The Hiding Place

“That was Father’s secret: not that he overlooked the differences in people; that he didn’t know they were there.”

Many people judge others on the basis of observable differences, but Father doesn’t see these. Corrie ascribes this to a pleasant obliviousness in his temperament. It is also likely due to his theological convictions that all people are created in God’s image, and thus any observable differences are inconsequential. Corrie, like her father, has a kind of pleasant obliviousness, in her case to her own virtues.

“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.”

Corrie outlines her belief in God’s guidance. This idea plays out in several different ways throughout the story, including through visions. Here, Corrie explains God’s guidance in terms of how the divine will is worked out through the circumstances in people’s lives, such that their past becomes a preparation for their future.

“When Mama had poured their coffee, Father put on his rimless spectacles and began to read: ‘Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path…. Thou art my hiding place and my shield: I hope in thy word….’

What kind of hiding place, I wondered idly as I watched Father’s brown beard rise and fall with the words. What was there to hide from?”

This is the first appearance of the idea of a “hiding place,” when Father reads from the Bible during family devotions. Corrie is a child in this scene, and does not yet understand how to apply the verses to life experience. Later, the idea of God as her hiding place will come to be of central importance.

“‘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.’”

This scene also takes place when Corrie is a child. On one of her train rides to Amsterdam with Father, she asks him what is meant by sexual sin, which she overheard someone talking about but doesn’t really understand. Father doesn’t respond immediately. When the train stops, he asks Corrie to carry his heavy case of clock parts. When she is unable to do so, he uses it to illustrate his point: He keeps some knowledge from her, not to restrict her understanding, but as an act of love and compassion. Part of the family’s faith is a belief that God bears things for them that they cannot, and that God gives what is necessary at the proper time, a trait that Father tries to emulate with his own children.

“‘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. […] 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.’”

Here, the reader also sees Father gently sharing his wisdom with Corrie. Corrie has just been emotionally shaken by seeing a baby who had died, and she is afraid that Father will die too. Again, the reader sees the family’s perspective on faith, that God will provide everything necessary for them when the appropriate time comes. It is this belief that allows them to maintain their hope and trust in God even in the midst of great suffering.

“Happiness isn’t something that depends on our surroundings, Corrie. It’s something we make inside ourselves.”

Corrie’s mother says this as she and Corrie reflect on one of the aunts’ temperaments. Although Father is usually the one to express wisdom of this type, Corrie’s mother, likewise shaped by years of Bible reading and prayer, is also a voice of great wisdom.

“‘Corrie,’ he began instead, ‘do you know what hurts so very much? It’s love. Love is the strongest force in the world, and when it is 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.’”

Corrie’s romance with Karel has ended after he gets engaged to another woman. Father comforts her, advising her not to let her pain shut out her capacity for love. Here, as always, his counsel is rooted by his faith in God. As the book progresses, Corrie does what her father advises. She cultivates the capacity to love those around her, including, ultimately, her enemies.

“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.”

These lines follow shortly after the previous ones. They exemplify how The Hiding Place shows the entanglement of suffering and hope. When losing Karel, Corrie suffers, but has her father’s love and wisdom. When losing freedom, Corrie has her faith in God to anchor her. The above lines capture the theme of Faith and Perseverance: Father’s encouragement will eventually carry Corrie through the “darker rooms” of what’s to come.

“Oh, my dears, I am sorry for all Dutchmen now who do not know the power of God. For we will be beaten. But He will not.”

Father says this just before Nazi Germany invades Holland. He is responding to a radio address from the Dutch government which falsely claims that Holland’s neutrality will be respected. He knows that Holland will fall, but his faith in God gives him a sense of assurance for the future.

“For what seemed 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 planes, caught in the fist 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.’”

This is one of the clearest examples of the ten Booms’ Compassion. Here Betsie prays for the German soldiers bombing her country; she sees them not as oppressors, but as “victims.” She views their violence and hatred as symptoms of a deeper woundedness that can only be healed by God’s love.

“‘Father! Those poor people!’ I cried. […]

‘Those poor people,’ Father echoed. But to my surprise I saw that he was looking at the soldiers now forming into ranks to march away. ‘I pity the poor Germans, Corrie. They have touched the apple of God’s eye.’”

Corrie and Father, early in Haarlem’s occupation, watch as Jewish individuals are rounded up and taken away. Father expresses pity for the Germans. He alludes to Deuteronomy 32:10 from the Bible, in which the Jewish people are referred to as the apple of God’s eye. The Germans are targeting the very people who are especially precious in God’s sight, and bringing divine judgment down upon themselves. Therefore, Father sees them as in special need of pity.

“But under the words a prayer was forming in my heart. ‘Lord Jesus, I offer myself for Your people. In any way. Any place. Any time.’ And then an extraordinary thing happened. Even as I prayed, that waking dream passed again before my eyes. I saw again those four black horses and the Grote Markt. As I had on the night of the invasion I scanned the passengers drawn so unwillingly behind them. Father, Betsie, Willem, myself—leaving Haarlem, leaving all that was sure and safe—going where?”

Corrie expresses a turning point during the middle of the occupation. She realizes that she has to be available for however God might use her to protect Jewish individuals. Immediately before, she had been visiting the home of Jewish clients. She had been struck by the disjunction between the sweetness of their family life and the thought that brutal German guards might break through the door to take them away at any moment. As she expresses her willingness to be used by God, her vision recurs, foretelling her arrest and imprisonment.

“Love. How did one show it? How could God Himself show truth and love at the same time in a world like this? By dying. The answer stood out for me sharper and chiller than it ever had before that night: the shape of a Cross etched on the history of the world.”

Here, Corrie illustrates the theme of Faith and Perseverance. Rather than seeing the atrocities around her as proof of God’s absence, she is informed by her biblically-rooted faith, seeing them as evidence of the brokenness of the world. God did not turn away from humanity, but was crucified, an act of redemptive self-sacrifice. Therefore, Corrie is able to see meaning even in terrible suffering.

“You say we could lose our lives for this child. I would consider that the greatest honor that could come to my family.”

Father says this in response to a pastor who had advised them not to take a Jewish baby into their home because of the danger they would be putting themselves in. For Father, however, his compassion for the child overrules any possible consideration of his own welfare.

“That night Father and Betsie and I prayed long after the others 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.”

Here we see the ten Boom’s characteristic courage. Corrie does not often draw attention to this, but the family’s courage emerges from the narrative nonetheless. The ten Booms have realized just how widely known their secret activities are and the extent of the danger they are in; nevertheless, they resolve to press on with their work.

“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 us all to the care of God. The Bible sat at home on its shelf, but much of it was stored in his heart. His blue 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 […].’”

This scene occurs shortly after the raid on the Beje. As the ten Booms wait to be processed and transferred to prison, Father keeps his daily habit of leading devotions. He again quotes Psalm 119:114, drawing attention to the idea that although their physical hiding place has been taken away, they still have a hiding place in God.

“Was it possible that all this—all of this that seemed so wasteful and so needless—this war, Scheveningen prison, this very cell, none of it was unforeseen or accidental? Could it be part of the pattern first revealed in the Gospels? Hadn’t Jesus […] been defeated as utterly and unarguably as our little group and our small plans had been? But…if the Gospels were truly the pattern of God’s activity, then defeat was only the beginning.”

As Corrie ruminates over the content of her Bible readings in solitary confinement, she comes to believe that the gospels show a haunting symmetry with her own condition; God was not done with her yet, but was guiding her to something better. In this way, her faith imbues her with a reason to persevere.

“And suddenly I recognized that this too was a message, a last wordless communication among neighbors. For I too had a hiding place when things were bad. Jesus was this place, the Rock cleft for me.”

As Corrie is about to leave her solitary cell in Scheveningen for the last time, she wants to say goodbye to the little ant in the crack she has befriended, but it won’t come out, as it is hiding in its safe spot. This brings her back to the idea of a hiding place; the crack where the ant hides reminds her of a biblical passage in which God safely hid Moses in the cleft of a rock (Exodus 33:18-23), a passage usually interpreted by Christians as pointing allegorically to Jesus.

“‘Ravensbruck!’ Like a whispered curse the word passed back through the lines. This was the notorious women’s extermination camp whose name we had heard even in Haarlem. That squat concrete building, that smoke disappearing in the bright sunlight—no! I would not look at it! As Betsie and I stumbled down the hill, I felt the Bible bumping between my shoulder blades. God’s good news. Was it to this world that He had spoken it?”

The Hiding Place often juxtaposes evil and good to draw out the horror of life under the Nazis on the one hand, and God’s goodness on the other. Here, the smoke of incinerated victims is immediately followed by the image of the Bible—“God’s good news”—which Corrie carries.

“Life in Ravensbruck took place on two separate levels, mutually impossible. One, the observable, external life, grew every day more horrible. The other, the life we lived with God, grew daily better, truth upon truth, glory upon glory.”

This quote also highlights both the terrible conditions that Corrie experienced physically and the sweetness of her spiritual life. Meeting with Betsie and other women to read the Bible and pray sustained Corrie in a way that seems almost impossible given external circumstances. Again, this underscores the theme of Faith and Perseverance, and how faith gives her the will to persevere.

“They were services like no others, these times in Barracks 28. A single meeting night might include a recital of the Magnificat in Latin by a group of Roman Catholics, a whispered hymn by some Lutherans, and a sotto-voce chant by Eastern Orthodox women. With each moment the crowd around us would swell, packing the nearby platforms, hanging over the edges, until the high structures groaned and swayed. At last either Betsie or I would open the Bible. […] They were little previews of heaven, these evenings beneath the light bulb. […] And I would know again that in darkness God’s truth shines most clear.”

These lines describe the devotion shared in the barracks at Ravensbruck, where beauty is experienced in a place of unimaginable suffering. Here Corrie uses the imagery of light and darkness to describe the stark contrast between their physical and spiritual experiences. Though the Germans sought to subjugate people and target racial and religious identities, people of many different identities come together in an act of unity and love.

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

Betsie expresses her desire not just to feel compassion for others, but to set up programs that will minister to people’s hearts. She shows her conviction that love is immeasurably more powerful than hate, as well as her belief that true compassion must be an active virtue, not a passive sentiment.

“And so I closed the Bible and to that group of women clustering close I told the truth about myself—my self-centeredness, my stinginess, my lack of love. That night real joy returned to my worship.”

One of the characteristic features of The Hiding Place is Corrie’s self-effacing nature. She regularly highlights the virtues of others and tells stories about her own failings—as in this instance, where she confesses that she hadn’t wanted to share a blanket with other prisoners. She often seems oblivious to her own virtues, which to the reader are clear and multifarious. It’s useful to remember that in the Christian tradition, humility is sometimes considered the highest virtue of all.