Posted: Sun Feb 11, 2007 11:12 am Post subject: Corrie Ten Boom
Corrie ten Boom
From Wikipedia
Cornelia (Corrie) ten Boom (April 15, 1892 – April 15, 1983) was a Dutch Christian Holocaust survivor who helped many Jews escape the Nazis during World War II. Born in Haarlem, North Holland, ten Boom was declared a member of the Righteous Among the Nations by the State of Israel in December 1967. She died in the United States.
Early life
In 1892 she was born in Haarlem, and in 1918 the family took in the first of many children.
Activities during the Holocaust
In 1940 the Nazis invaded the Netherlands and banned ten Boom's club organization. By 1942 she and her family had become very active in the Dutch underground, hiding refugees. Ten Boom was able to rescue many Jews from certain death at the hands of the Nazi SS. The family's work in saving Jews was motivated by their staunch Christian beliefs. They helped Jews without forcing conversion, and they even provided Kosher food and honored the Sabbath. The Germans arrested the entire ten Boom family on February 28, 1944 with the help of a Dutch informant (Corrie would later discover his name to be Jan Vogel); they were sent first to Scheveningen prison, then to the Vught political concentration camp (both in the Netherlands), and finally to the notorious Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany in September 1944, where Corrie's sister Betsie died. Corrie was released in December 1944[1]. In the movie The Hiding Place, Corrie narrates the section on her release from camp by saying that she later learned that her release had been a clerical error: it so happened that the women prisoners her age in the camp were killed in the week following her release.
Post-war
After the war Corrie returned to the Netherlands to begin rehabilitation centres. She returned to Germany in 1946, and many years of itinerant preaching in over sixty countries followed, during which time she wrote many books.
"The Hiding Place"
Ten Boom told the story of her family and their work during World War II in her most famous book, "The Hiding Place" (1971), which was made into a film of the same name by World Wide Pictures in 1975. The book and film give context to the story of Anne Frank, who was also in hiding in the Netherlands during the war.
Religious views
Her preaching focused on the Christian Gospel, with emphasis on forgiveness. In her book, "Tramp for the Lord" (1974), she tells the story of how, after she had been preaching in Germany in 1947, she was approached by one of the cruelest former Ravensbrück camp guards. She was reluctant to forgive him, but prayed that she would be able to. She wrote that she was then able to forgive, and that for a long moment we grasped each other's hands, the former guard and the former prisoner. I had never known God's love so intensely as I did then.
She also wrote (in the same passage) that in her post-war experience with other victims of Nazi brutality, it was those who were able to forgive who were best able to rebuild their lives.
Legacy
Ten Boom was honored by the State of Israel for her work in aid of the Jewish people by being invited to plant a tree in the Avenue of the Righteous Gentiles, at the Yad Vashem, near Jerusalem. Oskar Schindler is also honoured there. Rabbi Daniel Lapin has lamented how little Corrie ten Boom is known among American Jews, and how she has been ignored in the U.S. by the Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Ten Boom was knighted by the Queen of The Netherlands in recognition of her work during the war.
A museum in Haarlem, the Dutch city in which she grew up and spent much of her life, is dedicated to her and her family.
Corrie never married, and had no children.
Later years and death
In 1977, ten Boom, then 85 years old, moved to Orange, California. Successive strokes in 1978 took her powers of speech and communication and left her an invalid. She died on April 15, 1983, on her ninety-first birthday. She was said to have been happy to die on her birthday because she could "celebrate it with the Lord".
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