April 16

The Hiding Place
By Corrie Ten Boom

A few days ago, I listened to an NPR interview on the 25th anniversary of the National Holocaust Museum.  The speaker lamented the diminishing number of Holocaust survivors and the concern that we must never forget what happened in Nazi Germany.  She also noted that 40% of millennials (those born from 1980-95) have no idea how many people were killed by the Nazis, 60% never heard of Auschwitz, and few know how Hitler came to power.  Really?  Aren't we teaching world history any more?  When I worked as a reference librarian in the 1980s and 90s, this book was on Barrington High School's summer reading list.

Corrie Ten Boom was an aging spinster living with her sister Betsie and widowed father Casper in Amsterdam as Hitler started consolidating his power within his far-right National Socialist (Nazi) party in Weimar Germany, making persecution of the Jews a platform of his reich.  Hitler started invading other nations (Czechoslovakia, Poland, France) and in May of 1940, German soldiers marched into Amsterdam.  The Netherlands surrendered within days.  Like Miep Gies who hid the Otto Frank family, the Ten Booms knew the lives of Jewish friends would be in danger and sheltered many refugees during the course of the war.  Their home was located above their watch shop, located on a corner of a busy shopping street and a quiet alleyway.  Casper lamented that the Nazis had targeted Jews, the "apple of God's eye", and knew they would one day pay the price.  In 1944, the Ten Booms were betrayed, and sent to concentration camps, where Casper and Betsie died.  Only Corrie survived the horrors of the camps, but even there, she testified to God's provision (a camp guard, for example, left her and a group of women to have a Bible study in peace because the guard was repelled by the lice that were a fact of life among the women prisoners).  After the war, Corrie returned to her home and work at the watch shop, eventually writing many books about her experiences and the power of God to provide a "hiding place" (Ps 32:7) for her.  She traveled to the US in 1972, and I will never forget hearing her speak at a church in Brewster, MA.