corrie ten Boom’s spiritual beauty echoes throughout the story of The Hiding Place. Valor, determination, and integrity manifest themselves in her inspiring life and in her courageous actions. She is one of the few who can be described as a true hero.”

  David Selby, international director,

  Derek Prince Ministries

  Corrie with an early edition of The Hiding Place.

  The

  HIDING

  PLACE

  35TH

  ANNIVERSARY

  EDITION

  CORRIE TEN BOOM

  with ELIZABETH & JOHN SHERRILL

  © 1971 and 1984 by Corrie ten Boom

  and Elizabeth and John Sherrill

  © 2006 by Elizabeth and John Sherrill

  Published by Chosen Books

  a division of Baker Publishing Group

  P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

  chosenbooks.com

  E-book edition created 2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 73-172389

  ISBN 978-1-4412-3288-5

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  Scripture is taken from the King James Version of the Bible. The ten Boom family read the Bible in Dutch, and later, when Corrie and Betsie read it aloud in Bible studies, they translated it for their audience. The KJV is, therefore, an approximate translation.

  Material contained in “Since Then” is reprinted with permission from Guideposts magazine. Copyright © 1983 by Guideposts Associates, Inc., Carmel, NY 10512.

  Contents

  Foreword

  Preface

  Introduction

  1. The One Hundredth Birthday Party

  2. Full Table

  3. Karel

  4. The Watch Shop

  5. Invasion

  6. The Secret Room

  7. Eusie

  8. Storm Clouds Gather

  9. The Raid

  10. Scheveningen

  11. The Lieutenant

  12. Vught

  13. Ravensbruck

  14. The Blue Sweater

  15. The Three Visions

  Since Then

  Appendix

  Foreword

  It was the strangest of times.

  We wore tie-dyed shirts, listened to Jimi Hendrix, and watched the Vietnam War over TV dinners. Well, not everybody did that. I was not into shirts that made me dizzy, I hated psychedelic music, and I turned the channel whenever the war came on. I had more important things on my mind. Like surviving.

  The year 1971 marked four years in a wheelchair for me. Although my diving accident was in the past, the quadriplegia was not. I was still a little shaky living with total and permanent paralysis, plus I was still struggling to understand how God was going to use it for my good. It did not help that the world around me was unraveling at the seams.

  Somewhere in the mayhem, a friend gave me a copy of The Hiding Place. The back cover explained that it was about the life of Corrie ten Boom, a survivor of Nazi death camps. I was intrigued. As I said, I was into surviving. Perhaps this gutsy, gray-haired woman wearing a coat like the old raccoon thing in my mother’s closet would have something to say to me.

  The first chapter had me hooked. Although Corrie was from a different era, her life reached across the decades. World War II was far different from my own holocaust, but her ability to look straight into the terrifying jaws of a gas-chambered hell and walk out courageously into the sunshine of the other side was—well, just the story I needed to hear.

  For years to come, when I would occasionally fall back into my own pit of fear or depression, the Spirit of God would tenderly bring to mind her well-known phrases: “There is no pit so deep that God’s love is not deeper still.” “Only heaven will reveal the top side of God’s tapestry.” And, probably the most poignant and powerful of all, simply “Jesus is Victor.”

  You can understand why, when I first met Corrie ten Boom, I was filled with glee. She grasped my shoulder firmly and announced in her thick Dutch accent, “Oh, Joni, it will be a grand day when we will dance together in heaven!” The image she painted of us skipping down streets of gold left me breathless. I could easily picture the scene of glory and gladness. It made me realize I had survived.

  From then on, the years flew. Corrie continued to write books, travel to countless countries, and even oversee the film they made of The Hiding Place. But time was catching up with her, and after several strokes, her tired body finally gave out. When I attended her funeral—a quiet ceremony with testimonies and tulips—I kept thinking of that moment we first met. I smiled to imagine that heaven was applauding and that Jesus was probably explaining to her His choice of strange, dark threads mixed among the gold in the tapestry of which she so often spoke.

  That was 1983. The years have continued to march on and, sadly, things are no less crazy. What few seams are holding the planet to
gether are strained and threadbare, like so many people wondering how to survive in a world that even dear Corrie would barely recognize.

  I take that back. She would recognize it. And she would know exactly what to do in the face of new wars whispering of global holocausts that threaten the survival of all mankind: she would firmly yet gently point people to the Savior, reminding them that He is still Victor. She would remind us all of the old, old story that Jesus has conquered sin, no matter how ugly and pernicious it gets. And that soon—perhaps sooner than we think—He will finally close the curtain on sin and suffering, hate and holocausts to welcome home His survivors.

  One more thing. In the fall of 2004, as I was on a twenty-hour flight to India, the decades finally caught up with me. I was in great pain, sitting on quadriplegic bones that were thin and tired. To pass the hours, and to keep discomfort at bay, I started reading another Corrie book, Life Lessons from the Hiding Place. I got a lump in my throat as I read about her incredible passion to travel the world to share the Gospel of Christ. At the age of 85, Corrie ten Boom was enduring flights like this one . . . and if she could do it, by the grace of God, so can I! It was all the inspiration and encouragement I needed for the grueling journey. Once again Corrie ten Boom had spoken.

  Corrie’s story is as current and compelling as ever. This is why I am pleased and happy to commend to you, part of a new generation of readers, this special edition of The Hiding Place. It is for every person whose soul is threadbare and frazzled, and for every individual who must walk into the jaws of his or her own suffering. And if you have gotten this far, it is for you. Go a little further and you will discover what I did so long ago. . . .

  If God’s grace could sustain Corrie in that concentration camp, then His grace is sufficient for you. With His help you can survive. And, Corrie would say, you will.

  Joni Eareckson Tada

  Joni and Friends

  Fall 2005

  Preface

  In May 1968 I spent several days at a retreat center in Darmstadt, Germany. At a time when most Germans preferred not to think about the Holocaust—or even denied outright that it had happened—a group of Lutheran women calling themselves the Sisters of Mary took on themselves the task of repentance for their nation. They assisted Jewish survivors, listened to their stories, and publicized the truth about the Nazi past.

  While at the center, I attended an evening service featuring two speakers. The first was a man who had been a prisoner in a concentration camp. He had been brutalized and starved; his father and a brother had died in the camp. The man’s face and body told the story more eloquently than his words: pain-haunted eyes, shaking hands that could not forget.

  He was followed at the lectern by a white-haired woman, broad of frame and sensible of shoe, with a face that radiated love, peace, and joy. But the story that these two people related was the same! She, too, had been in a concentration camp, experienced the same savagery, suffered identical losses. The man’s response was easy to understand. But hers?

  At the close of the service, I stayed behind to talk with her. Cornelia ten Boom, it was apparent, had found in a concentration camp, as the prophet Isaiah foretold, a “hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest . . . the shadow of a great rock in a weary land” (Isaiah 32:2).

  With my husband, John, I returned to Europe to get to know this amazing woman. Together we visited the crooked little Dutch house, one room wide, where until her fifties she lived the uneventful life of a spinster watchmaker—little dreaming as she cared for her older sister and their elderly father that a world of high adventure and deadly danger lay just around the corner. We went to the garden in southern Holland where young Corrie gave her heart away forever. To the big brick house in Haarlem where Pickwick served real coffee in the middle of the war.

  And all the while we had the extraordinary feeling that we were looking not into the past but into the future. As though these people and places were speaking to us not about things that had already happened but about the experiences that lay ahead of us. Already we found ourselves putting into practice what we learned from her about the following:

  • handling separation

  • getting along with less

  • security in the midst of insecurity

  • forgiveness

  • how God can use weakness

  • dealing with difficult people

  • facing death

  • loving your enemies

  • what to do when evil wins

  WE COMMENTED to Corrie about the practicalness of the things she recalled, how her memories seemed to throw a spotlight on problems and decisions we faced here and now. “But,” she said, “this is what the past is for! Every experience God gives us, every person He puts in our lives is the perfect preparation for a future that only He can see.”

  Every experience, every person. . . . Father, who did the finest watch repairs in Holland and then forgot to send the bill. Mama, whose body became a prison but whose spirit soared free. Betsie, who could make a party out of three potatoes and some twice-used tea leaves. As we looked into the twinkling blue eyes of this undefeatable woman, we wished that these people had been part of our own lives.

  And then, of course, we realized that they could be. . . .

  Elizabeth Sherrill

  Chappaqua, New York

  September 2005

  Introduction

  Anyone who thinks Christianity is boring has not yet been introduced to my friend Corrie ten Boom!

  One of the qualities I admired best about this remarkable lady was her zest for adventure. Although she was many years my senior, she traveled tirelessly with me behind the Iron Curtain, meeting with clandestine Christian cell groups in the days when this meant risking prison or deportation.

  “They’re putting their lives on the line for what they believe,” she would say. “Why shouldn’t I?”

  If Corrie were alive today, I have no doubt she would insist on going with me to the current hot spots of persecution. And how she would delight in sharing her radical faith with bold believers like the Christian Motorcycle Association, that wonderful group of men and women who often drive their bikes into poor countries, then give them away to pastors who have no other way to get around.

  If you have never met Corrie ten Boom, the best way to enter into a lifetime friendship with her and her Lord is through the pages of this book. As The Hiding Place celebrates its 35th anniversary, a new generation is responding to her ringing challenge: “Come with me and step into the greatest adventure you will ever know.”

  Brother Andrew

  founder, Open Doors

  author, God’s Smuggler

  1

  The One Hundredth Birthday Party

  I jumped out of bed that morning with one question in my mind—sun or fog? Usually it was fog in January in Holland, dank, chill, and gray. But occasionally—on a rare and magic day—a white winter sun broke through. I leaned as far as I could from the single window in my bedroom; it was always hard to see the sky from the Beje. Blank brick walls looked back at me, the backs of other ancient buildings in this crowded center of old Haarlem. But up there where my neck craned to see, above the crazy roofs and crooked chimneys, was a square of pale pearl sky. It was going to be a sunny day for the party!

  I attempted a little waltz as I took my new dress from the tipsy old wardrobe against the wall. Father’s bedroom was directly under mine but at seventy-seven he slept soundly. That was one advantage to growing old, I thought, as I worked my arms into the sleeves and surveyed the effect in the mirror on the wardrobe door. Although some Dutch women in 1937 were wearing their skirts knee-length, mine was still a cautious three inches above my shoes.

  You’re not growing younger yourself, I reminded my reflection. Maybe it was the new dress that made me look more critically at myself than usual: 45 years old, unmarried, waistline long since vanished.

  My sister Betsie, though seven years older than I, still
had that slender grace that made people turn and look after her in the street. Heaven knows it wasn’t her clothes; our little watch shop had never made much money. But when Betsie put on a dress something wonderful happened to it.

  On me—until Betsie caught up with them—hems sagged, stockings tore, and collars twisted. But today, I thought, standing back from the mirror as far as I could in the small room, the effect of dark maroon was very smart.

  Far below me down on the street, the doorbell rang. Callers? Before 7:00 in the morning? I opened my bedroom door and plunged down the steep twisting stairway. These stairs were an afterthought in this curious old house. Actually it was two houses. The one in front was a typical tiny old-Haarlem structure, three stories high, two rooms deep, and only one room wide. At some unknown point in its long history, its rear wall had been knocked through to join it with the even thinner, steeper house in back of it—which had only three rooms, one on top of the other—and this narrow corkscrew staircase squeezed between the two.

  Quick as I was, Betsie was at the door ahead of me. An enormous spray of flowers filled the doorway. As Betsie took them, a small delivery boy appeared. “Nice day for the party, Miss,” he said, trying to peer past the flowers as though coffee and cake might already be set out. He would be coming to the party later, as indeed, it seemed, would all of Haarlem.

  Betsie and I searched the bouquet for the card. “Pickwick!” we shouted together.

  Pickwick was an enormously wealthy customer who not only bought the very finest watches but often came upstairs to the family part of the house above the shop. His real name was Herman Sluring; Pickwick was the name Betsie and I used between ourselves because he looked so incredibly like the illustrator’s drawing in our copy of Dickens. Herman Sluring was without doubt the ugliest man in Haarlem. Short, immensely fat, head bald as a Holland cheese, he was so wall-eyed that you were never quite sure whether he was looking at you or someone else—and as kind and generous as he was fearsome to look at.