BOOM Corrie Ten - The Hiding Place

The Hiding Place

by Corrie Ten Boom

From the Preface

... Cornelia ten Boom's world-wide ministry of comfort and counsel had begun there in the concentration camp where she had found, as the prophet Isiah promised, "a hiding place from the wind, a covert from the tempest...the shadow of a great rock in a weary land."

QUOTES FOR DISCUSSION

Father could never bear a house without children and whenever he heard of a child in need of a home a new face would appear at the table. Somehow out of his watch shop that never made money he fed and dressed and cared for eleven more children after his own four were grown. chapter 1, pg. 10

How could we have guessed as we sat there - two middle-aged spinsters and an old man - that in place of memories were about to be given adventures such as we had never dreamed of? Adventure and anguish horror and heaven were just around the corner, and we did not know.

chapter 1, pg. 11

Father was as innocent of business know-how as his father had been before him. He would work for days on a difficult repair problem and then forget to send bill. The more rare and expensive a watch the less he was able to think of it in terms of money. " A man should pay for the privilege of working on such a watch!" he would say.

chapter 1, pg. 15

Childhood scenes rushed back at me out of the night, strangely clothes and urgent. Today I know that such memories are the key not to the Past, but to the Future. I know that the experiences of our lives, when we let God use them, become the mysterious and perfect preparation for the work He will give us to do.

Pg. 17

Father, I knew, put an almost religious importance on education. He himself had had to stop school early to go to work in the watch shop and though he had gone on to teach himself history, theology, and literature in five language, he always regretted the missed schooling.

chapter 2, pg. 21

"I'm not at all sure this cheese is fresh!" She sniffed at the big pot of yellow cheese in the center of the table and pushed it across to Father. "What do you think Casper?"

chapter 2, pg. 22

If there was one subject which engaged her energies even more than completely than modern clothing it was spoiled food. At last almost reluctantly it seemed to me, she approved the cheese, ...

chapter 2, pg. 22

He turned to look at me, as he always did when answering a question, then to my surprise he said nothing. At Last he stood up, lifted his traveling case from the rack over our heads, and set it on the floor. "Will you carry it off the train, Corrie?" he said.

I stood up and tugged at it. It was crammed with a watches and spare parts he had purchased that morning.
"It's too heavy," I said.
"Yes," he said, "and it would be a pretty poor father who would ask his little girl to carry such a load. It's the same way, Corrie, with knowledge. Some knowledge is too heavy for children. When you are older and stronger you can bear it. For now you must trust me to carry it for you."

chapter 2, pg. 24

I never occurred to any of us children that we ourselves were poor; "the poor" were people you took baskets to.

chapter 2, pg. 25

"I need you!" I sobbed. "You can't die you can't!"
 Corrie," he began gently, "when you and I go to Amsterdam - when do I give you your ticket?"

I sniffed a few times, considering this. "Why just before we get on the train."

"Exactly. And our wise Father in heaven knows when we're going to need things, too. Don't run out ahead of him Corey. When the time comes that some of us will have to die you will look into your heart and find the strength you need just in time."

Pg. 26

"Do you know when she started praising the Wallers so highly?" Mama went on. The day she left them. As long as she was there, she had nothing but complaints. The Wallers couldn't compare with the van Hooks where she'd been before. But at the van Hooks she'd actually been miserable. Happiness isn't something that depends on our surroundings Corrie. It's something we make inside ourselves."

chapter 3, pg. 29

My life was lived just spent in romantic novels; I’d borrow them from the library in English, Dutch, and German, often reading ones I liked in all three languages, and I had played this scene where hero meets heroine a thousand times.

chapter 3, Pg. 31

Suddenly, the organ music, swelling from the open door was for us, the arm he offered was the moon, and my gloved hand resting upon it the only thing that kept me from soaring right over the peaked rooftops of Haarlem.

chapter 3, Pg. 32

There is a joyous journey which each of God's children sooner or later sets out on. And, Jans, some must go to their Father empty-handed, but you will run to Him with hands full!

chapter 3, Pg. 33

How long I lay on my bed sobbing for the one love of my life I do not know. Later, I heard Father's footsteps coming up the stairs. For a moments I was a little girl again waiting for him to tuck the blankets tight. But this was a hurt that no blanket could shout out, and suddenly I was afraid of what Father would say. Afraid he would say, "There'll be someone else soon," and that forever afterward this untruth would lie between us. For in some deep part of me I knew already that there would not - soon or ever - be anyone else.

chapter 3, pg. 37

Do you know what hurts so very much? It's love. Love is the strongest force in the world, and when it's blocked that means pain. There are two things we can do when this happens. We can kill the love so that it stops hurting. But then of course part of us dies, too. Or, Corrie, we can ask God to open up another route for that love to travel.

Chapter 3, Pg. 37

Whenever we cannot love in the old, human way, Corrie, God can give us the perfect way."

I did not know, as I listened to Father's footsteps winding back down the stairs, that he had given me more than the key to this hard moment. I did not know that he had put into my hands the secret that would open far darker rooms than this - places where there was not, on a human level, anything to love at all.

chapter 3, pg. 37

"Lord I give to You the way I feel about Karel, my thoughts about our future - oh You know! Everything! Give me Your way of seeing Karel instead. Help me to love him that way. That much."

And even as I said the words I fell asleep.

chapter 3, pg. 37

Mama's consciousness was the last thing to go, her eyes remaining open and alert, looking lovingly at each one of us until very slowly they closed and we were sure she was gone forever.

chapter 4, pg. 39

To communicate she and I invented a little game, something like Twenty Questions.

chapter 4, pg. 39

All the way through she sang while I stared straight ahead, not daring to turn around for fear of breaking the spell. When at at last everyone sat down, Mama's eyes, Betsie's and mine were brimming with tears.

At first we hoped it was the beginning of Mama's recovery. But the words she had sung she was not able to say nor did she ever sing again. It had been an isolated moment, a gift to us from God, His own very special wedding present. Four weeks later asleep with a smile on her lips, mama Slipped way from us forever.

chapter 4, pg. 41

And so it was out. We had divided the work backwards. It was astonishing once we'd made the swap how well everything went. The house had been clean under my care; under Betsie's it glowed. She saw beauty in wood in pattern in color, and helped us to see it too.

chapter 4, pg. 42

But as the months passed and Big Ben and the Observatory continued in perfect agreement, he went less regularly and finally not at all. The astronomical clock in any case was so jarred and jiggled by the constant rattle of automobile traffic in the narrow street outside that it was no longer the precision instrument it had been. The ultimate ignominy came the day Father set the astronomical clock by the radio.

chapter 4, pg. 45

I was shocked, but Father was only sorrowful. "He has been taught wrong," he told me. "By watching us seeing that we love this Book and are truthful people he will realize his error."

chapter 4, pg. 46

It's because Cristoffels is old. The old have no value to the State. They're also harder to train in the new ways of thinking. Germany is systematically teaching disrespect for old age."

We stared at him. trying to grasp such a concept. "Surely you are mistaken Willem!" Father said. "Otto is extremely courteous to me - unusually so. And I'm a good deal older than Christoffels."

"You're different. You're the boss. That’s another part of the system: respect for authority. It is the old and the weak who are to be eliminated."

We rode the train home in stunned silence -

chapter 4, pg. 47

Betsie and I knelt down by the piano bench. For what seemed like hours we prayed for our country, for the dead and injured tonight, for the queen. And then, incredibly, Betsie began to pray for the Germans, up there in the plains, caught in the first of the giant evil loose in Germany. I looked at my sister kneeling beside me in the light of burning Holland. "Oh Lord," I whispered, "listen to Betsie, not me, because I cannot pray for those men at all."

Chapter 4, Pg. 49

"But if God has shown us bad times ahead it's enough for me that He knows about them. That's why He sometimes shows us things you know - to tell us that this too is in His hands."

chapter 5, pg. 50

Early in the occupation, Haarlemers were ordered to turn in all private sets. Realizing it would look strange if our household produced none at all we decided to turn in the portable and hide the larger more powerful instrument in one of the many hollow spaces beneath the old twisting staircase.

Both suggestions were Peter's. He was sixteen at the time of the invasion and shared with other Dutch teenagers the restless energy of anger and impotence.

chapter 5, pg. 52

"Do either of them own radio?"

I had known from childhood that the earth opened and the heavens rained fire upon liars but I met his gaze.

"No."

Only as I walked out of the building did I begin to tremble. Not because for the first time in my life I had told a a conscious lie. But because it had been so dreadfully easily.

But we had saved our radio.

chapter 5, pg. 52

I raced down the stairs with the shrapnel shard in my hand. We went back to the dining room and stared at it in the light while Betsie bandaged my hand. "On your pillow," she kept saying.

"Betsie, if I hadn't heard you in the kitchen - "

But Betsie put a finger on my mouth. "Don't say it Corrie! There are no 'if's' in God's world. And no places that are safer than other places. The center of His will is our only safety - O Corrie let us pray that we may always know it!"

chapter 5, pg. 53

Was this what God wanted in times like these? How should a Christian act when evil was in power?

chapter 5, pg. 56

"Don't!" I said remembering Willem's warning. "Don't tell me who. And don't tell me how. Just get the cards if you possibly can."

chapter 6, pg. 63

"Develop your own sources," Willem had said. And from the moment Fred Koornstra's name had popped into my mind and uncanny realization had been growing in me. We were friends with half of Haarlem! We knew nurses in the maternity hospital. We knew clerks in the Records Office. We knew someone in every business and service in the city.

We didn't know of course the political views of all these people. But - and here I felt a strange leaping of my heart - God did! My job was simply to follow His leading one step at a time, holding every decision up to Him in prayer. I knew I was not clever or subtle or sophisticated; if the Beje was becoming a meeting place for need and supply it was through some strategy far higher than mine.

chapter 6, pg. 65

"This could be a danger for all of us and for Rolf too." But even with the words came a flood of assurance about this man. How long, I wondered, would we be led by this Gift of Knowledge.

Chapter 7, Pg. 73

"Miss ten Boom! I do hope you're not involved with any of this illegal concealment and undercover business. It's just not safe! Think of your father! And your sister - she's never been strong!"

chapter 7, pg. 76

"No. Definitely not. We could lose our lives for that Jewish child!"

Unseen by either of us, Father had appeared in the doorway. {"Give the child to me, Corrie," he said.

Father held the baby close his white beard brushing its cheek, looking into the little face with eyes as blue and innocent as the baby's own. At last he looked up at the pastor. "You say we could lose our lives for his child. I would consider that the greatest honor that could come to my family."

chapter 7, pg. 76

Can you recite the one hundred and sixty-sixth Psalm?

Chapter 7, Pg. 77

Changing Meyer's name was easy - at once he became "Eusie." But getting Eusie to eat non-kosher food was something else.

chapter 7, pg. 78

Eusie wet his lips with his tongue. "Of course," he said, "there's a provision for this in the Talmud." He speared the meat with his fork, bit hungrily and rolled his eyes heavenward in pure pleasure. "And I'm going to start hunting for it, too" he said "just as soon as dinner's over."

chapter 7, pg. 79

That it could have been happy at such a time and in such circumstances was largely a tribute to Betsie. Because our guests's physical lives were so very restricted, evening sunder Betsie's direction became the door to the wide world. Sometimes we had concerts, with Leendert on the violin, and Thea, a truly accomplished musician, on the piano. Or Betsie would announce "an evening of Vondel" (The Dutch Shakespeare) with each of us reading a part. One night a week she talked Eusie into giving Hebrew lessons another night Meta taught Italian.

chapter 7, pg. 82

"And Corrie" Rolf said, "we must face it. The Gestapo will get information out of Jop. They have already taken him to Amsterdam. How long will he be able to hold his tongue?"

Once again we considered stopping the work. Once again we discovered we could not.

That night Father and Betsie and I prayed long after the other had gone to bed. We knew that in spite of daily mounting risks we had no choice but to move forward. This was evil's hour; we could not run away from it. Perhaps only when human effort had done its best and failed would God's power alone be free to work.

chapter 8, pg. 93

A man appeared in the doorway. "We've searched the whole place, Willemse" he said. "If there's a secret room here the devil himself built it."

chapter 9, pg. 99

When I got back the last time, a group had gathered around father for evening prayers. Every day of my life had ended like this: that deep steady voice that sure and eager confiding of all us to the care of God.The Bible lay at home on it's shelf, but much of it was stored in his heart. His eyes seemed to be seeing beyond the locked and crowded room beyond Haarlem, beyond earth itself, as he quoted from memory: "Thou art my hiding place and my shield: I hope in thy word... Hold thou me up, and I shall be safe..."

chapter 9, pg. 101

In a strange way it seemed to me that I had lived through this moment before.

Then I recalled.

The vision. The night of the invasion. I had seen it all. Willem, Nollie Pickwick, Peter - all of us here - drawn against our wills across this square. It had all been in the dream - all of us leaving Haarlem, unable to turn back. Going where?

chapter 9, pg. 102

Already the matron was starting down the long corridor that I could see through the door. But I hung back gazing desperately at Father, Willem Peter all our brave underground workers.

"Father!" I cried suddenly. "God be with you!"

His head turned toward me. The harsh overhead light flashed from his glasses.

"And with you, my daughters" he said.

chapter 10, pg. 105

I sank down on the narrow bed then went into a fresh paroxysm of coughs and as a cloud of choking black dust rose from the filthy straw mattress. At last the attack passed and I lay down. The sour straw smell filled my nostrils. I felt each slat of wood through the thin pallet.

"I'll never been able to sleep on such a bed," I thought, and the next think I knew it was morning and there was a clattering at the door...

chapter 10, pg. 106

Then a prison boredom - which I soon learned to fear above all else - settled over the cell.

chapter 10, pg. 107

I tried not to let my mind venture higher in the house, not to let it climb the stairs to see if Thea, Mary, Eusie - no! I could do nothing for them here in this cell. God knew they were there.

chapter 10, pg. 107

... I wondered what Father's resistance to them had been - surely nothing could be ore innocent than this succession of shapes called clubs spades diamonds...

But as the days passed I began to discover a subtle danger. When the cards went well, my spirits rose. It was an omen: someone from Haarlem had been released! But if I lost... Maybe someone was ill. The people in the secret room had been found...

At last I had to stop playing. In any case I was finding ti hard to sit up so long. Increasingly I as spending the days as I did the nights tossing on the thin straw pallet trying in vain to find a position in which all the aches at once were eased. My head throbbed continually, pain shot up and down my arms my cough brought up blood.

chapter 10, pg. 108

Sky! For the first time in two weeks blue sky! How high the clouds were, how inexpressibly white and clean I remembered suddenly how much sky had meant to Mama.

chapter 10, pg. 108

After a while he disappeared through a crack in the floor. But when my evening piece of bread appeared on the door shelf, I scattered some crumbs and to my joy he popped out almost at once He picked up a heroic piece struggled down the hole with it and came back for more. It was the beginning of a relationship. Now in addition to the daily visit of the sun I had the company of this brave and handsome guest - in fact soon of a whole small committee.

chapter 10, pg. 113

Hadn't a message come to the Beje under a stamp, penciled in the tiny square beneath? Laughing at my own overwrought imagination I moistened the paper in the basin water and worked the stamp gently free.

Words! There was definitely writing there - but so tiny I had to climb again on to the cot and hold the paper close to the shaded bulb.

"All the watches in your closet are safe."

chapter 10, pg. 115

To my relief I honestly did not know any of the names he read - now I understood the wisdom of the ubiquitous "Mr. Smit."

chapter 10, pg. 116

"Whatever happens" she said at last, "you brought it on yourself by breaking the laws!"

Dear Jesus I whispered as the door slammed and her footsteps died away, how foolish of me to have called for human help when You are here. To think that Father sees You now face to face! To think that he and Mama are together again, walking those bright streets...

chapter 10, pg. 117

"Lord Jesus, You were called to a hearing too. Show me what to do."

chapter 11, pg. 118

"What can you know of darkness like mine..."

chapter 11, pg. 120

"How can you believe in God now?" he'd ask.

... And suddenly I was thinking of Father's own answer to hard questions: "Some knowledge is too heavy... you cannot bear it... your Father will carry it until you are able."

chapter 11, pg. 121

"Corrie, if people can be taught to hate they can be taught to love! We must find a way, you and I, no matter how long it takes..."

She went on almost forgetting in her excitement to keep her voice to a whisper while I slowly took in the fact that she was talking about our guards. I glanced at the matron seated at the desk ahead of us. I saw a gray uniform and a visored hat; Betsie saw a wounded human being.

And I wondered not for the first time what sort of a person she was, this sister of mine... what kind of road she followed while I trudged beside her on the all too-solid earth.

chapter 12, pg. 130

"You're the first woman worker," he said, "who has ever shown any interest in what we are making here."

"I'm very interested," I said. "I'm a watchmaker."

He started at me with a new interest. "Then I have work you will enjoy more."

chapter 12, pg. 131

"Dear watch lady! Can you not remember for whom you are working? These radios are for their fighter planes!" An reaching across me he would yank a wire from its housing or twist a tiny tube from an assembly.

"Now solder them back wrong."

chapter 12, pg. 132

I thought of Father's final hours alone and confused, in a hospital corridor. Of the underground work so abruptly halted. I thought of Mary Itallie arrested while walking down the street. And I knew that if Jan Vogel stood in front of me now, I could kill him.

chapter 12, pg. 133

What puzzle me all this time was Betsie. She had suffered everything I had and yet she seemed to carry no burden of rage. "Betsie!" I hissed on dark night when I knew that my restless tossing must be keeping her awake. Three of us now shared this single cot as the crowded camp daily receive new arrivals. "Betsie don't you feel anything about Jan Vogel? Doesn't it bother you?"

"Oh yes Corrie! Terribly! I've felt for him every since I knew - and pray for him whenever his name comes into my mind. How dreadfully he must be suffering!"

chapter 12, pg. 133

Wasn't she telling me in her gentle way that I was as guilty as Jan Vogel?  Didn’t he and I stand together before an all-seeing God convicted of the same sin of murder? For I had murdered him with my heart and with my tongue.

Chapter 12, Pg. 133

"Lord Jesus" I whispered into the lumpy ticking of the bed" I forgive Jan Vogel as I pray that You will forgive me. I have done him great damage. Bless him now, and his family..." That night for the first time since our betrayer had a name I slept deep and dreamlessly until the whistle summoned us to roll call.

chapter 12, pg. 133

I was endlessly, daily grateful to be again with people. But what I had not realized in solitary confinement as that to have companions mean to have their griefs as well. We all suffered with the women whose men were in the camp; the discipline the male section was much harsher than in the women's; executions were frequent.

chapter 12, pg. 134

And so hanging between hope and horror we waited out the days. Rumor was all we lived on.

chapter 12, pg. 135

Now they were so near they hurt our ears.

"Drop your lower jaw!" Mr. Moorman called down the long room. "Keep your mouth open and it will save your eardrums."

chapter 12, pg. 136

I flattened it out as best I could, pushing it down, tugging the sweater around my waist but there was no real concealing it beneath the thin cotton dress And all the while I had the incredible feeling that it didn't matter that this was not my business but God's. That all I had to do was walk straight ahead.

As we trooped back out through the shower room door, the S.S. men ran their hands over every prisoner front, back and sides. The woman ahead of me was searched three times. Behind me, Betsie was searched. No hand touched me.

chapter 13, pg. 142

I had believed the Bible always, but reading it now had nothing to do with belief. It was simply a description of the way things were - of hell and heaven, of how men act and how God acts. I had read a thousand times the story of Jesus' arrest - how soldiers had slapped Him, laughed at Him, flogged Him. Now such happenings had faces and voices.

chapter 13, pg. 144

...yet another page in the Bible leapt into life for me.

He hung naked on the cross.

I had not known - I had not thought... The paintings, the carved crucifixes showed at the least a scrap of cloth. But this I suddenly knew, was the respect and reverence of the artist. But oh - at the time itself on that other Friday morning - there had been no reverence. No more than I saw in the faces around us now.

I leaned toward Betsie, ahead of me in line. Her shoulder bladess tood out sharp and thin beneath her blue-mottled skin.

Betsie they took His clothes too."

Ahead of me I heard a little gasp. "Oh Corrie. And I never thanked Him..."

chapter 13, pg. 144

The fleas! This was too much "Betsie, there's no way even God can make me grateful for a flea."

chapter 13, pg. 146

Another strange thing was happening. The Davitamon bottle was continuing to produce drops. It scarcely seemed possible, so small a bottle so many doses a day. Now in addition to Betsie, a dozen others on our pier were taking it.

My instinct was always to hoard it - Betsie was growing so very weak! But others were ill as well. It was hard to say no to eyes that burned with fever hands that shook with chill. I tried to save it for the very weakest - but even these soon numbered fifteen, twenty, twenty-five...

And still every time I tilted the little bottle, a drop appeared at the tip of the glass stopper. It just couldn't be! I held it up to the light, trying to see how much was left, but the dark brown glass was too thick to see through.

"There was a woman in the Bile" Betsie said, "whose oil jar was never empty." She turned to it in the book of Kings the story of the poor widow of Zarephath.

chapter 13, pg. 149

Wonderful things happened all through the Bible. It was one thing to believe that such things were possible thousands of years ago, another to have it happen now, to us, this very day. And yet it happened, this day, and the next, and the next,

Chapter 13, Pg. 149

Betsie saw where I was looking and laid a bird-thin hand over the whip mark. "Don't look at it, Corrie. Look at Jesus only." She drew away her hand: it was sticky with blood.

Chapter 13, Pg. 150

I found our section in the dark and squeezed into a spot in the middle. From the doorway a searchlight swept the room lingering on blocks where anything stirred. Someone's elbow dug into my back, another woman's feet were two inches from my face. How was it possible, packed so close, to be so utterly and miserably alone?

chapter 13, pg. 151

"Can't we make a home for them and care for them and love them?"

"Corrie, I pray every day that we will be allowed to do this! To show them that love is greater!"

And it wasn't until I was gathering twigs later in the morning that I realized that I had been thinking of the feeble-minded, and Betsie of their persecutors.

chapter 14, pg. 154

As the cold increased, so did the special temptation of concentration-camp life: the temptation to think only of oneself. It took a thousand cunning forms.

chapter 14, pg. 156

Oh, this was the great ploy of Satan in that kingdom of his: to display such blatant evil that one could almost believe one's own sins didn't matter.

Chapter 14, Pg. 157

We must tell them the there is no pit so deep that He is not deeper still. They will listen to us, Corrie, because we have been here.

Chapter 14, Pg. 159

Even in the other patients I saw that stony indifference to others that was the most fatal disease of the concentration camp. I felt it spread to myself: how could one survive if one kept on feeling!

 Chapter 14, Pg. 164

There are no "ifs" in God's kingdom. I could hear her soft voice saying it. His timing is perfect. His will is our hiding place. Lord Jesus, keep me in Your will! Don't let me go mad by poking about outside it.

Chapter 14, Pg. 164

If I had ever needed proof that I had no boldness or cleverness of my own, I had it now. What ever bravery, or skill I had ever shown were gifts of God - sheer loans from Him of the talent needed to do a job. And it was clear from the absence of such skills now, that this was no longer His work for me.

chapter 15, pg. 171