Corrie ten Boom
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Cornelia Johanna Arnalda ten Boom, generally known as Corrie ten Boom, (April 15, 1892 – April 15, 1983) was a Dutch Christian Holocaust survivor who helped many Jews escape the Nazis during World War II. Born in Haarlem, North Holland, Ten Boom was declared a member of the Righteous Among the Nations by the State of Israel in December 1967. She died in the United States.
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[edit] Pre-war Life
Corrie 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 fourth child of two 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 Corrie her brother Wilhem was obssessed with politics, graduated from a theology school, 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. Corrie herself never married. She said in later life that she had had one love, Karel, from the age of fourteen to her early twenties. When Karel married another woman, she vowed that she would never love another man.
The Ten Boom family was by all accounts a family with strong Christian beliefs. Corrie 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 the sec club, and in the 1930s these clubs grew to become the very large Triangle club.
[edit] 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. 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 Corrie's sister Betsie died. Corrie was released in December 1944.[1] In the movie The Hiding Place, Corrie narrates the section on her release from camp by 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.
[edit] 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.
[edit] 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.
[edit] 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.
[edit] 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".
[edit] 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 lamented how little Corrie ten Boom is known among American Jews, and 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 Haarlem, the Dutch city in which she grew up and spent much of her life, is dedicated to her and her family.
Corrie never married, and had no children.
[edit] 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.
- Corrie ten Boom, Not Good If Detached, Christian Literature Crusade, 1980.
- Corrie ten Boom, Amazing Love, Christian Literature Crusade, 1982.
- Corrie ten Boom, Defeated Enemies, Christian Literature Crusade, 1983.
- Corrie ten Boom, Common Sense Not Needed-Revised, Christian Literature Crusade, 1994.
- Corrie ten Boom, Marching Orders for End Battle, Christian Literature Crusade.
- Corrie ten Boom, Plenty for Everyone, Christian Literature Crusade, 1980.
[edit] Footnotes
- ^ 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.
[edit] External links
- Corrie ten Boom museum
- Corrie Ten Boom comments regarding the Rapture of the Church.
- Holocaust Rescuers Bibliography
- U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum article
- http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/questionofGod/voices/boom.html
- Haarlem Shuffle - Corrie ten Boom
- Picture of Corrie ten Boom
- The Hiding Place DVD: a remastered DVD including many of her testimonies
