Ten Boom's hiding place
Corrie ten Boom hides Jews in Holland
The hiding place is behind a false wall in Corrie ten Boom's bedroom on the top floor of the family's watch shop in Haarlem.
The Beje — as the house is called — has become a stop on the Dutch underground network for Jews fleeing the Nazi deportations. The ten Boom family are not heroic in the way the word is usually used — they are not soldiers, not politically connected, not particularly young. Casper ten Boom is eighty-four years old. His daughter Corrie is fifty.
They are Christians who read their Bible and concluded that the people being hunted are their neighbors, and that the command to love their neighbor did not come with an exception for personal risk.
From May 1942 until February 1944, the Beje shelters Jews and resistance workers. On February 28, 1944, a Dutch informer leads the Gestapo to the house. Everyone is arrested.
Six people are hidden behind the false wall and stay there for forty-seven hours after the arrests before escaping. They survive. The people arrested do not all survive.
Casper ten Boom dies in Scheveningen prison ten days after his arrest. He is eighty-four years old. His daughter Betsie dies in Ravensbrück concentration camp in December 1944. Corrie is released in January 1945 — by a clerical error, she later learns. The women her age were gassed the week after her release.
She spends the rest of her life telling the story.
“There is no pit so deep that he is not deeper still.”
— Betsie ten Boom, to Corrie, in Ravensbrück, c. 1944 AD
“For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
There is no pit so deep that he is not deeper still.
Betsie says this in Ravensbrück — in a concentration camp, watching people die, dying herself. She does not say it about a theological abstraction. She says it about the specific pit she is in, at the bottom of which she has found someone already there.
This is the most important claim the Christian faith makes about suffering: not that God prevents it, not that he explains it, but that he is in it — deeper than the deepest — and that his presence there is not an illusion.
Betsie died at Ravensbrück believing it. Corrie lived to testify to it.
In the deepest pit you have ever been in, or the one you are in now — have you found him there? Not felt his absence and concluded the pit is empty, but looked deeper and found him?