Corrie ten Boom

Corrie ten Boom (Amsterdam, April 15, 1892-Placentia, California, April 15, 1983), was a Dutch and Christian writer, watchmaker and activist, famous for providing refuge to the persecuted by the Nazi regime during the Holocaust. After the War, the Jewish institution Yad Vashem named her Righteous Among the Nations.

Biography

She was the youngest of three sisters and one brother. The daughter of Casper ten Boom, a watchmaker, she was raised within the Dutch Reformed Church (in Dutch, Nederlandse Hervormde Kerk). She did not get married.

Corrie grew up in the rooms above "Beje" in Haarlem, the Netherlands, a house with a watch shop at the front, which had been opened in 1837 by her grandfather Willem and passed on to her father Casper. Corrie began training as a watchmaker in 1920 and in 1924 became the first "authorized" in Holland. In 1921 Corrie's mother died. Before 1919 she had already started activities for adolescents in her community: girls' walking group, gymnastics, theater and German club. Over time the clubs grew until it became the great Triangle Club.

World War II

During the early years of the conflict, he was able to rescue many Jews from certain death at the hands of the Nazi SS. In 1940 the Nazis invaded the Netherlands and banned his club. In 1942 his family became very active in hiding refugees, and for this the Nazis arrested the entire family in 1944; they were first sent to Dutch prisons (where he evangelized various Nazi soldiers of various ranks), and eventually to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany. She was released at the end of the war, just a few days after the death of her sister Betsie. She returned to the Netherlands to found rehabilitation centers.

Postwar

His return to Germany in 1946 was the beginning of many years of preaching in more than sixty countries, during which time he wrote many books.

Preaching focused on the Christian Gospel, with special emphasis on forgiveness. In his book Tramp for the Lord (1974), he tells how, after having been preaching in Germany in 1947, he was approached by one of the cruelest guards in the Ravensbrück camp. Naturally, she was reluctant to forgive him, but she told herself that she would be able to. She wrote that she was later able to forgive, and that "for a long moment we shook hands, the former guard and the former prisoner." She had never felt God's love so intensely as I felt it then & # 34;. She also wrote (in the same passage) that in her postwar experience with other victims of Nazi brutality, those who were able to forgive were best able to rebuild her lives.

Corrie told the story of her family and her work during World War II in another book, The Secret Refuge (1971), which was made into a film, with the same title, by World Wide Pictures. The book and film give context to the story of Anne Frank, who also went into hiding in the Netherlands during the war.

In 1978 Corrie suffered paralysis as a result of a stroke, and died on April 15, 1983, her 91st birthday. In Haarlem, the city where she lived, there is a house-museum dedicated to her and her family.