The Hiding Place

Summary

The Hiding Place is Corrie ten Boom's memoir, written with John and Elizabeth Sherrill, of her family's life in Haarlem, their work hiding Jews during the German occupation of the Netherlands, and her imprisonment with her sister Betsie in Nazi prisons and camps. It opens in January 1937 with the hundredth anniversary of the watch shop in the narrow old house called the Beje, where Corrie, then in her forties and unmarried, lives with her father Casper and her older sister Betsie. Looking back, she describes a crowded, devout childhood with three aunts in the house, her mother's cheerful charity, her lost first love Karel, who married a wealthier woman, her training as a watchmaker, and the quiet years in which Betsie kept house and Corrie worked at the bench beside her father. After Germany invades in May 1940, the family is drawn step by step into the Dutch underground. They take in Jews turned away elsewhere, Corrie obtains ration cards through a friend at the food office, and an architect known as Mr. Smit builds a false wall in Corrie's top-floor bedroom, behind which up to six people can hide. Among the household's permanent guests is the cantor Meyer Mossel, nicknamed Eusie. Corrie's nephew Peter is jailed for playing the national anthem on a church organ, and her sister Nollie is arrested for refusing to lie about a Jewish woman in her house. On 28 February 1944, acting on an informer's tip, the Gestapo raids the Beje while Corrie lies sick with influenza. The six people in the secret room are never found and later escape, but the family and many visitors are arrested. Casper ten Boom, eighty-four, dies about ten days later. Corrie spends months in solitary confinement at Scheveningen, where a hidden copy of the Gospels sustains her and a German lieutenant named Rahms questions her with unexpected sympathy. She and Betsie are reunited at the Vught camp, where Corrie works in a Philips radio workshop, and in September 1944 are shipped to Ravensbrück in Germany. In a flea-ridden barracks they hold secret Bible readings, Betsie gives thanks even for the fleas that keep the guards away, and a small bottle of vitamin drops seems never to run dry. Betsie weakens and dies on 16 December 1944, having described a vision of homes where the wounded of the war would be healed. Days later Corrie is released through what she was told was a clerical error. At home she opens houses for the war's damaged, including a mansion in Bloemendaal and later a former camp in Germany, and the book closes with her struggle, in a church in Munich, to take the hand of a former Ravensbrück guard who asks her forgiveness. Chosen Books published the memoir in 1971; World Wide Pictures filmed it in 1975.

Top Lessons

• Ordinary people and a righteous risk

  The ten Booms were an elderly watchmaker and his two middle-aged daughters, with no training for resistance. They began by opening their door to one frightened neighbor and found themselves running a hiding place. Their story shows how moral courage often grows out of long habits of hospitality and faith rather than from a single heroic decision.

• Truth-telling under tyranny

  The family wrestles openly with the lies, forged papers and stolen ration cards that underground work requires, while Nollie refuses to lie even to soldiers. The memoir does not settle the question but shows serious Christians disagreeing about it in good faith, which makes it a natural starting point for moral reasoning.

• Gratitude in the worst place

  In Ravensbrück Betsie insists on giving thanks for everything, including the fleas in their barracks, and Corrie cannot do it. Only later do they learn that the fleas kept the guards out, so that their Bible readings went undisturbed. The episode presents gratitude as an act of faith offered before its reasons are visible.

• Forgiveness that must be given

  Corrie preaches forgiveness after the war, but when a former Ravensbrück guard holds out his hand to her she finds she cannot feel it. She describes praying and taking his hand as an act of obedience, and then receiving the love she could not produce herself. The memoir ends on forgiveness as something received from God before it can be given to an enemy.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The memoir is a lay witness's account of medicine and its absence in occupation and the camps. Earlier chapters record illness in the household with matter-of-fact detail: an aunt dying of tuberculosis, another of diabetes, the mother's long decline after a stroke. In prison and camp the record becomes one of hunger, cold, vermin and exhaustion: Corrie is arrested while ill with influenza; her father, an old man, dies within days of arrest; Betsie, long frail, wastes under the Ravensbrück regime of roll calls and labor and dies in the camp hospital; and Corrie is held back before release because of swelling in her legs, consistent with the hunger edema that camp physicians and survivors described widely. The small bottle of vitamin drops the sisters share becomes a sign of providence in the narrative. After the war ten Boom's houses for the war's casualties, including former prisoners and displaced people, amount to an informal program of rehabilitation for what would now be called trauma, built on rest, work, gardens and forgiveness rather than on psychiatry. Earlier and later chapters also mention her care for people with intellectual disabilities. Present any modern diagnostic reading as interpretation.

• Chapters 3-4

  Deaths of the aunts from tuberculosis and diabetes and the mother's stroke, nursed at home by the ten Boom daughters.

• Chapters 9-10

  Corrie, sick with influenza, is arrested in the raid; her elderly father dies some ten days after the arrest while she is in solitary confinement.

• Chapters 13-14

  Ravensbrück: hunger, cold roll calls, fleas and lice, the shared vitamin drops, and Betsie's decline and death in the camp hospital.

• Chapter 15

  Corrie's release is delayed for swelling of the legs; afterwards she opens homes where survivors and others damaged by the war recover.