Tag Archives: Corrie Ten Boom

Dear Corrie

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Dear Miss Ten Boom –

I read The Hiding Place for the first time when I was much too young to understand its full implications. When I began teaching sociology, I used it to introduce the Holocaust to sheltered students in a religious institution.

And now I find myself picking it up to read again, alongside Tim Alberta’s The Kingdom, The Power, and the Glory, and the Old Testament books First and Second Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles. They all deal with regime change, and the struggles between good and evil.

These days, we have Wicked taking Hollywood by storm, but for the most part, there are good guys and bad guys in good versus evil plots, and they are easy to tell apart.

Your book, your life story, there in Holland being a nice spinster watchmaker in your fifties with your family business, suddenly hiding people the Nazis were trying to kill, it had good and evil. But rereading it, I find places where it got tricky to tell them apart.

I remember a story from your book: someone from the resistance came to your watch shop to ask for significant names. They wanted to kill those people. They wanted you to help them set it up. And you said no. And agonized over it.

It is getting tricky, and likely will get trickier, to figure out good and evil in the United States right now. White is black and black is white, right is wrong and wrong is right. The liberal elites want to build a super-government everyone has to obey, but the right wingers are doing it, using threats of violence. It’s all getting a bit tricky, Ms. Ten Boom.

When I read The Hiding Place again recently, I saw something else in it: your loneliness, and your singlemindedness. You missed your sister. You didn’t know what to say about what was happening to you. You tried to be nice to some Somalian women in the rescue hospital who didn’t know anything about what was going on and they clearly viewed you as a threat and you didn’t know what to do with that. How hard was it to know what to do, Corrie? Your book resonates with getting to keep your Bible in the prison, reading, praying, holding out hope against hate. What did it feel like, every day, making decisions to not hate the people who were showing you hate, knowing you had the moral high ground, but were considered the criminal? How simple can we make these decision?

What did you worry about when you told the resistance people you wouldn’t help them kill Nazis? Did you fear for the little collection of Jewish people hiding in your house? Did you know all your neighbors knew, but still wave to them each morning? Did they wave back?

Tell us where to put our feet, Ms. Ten Boom, when our allegiance is not to America, but to God, and we don’t think those two names are synonymous. How do we live?

Thanks for listening. I may come back to you in the coming months. It’s kinda hard to sort through everything right now, and surely that is intentional. Big power displays to cow and intimidate, followed by the real meanness. What did you pray for, Ms. Ten Boom? How did you keep your head when those around you were losing theirs, or offering up their neighbors’ for a fee?

Sincerely,

A Christian in America

The Monday Book: THE HIDING PLACE by Corrie Ten Boom

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hiding placeI thought about blogging this book in the wake of the Tree of Life Synagogue shootings, but wanted to wait a week.

Aside from the easy tease that tomorrow is a mid-term election and we’re all tired of politics and looking for a place to hide from it, this book is no joke. It is intense yet accessible.

For those unfamiliar, it is about sisters in a watch-repairing Dutch family, happy people with a strong Christian ethic. When WWII breaks out, they hide Jewish people. This brings them close to The Resistance–which they don’t work with, other than hiding and moving Jewish people as best they can. There is a poignant scene when Corrie is asked to pass along intelligence that she realizes will get a German officer killed, and refuses to do so. The young Resistance worker in her kitchen is gobsmacked and furious. They become suspect–despite considerable sacrifices.

The scene has come to me again and again in these turbulent times where no one can be neutral and expect to be left alone. If you’re not for, you’re against. You can’t stand in your kitchen and refuse to condemn one man to death while saving six more people in a closet upstairs. Both sides would kill you.

The Hiding Place also asks ethical questions about what it means to be light in a dark place. The family is eventually betrayed, and while the Jewish people they are hiding escape, Corrie, her father and sister do not. The latter two eventually die in a concentration (prison) camp. The women are in their fifties when the Nazis round them up. Betsy is not in excellent health. Yet she insists on standing at the edge of morning roll call, taking the brunt of the cold wind, so she can protect younger women. This infuriates Corrie. When a woman is beaten to death in front of them, Betsy and Corrie have very different reactions.

Corrie also talks about two Somali Jewish women who distrust everyone else in the hospital where she is meant to be a patient, but instead winds up bringing bedpans to others. When she attempts to help the women, who are isolated in language and race, they throw their gangrenous bandages at her. Corrie has to come to terms with what help means, when, and how.

I loved this book as a child too young to understand some of it subtleties. I loved it as a college student enough to write about it for a literacy project, igniting an interesting argument with a professor. I love it now because, in a storm of words bent on winning, it tells the story of a family that redefined what “winning” meant on their own terms. They paid for it, but they also left a legacy that allows Quakers and moderates, and quiet bunny rabbit peaceniks to find a place to stand when people all around scream “If you stand there you’re ______ (insert bad thing here).”

On Christ the solid rock I stand, best as I can interpret him in the whelming flood, alongside the Ten Boom Family, who did an amazing job of not being on anyone’s side while helping everyone they could.