The Work
The Hiding Place was first published in 1971 by Chosen Books, a division of Fleming H. Revell Company. It was written in collaboration with John and Elizabeth Sherrill, experienced Christian authors who had helped Corrie ten Boom develop her oral account into a literary form. (Elizabeth Sherrill had earlier helped ghost-write David Wilkerson's The Cross and the Switchblade and Brother Andrew's God's Smuggler.) The book is approximately 240 pages.
The book became a sustained bestseller, eventually selling over three million copies. A major motion picture adaptation was released in 1975 by World Wide Pictures (the film ministry of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association), directed by James F. Collier and starring Jeannette Clift as Corrie and Julie Harris as her sister Betsie. The film was shown in churches and theaters worldwide and further extended the book's reach. The Hiding Place is regularly cited in lists of the most influential Christian books of the twentieth century.
The Historical Events
Corrie ten Boom (1892-1983) was born in Amsterdam and raised in Haarlem in a devout Dutch Reformed family. Her father, Casper ten Boom, was a watchmaker - the family business occupied the ground floor of their house in the Barteljorisstraat - and the family home was a center of Christian hospitality and ministry. The ten Booms regularly hosted Bible study groups, cared for foster children, and maintained relationships with members of the Haarlem Jewish community.
When Germany occupied the Netherlands in May 1940, the ten Boom family became active in the Dutch resistance almost immediately. Casper ten Boom, then in his eighties, was among the first to insist that the family must help Jews, drawing on his lifelong conviction that the Jewish people were God's beloved people (Romans 11) and that Deuteronomy 10:19 - 'Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt' - was a direct command. The family constructed a secret room (the 'hiding place' of the title) behind a false wall in Corrie's bedroom on the top floor of the house, capable of concealing up to six people.
Over the course of three years, the ten Boom family helped approximately 800 people - mostly Jews but also Dutch resistance workers and young men evading forced labor - either by sheltering them temporarily or by connecting them with safe houses throughout the Netherlands. On February 28, 1944, the house was raided by the Gestapo following an informant's tip. Corrie, her sister Betsie, their father Casper, and several other family members were arrested. The six people in the hiding place escaped undetected.
Casper ten Boom died in Scheveningen prison ten days after his arrest. Corrie and Betsie were transferred to the Vught concentration camp in the Netherlands and then to Ravensbrück women's concentration camp in Germany in September 1944, arriving just as the first mass gassings began at that facility. Betsie died at Ravensbrück on December 16, 1944. Corrie was released through a 'clerical error' on December 28, 1944, one week before all women of her age group at Ravensbrück were sent to the gas chambers.
After her release, Corrie spent the remainder of her long life (she died in 1983 on her ninety-first birthday) traveling and speaking about forgiveness, faith, and the faithfulness of God through suffering. She established the rehabilitation home 'Bloemendaal' in Haarlem for concentration camp survivors and Dutch collaborators, and lectured widely in over sixty countries.
Biblical Engagement
Psalm 32:7 ('Thou art my hiding place; thou shalt preserve me from trouble; thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliverance') provides the book's title and its central theological image. The 'hiding place' operates on three levels: literally, the secret room in the family home where Jews were hidden; metaphorically, the human choice to take refuge in dangerous love; and spiritually, the Psalmist's image of God as the ultimate refuge and protector. The title condenses the book's theology: human courage in providing hiding places for the vulnerable is an imitation of God's own protective love.
Matthew 6:14-15 ('For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you: But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses') is central to the book's most famous and theologically potent scene. After the war, Corrie ten Boom was speaking at a gathering in Munich when she encountered a man she recognized as one of the cruellest guards at Ravensbrück. He extended his hand for forgiveness, having recently become a Christian. The scene is a confrontation with Matthew 6 at its most literal and most demanding: can the teaching be lived? Corrie describes the experience of asking God for the capacity to forgive when her own capacity had entirely failed, and receiving it as she extended her hand - an experience that became the heart of her speaking ministry for the rest of her life.
Romans 8:38-39 ('For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord') forms the theological bedrock of the book's proclamation. Betsie ten Boom's repeated insistence, in the depths of Ravensbrück, that 'there is no pit so deep that He is not deeper still' - Corrie's most famous quotation - is an experiential attestation of Romans 8:39.
2 Corinthians 1:3-4 ('Blessed be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort; Who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble') describes the theological logic of Corrie's post-war ministry: having received comfort in extremity, she became a vehicle of comfort to those still in their own extremities. Betsie ten Boom's dying vision - 'We must tell them, Corrie. We must tell them that there is no pit so deep...' - is the direct call to this Pauline ministry of comfort-through-experience.
John 15:13 ('Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends') and Matthew 25:40 ('Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me') provide the christological grounding for the family's decision to risk their lives for Jewish strangers. Casper ten Boom's response, when challenged about the danger he was placing his family in, echoes Matthew 25: 'It would be an honor to give my life for God's ancient people.'
Author & Context
Cornelia Johanna (Corrie) ten Boom was born on April 15, 1892, in Amsterdam. The family moved to Haarlem when Corrie was an infant, and she grew up in the watchmaker's shop on the Barteljorisstraat that is now the Corrie ten Boom House Museum. She was the first woman to be licensed as a watchmaker in the Netherlands (1922) and remained active in the family business until her arrest in 1944.
The ten Boom household was shaped by Dutch Reformed Pietism - a tradition combining doctrinal orthodoxy, family devotion, social concern, and a distinctive warmth toward the Jewish people, rooted in an appreciation of the church's debt to Israel. Family Bible reading, prayer for Jewish people and for the land of Israel, and Sunday hospitality for those in need were constants of the household. These practices were not incidental to the family's resistance activity but its direct theological foundation.
The Hiding Place was written twenty-seven years after the events it describes. The collaboration with the Sherrills, who had significant experience in narrative spiritual memoir, shaped the book's dramatic construction - the rising tension of the resistance years, the catastrophe of the arrest, the extreme suffering of Ravensbrück, and the redemptive arc of Betsie's dying vision. Critics have occasionally noted that the book's narrative shape is too neat, too redemptive - that the realities of trauma and survivor's guilt are somewhat smoothed over. But readers have generally responded to its authenticity: the specificity of the suffering described, the honesty about Corrie's own struggles with bitterness and forgiveness, and the luminous figure of Betsie give the book a credibility that no polished narrative could manufacture.
Theological Themes
The book's central theological contribution is its theology of forgiveness as a practice - not a feeling to be cultivated but an act to be performed in dependence on divine grace when human capacity has been entirely exhausted. The Munich scene is the book's theological climax precisely because Corrie makes no pretense of having achieved forgiveness: she simply acts in obedience to the command, asking God for the capacity she does not possess, and discovers that God supplies it. This experiential account of forgiveness as divinely enabled action rather than humanly achieved attitude has been deeply influential in the literature of reconciliation and trauma healing.
The book also develops a theology of suffering as the curriculum of compassion. Betsie ten Boom's response to Ravensbrück - her insistence on gratitude for fleas (because the fleas kept the guards away from their barrack, allowing them to read Scripture freely) and her dying vision of a rehabilitation home for survivors - models the Pauline disposition of 2 Corinthians 1 and Romans 5:3-5. Suffering does not make faith impossible but, for those who maintain it, deepens both faith and the capacity to comfort others.
Critical Reception and Significance
The book's reception in evangelical Christian circles was immediate and enormous. It gave millions of readers a concrete, historical witness to faith under the most extreme conditions of the twentieth century. It became a standard text in Christian education from Sunday school through seminary. Its influence on the theology and practice of Christian forgiveness - not as an abstract virtue but as a possible, enacted, divinely sustained act - is difficult to overestimate.
Scholars of Holocaust literature have engaged more cautiously with the book, noting that its Christian theological framework can give the suffering of Jewish victims a redemptive meaning that does not belong to them. The majority of the Jews sheltered by the ten Booms did not survive; the book's redemptive arc is the arc of a Christian survivor's story, not of the Holocaust as a whole. These are legitimate critical observations, though they do not diminish the book's significance as a testimony to Christian love under persecution.
Legacy
Corrie ten Boom's ministry after the war brought her to over sixty countries. Her speaking on forgiveness, her testimony to God's faithfulness, and her support for persecuted Christians in Eastern Europe and China made her one of the most widely traveled Christian speakers of the twentieth century. Her books - including In My Father's House (1976), Tramp for the Lord (1974), and Each New Day (1977) - extended her ministry in print.
The Hiding Place stands alongside Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison and Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning as one of the three most widely read testimonies to faith, hope, and humanity under National Socialist persecution. It has been particularly influential in the theology and practice of forgiveness and reconciliation, and is regularly cited in the literature of post-conflict healing, restorative justice, and trauma recovery.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study Psalm 32 (the Lord as hiding place), Romans 8:31-39 (nothing separates us from God's love), Matthew 6:9-15 (the Lord's Prayer and forgiveness), 2 Corinthians 1:3-7 (comfort received and comfort given), Matthew 25:31-46 (caring for Christ in the stranger), and Romans 11:17-29 (the church's debt to Israel).
Further Reading
- Pamela Rosewell Moore, Life Lessons from the Hiding Place: Discovering the Heart of Corrie ten Boom (2004) - a memoir by Corrie's personal companion in her later years, with additional personal reflections. - Ann Spangler and Lois Tverberg, Sitting at the Feet of Rabbi Jesus (2009) - develops the Jewish Christian connection that motivates the ten Boom family's resistance. - Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace (2005) - the most theologically rigorous engagement with the theology of forgiveness that The Hiding Place embodies.