Corrie ten Boom’s Hiding Place WellsOfGrace.com

Corrie ten Boom’s Hiding Place
by Bertine Krol

Corrie ten Boom

Corrie ten Boom
(15 April 1892- 15 April 1983)

Everybody in the Netherlands knows about the Anne Frank House, but relatively few Dutch people will have heard of another important wartime hide-out: that of Corrie ten Boom in Haarlem - the place where this brave and deeply religious woman used to live, who in WWII offered help and refuge to hundreds of people.

Her wartime home is now a museum and, to mark the anniversary of her death, on April 15 a new book about her life and works will be presented at the museum.

Walk through Haarlem's old city centre and you could easily overlook the modest jewellery and watchmaker's shop on a corner of Barteljorisstraat.

The business still bears the name Ten Boom though it's no longer related to the family. The living quarters on the second floor again resemble the way they looked during the war and now serve as a museum. You almost expect to bump into Corrie, her father Casper or her sister Betsie while taking one of the regular guided tours of the house

Natural leader
Shortly after the Nazi's invaded the Netherlands in 1940, the Ten Boom family became active in the resistance. For years they offered a hiding place to hundreds of people in their house. One of the museum's tour guides, Aty Bennema, tells how Corrie turned out to be a natural leader:

"She was 48 when the war began and very soon got involved in underground work. Eventually she was head of a resistance group of about 80 people and had built up a whole network of addresses and contacts."

The network was used to find hiding places for people on the run from the Nazis, Jews mostly, but also members of the resistance and young men who had been called to work in German factories. Some people only stayed for a couple of hours with the family Ten Boom, until a safe house had been found, others -usually up to six or seven people- lived there for weeks or months even.

Corrie ten Boom's Haarlem hide-out at Barteljorisstraat 19

Hiding place
On the second floor, in Corrie's bedroom, a hiding place was constructed behind a brick wall, accessible through a removable panel in a built-in closet. A small space where seven people could only fit in if they stood close together. In case of unwanted Nazi visitors an alarm bell would ring and the people had to get to the hiding place within 70 seconds, taking even their plates and cutlery if they happened to be having dinner at the moment. Usually it was a matter of hours until all was safe again.

"Corrie and her family didn't know fear," Aty Bennema says "They believed God would help them." With customers coming and going the shop proved to be a good cover. Until they were betrayed and the house was raided by the Gestapo.

Six people made it to the hiding place in time and weren't discovered, but they had to stay there in absolute silence for four days. Aty Bennema tells that the Gestapo kept the house under close surveillance for a long time because they knew there were people hiding somewhere.

"They arrested everybody else in the house and also people who dropped by later that day. You see, the Ten Booms had an all safe signal, a wooden plate advertising Swiss Clocks, which they put in a side window. But they had forgotten to remove the plate and when Corrie's sister Betsie saw that, it was too late."

Many people walked into the trap that way. The Gestapo arrested Corrie, Betsie and their father as well as 36 other people.

Miracle release
They were taken to the nearby police station and later to Scheveningen prison, where father Ten Boom, who was 84 at the time, died ten days after his arrest. Most of the others were released at one time or other, but Corrie and Betsie were eventually transported to Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany. Aty Bennema:

The hiding place in Corrie ten Boom's bedroom. It was constructed behind a brick wall, accessible through a removable panel in a built-in closet

"Betsie died there in December 1944, but Corrie survived. She was released through a clerical error. The Nazis had made a list of all the women of 50 and older but Corrie - she was 52- was put on a list for release. It was a miracle. Corrie later heard that all the elderly women went to the gas chambers and died there. Thousands of them."

After the liberation Corrie wrote a best-selling book entitled "The Hiding Place", recounting her family's wartime experiences. She also set up homes where war victims could recuperate and then the deeply religious woman travelled the world as an evangelist. In the 1970s, Corrie ten Boom moved to the United States, where she continued to write books and give sermons. Several years after her death in 1983 her old house in Haarlem became a museum, which annually draws tens of thousands of visitors, many of them from abroad.

While Corrie ten Boom is widely known among Christians around the world, here in the Netherlands she's not quite as famous as that other wartime icon, Anne Frank. Aty Bennema thinks there is a logical explanation for that:

"First of all we are no longer a Christian nation and here at the museum we give a Christian message. The other reason is, there are more people who did the same as the Ten Boom family, even in Haarlem."