The Hiding Place

What The Hiding Place is

The Hiding Place is a first-person memoir written by Corrie ten Boom with John and Elizabeth Sherrill and first published in 1971. It runs roughly 250 pages and covers the years from Corrie’s childhood in Haarlem through the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940, the family’s clandestine work hiding Jews and resistance members behind a false wall in their home, the February 1944 raid that sent them to prison, Corrie’s and Betsie’s deportation to Ravensbrück, Betsie’s death there in December 1944, and Corrie’s release. The final chapters cover her post-war ministry traveling to more than sixty countries speaking on forgiveness.

It is published by Chosen Books, an imprint of Baker Publishing Group, and has been continuously in print for fifty-plus years. The book is the basis for the 1975 World Wide Pictures film of the same name starring Jeannette Clift George, and it has been translated into dozens of languages. The ten Boom family home at Barteljorisstraat 19 in Haarlem is now a museum, and visitors can still climb the narrow stairs and see the hiding place behind the false wall.

Why readers across every Christian tradition keep returning to The Hiding Place

The single biggest practical difference between The Hiding Place and almost every other wartime Christian memoir is that Corrie ten Boom never lets the reader stay in the abstract. She does not write about evil in general. She writes about the lice in the straw of Barracks 28, about the smell, about her sister’s thin face, about the moment a guard’s rifle stock came down on Betsie’s chest. And then she does not let you stay in the suffering either. She drags you, sentence by sentence, to a church basement in Munich in 1947, where a balding man in a gray overcoat walks up to her with his hand out and says: “You mentioned Ravensbrück. I was a guard there.”

That arc — from the watch shop to the camp to the outstretched hand — is the reason readers across every Christian tradition return to this book. Dutch Reformed by upbringing, Corrie writes in a register that Catholics, Latter-day Saints, Orthodox, evangelicals, and mainline Protestants have all received as their own. The theology is rendered through scene, not statement, and the scenes are unforgettable. It is the thoughtful person’s memoir of forgiveness.

The wartime hiding of Jews: the false wall behind the bedroom

Roughly the first half of the book — Books One and Two in the original structure — covers the Haarlem years and the building of the hiding place itself. The ten Booms were Dutch Reformed Christians who had run a watch shop on Barteljorisstraat for three generations. When the German occupation began in 1940 and Jewish neighbors started disappearing, Casper ten Boom, the patriarch, made a decision that Corrie records almost in passing: when asked if he knew he might die for sheltering Jews, he answered that it would be an honor to give his life for God’s ancient people. That sentence functions as the moral pivot of the whole memoir. Everything that follows flows from it.

The Resistance built a hidden room behind a false brick wall in Corrie’s own bedroom on the top floor of the house — about thirty inches deep, accessed by a low sliding panel near the floor. At any given time the family was hiding four to seven people, with a rotating underground railroad moving Jewish neighbors to safer addresses in the Dutch countryside. Corrie writes about the practical detail of it — the fake ration cards, the drill that taught hiders to disappear in sixty seconds, the buzzer system, the meals cooked for double the household — with a matter-of-factness that makes the moral weight land harder. Historians estimate the ten Boom operation saved roughly eight hundred Jews and resistance workers before the betrayal on February 28, 1944.

Ravensbrück, Betsie’s death, and the lice in Barracks 28

After the raid, Corrie and Betsie were held first at Scheveningen, then at the Vught transit camp in the Netherlands, and finally deported in September 1944 to Ravensbrück, the women’s concentration camp ninety kilometers north of Berlin. Their father Casper had already died in a Dutch prison ten days after the arrest, at age eighty-four. The Ravensbrück chapters are the hardest reading in the book, and Corrie does not soften them. She writes about the inspection lines, the cold, the starvation diet, the public humiliations, the watchtower searchlights, the smoke from the crematorium. She also writes about Betsie smuggling in a small Bible and the two sisters holding worship services in their flea-infested barracks because, as Betsie pointed out, the guards would not enter Barracks 28 — the lice kept them out.

Betsie ten Boom died on December 16, 1944, at age fifty-nine. Corrie was released on December 28 — a clerical error, she always said, because every woman her age in the camp was killed in the following week. The chapters that cover Betsie’s final days are written without melodrama, which is what makes them devastating. Betsie’s last recorded words to her sister are about a future home for survivors and former captors alike, a vision Corrie spent the rest of her life building toward in concrete form — first a rehabilitation center in Holland, then a worldwide speaking ministry.

The post-war forgiveness ministry: the former SS guard in Munich

The final chapters of The Hiding Place take place after the war and lay out what became Corrie’s vocation for the next thirty-five years — traveling to more than sixty countries and speaking, in halls and prisons and refugee camps and Sunday morning services, on one subject: forgiveness. The single most-quoted scene in the entire book takes place in 1947, in a church basement in Munich. Corrie has just finished speaking about forgiveness when a balding man in a gray overcoat approaches her with his hand outstretched. She recognizes him immediately. He had been one of the cruelest guards at Ravensbrück — one of the men who had stripped her and Betsie at the shower-room intake.

He did not recognize her. He told her he had become a Christian, that he knew God had forgiven him for the things he had done at Ravensbrück, and he asked her to forgive him too. Corrie writes that she stood there with her hand at her side and could not raise it. She prayed silently — “Jesus, help me” — and felt, she says, something like an electric current pass through her arm, and she shook his hand. “I forgive you, brother,” she heard herself say, “with all my heart.” It is the moment the whole memoir has been building toward, and it is the reason this book has outlived the war that produced it. Forgiveness, Corrie writes, is not a feeling — it is an act of the will, and the feeling follows.

Pricing

Where The Hiding Place falls behind

Not a history book. Readers who want footnotes, archival sources, and a strict chronology of the Dutch resistance will need a companion volume — Diet Eman’s Things We Couldn’t Say or a general history of the Dutch occupation will fill in what The Hiding Place leaves between the lines.

Light on theological framework. The book is a witness, not a treatise. Readers wanting a theology of suffering or evil should pair it with something like J. I. Packer’s Knowing God or Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship — The Hiding Place is what the theology looks like in practice, not the theology itself.

A few unverifiable mystical moments. Betsie ten Boom reports visions and premonitions in the camp — a postwar home in the country, a place of healing for former captors — and Corrie records them at face value. Most readers find these moving; readers who want strictly empirical memoir should know they are there.

The Sherrill voice. John and Elizabeth Sherrill were professional collaborators — the same team behind The Cross and the Switchblade — and the prose carries their fingerprints. It is more polished than Corrie’s own later self-written books. For the unfiltered voice, pair it with Tramp for the Lord.

Pre-war pacing. The opening chapters move slowly through Haarlem family life, and some readers stall before the Gestapo arrives. Push through — the setup is what makes the camp chapters land.

The Hiding Place vs. Bonhoeffer (Metaxas) vs. Through Gates of Splendor

These three books form the standard short list of twentieth-century Christian wartime and martyrdom memoirs read in English-speaking churches, and each does something different.

The Hiding Place is the survivor’s memoir, written in the first person by the woman who lived it. It is short, it is intimate, and it is built around a single hand-shaking moment in a Munich church basement. Eric Metaxas’s Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy is a full-length biography written by a third party four decades after the events — broader in scope, longer in length, heavier on political and theological context, and the standard popular life of the German pastor executed at Flossenbürg in April 1945. Through Gates of Splendor, Elisabeth Elliot’s 1957 account of the five missionaries killed in Ecuador in 1956, sits between them — a third-person narrative written by an insider in the immediate aftermath, with the missionaries’ own journals woven in.

Different strengths. The Hiding Place is the best on forgiveness as a lived practice. Bonhoeffer is the best on the political and theological cost of resistance. Through Gates of Splendor is the best on missionary calling under threat. Most serious readers eventually own all three; if you can only start with one, The Hiding Place is the shortest, the most accessible, and the one with the cleanest emotional arc.

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