The Hiding Place

I feel like I should have read this book about 30 years ago. I’ve seen it, and Corrie Ten Boom, quoted numerous times but never quite had the full picture. Having read it I feel like a key jigsaw-piece in my Christian cultural understanding is now in place but most importantly the book didn’t disappoint.

Many have written far more and better than I of Corrie who grew up in a multi-generational, humble and Christian home in the 1900s. She fell in love with a man but that love was not requited and so she supported her father and family business as a watch-maker in a town in Holland.

As the war progressed she lead her family in shielding Jews and others under threat from Nazi rule, growing steadily more influential in the under-ground resistance movement until eventually was caught, along with her father and sister and lead to incarceration and then later one of the most horrific female concentration camps of the war. 96,000 women died there.

Her elderly father, on arrival at the first prison was offered the chance to leave. To which he replied: ‘If I go home, I’ll immediately continue supporting Jews, who are my fellow human beings‘. They didn’t let him out. He died within a matter of days.

I was captivated by every detail of the concentration camp journey as their dignity and life was steadily stripped back further and further to new depths of degradation, squalor, forced labour, murder squads. Corrie spent months in solitary confinement before the move to Ravensbrook where she was with her sister, Bettie, in inhumane, brutal, sadistic prison. Against all rules and odds, despite being strip searched they managed to smuggle a Bible into their over-crowded cells and we hear mind-blowing stories of faith and miracles:

·        ‘Give thanks in all circumstances’ – a verse they read and interpreted to include their flea infested straw mattress.

·        Corrie, confessed her selfishness of trying to move to the centre of the queue at 0400 one December morning so she could be shielded from the wind! 

·        Bettie became ill and Corrie’s bottle of vitamin medicine was used to support her. Others were soon asking for it, so they gave it to a daily to a queue of people…..and somehow the bottle never ran out.

Eventually Bettie died (one of 90,000 who did so!) and her body was seen on top of a load of other corpses stored behind the open latrines.

Just before passing away, Bettsie described in detail 2 separate homes, one in Holland another in Germany, that Corrie could run to support survivors coping with the trauma of concentration camps and this vision included a place to help their cruel prison officers also!!!!

After Corrie was released she found herself, in the years just after the war, being offered 2 buildings exactly as Bettsie had described and put them to use for people recovering trauma just as Bettsie had envisioned.

I was reading the final chapters on the concentration camp one Sunday morning. Rach and the family were still sleeping so I read by the dim light of my torch while lying in bed.  After a few hours of being absorbed the detailed description of their time in concentration camp and their possession of absolutely nothing, no materials, no health-care, no agency, no power, just a bible.   I then went down and met the washing up. Suddenly the clutter of my belongings struck me as completely unnecessary.

I am miles off anywhere near the humanity that Corrie and Bettie exhibited. With my new job I’m getting a bit more money and am tempted to either hoard and/or spend. The challenge for me is to become more generous.

So  - I thought about giving away one of my coats. As if to rub it in, that morning in church we read the words of John: ‘Those of you with 2 tunics should give to those with none.’  Ok  - I get the message!

So I chose the coat with the branded name on, took it into my office in town and within 2 hours a homeless man knocked on my window. I said I had no money to give but then remembered my coat and handed it to him. Never before or since has anyone else knocked on my window asking for help!  Maybe someone upstairs knew he needed it….or maybe, more likely, the gift represented more about what I needed to learn.

So I'd recommend the book as a way to help, give your life a bit of perspective!