Corrie ten Boom

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Cornelia (Corrie) ten Boom (April 15, 1892 – April 15 1983) was a Christian Holocaust survivor who helped many Jews escape the Nazis during World War II. Born in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, she was the youngest of three sisters and one brother. Her father was a watchmaker, and she was raised in the Dutch Reformed Church. She never married.

1 Biography
2 See also
3 References
4 Foonotes
5 External links

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Biography

In 1892 Corrie's family moved to Beje house in Haarlem, and in 1918 the family took in the first of many children. Corrie 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 first girls' club, and in the 1930s these clubs grew to become the very large Triangle Club.

Corrie was able to rescue many Jews from certain death at the hands of the Nazi SS during the Holocaust. In 1940 the Nazis invaded the Netherlands and banned her club organization. By 1942 her family had become very active in the Dutch underground, hiding refugees.

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 Nazis arrested the entire ten Boom family in 1944; they were sent first to Dutch prisons, and finally to the notorious Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany in September 1944, where Corrie's sister Betsie died. Corrie was released in December 1944¹. In the movie The Hiding Place, Corrie narrates the section on her release from camp by saying that she later learned her release was a clerical error. It so happens that the women prisoners in the camp were killed the day after her release. She returned to the Netherlands to begin rehabilitation centres. She went to Germany in 1946, beginning many years of itinerant preaching in over sixty countries, a time during which she wrote many books.

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 naturally 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.

Corrie told the story of her family and their work during World War II in another 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.

Rabbi Daniel Lapin has lamented how little known Corrie ten Boom is among American Jews, and how she has been ignored in the U.S. by the Holocaust Memorial Museum. In 1968, however, she 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.

In 1977, the beloved spiritual pioneer, then 85 years old, decided to make her home in Southern California. Successive strokes in 1978 took Miss ten Boom's powers of speech and communication and left her an invalid. She died on April 15, 1983, on her ninety-first birthday. A museum in Haarlem, the city she lived in, is dedicated to her and her family.

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