The Hiding Place

Corrie ten Boom’s account of her family’s watch shop in Haarlem, the secret room built behind a false wall in her bedroom, and the Jews and resistance workers they hid there during the German occupation of the Netherlands. They were betrayed and arrested in February 1944; her father died within days of imprisonment, and she and her sister Betsie were sent to Scheveningen, Vught and finally Ravensbruck, where Betsie died. Ten Boom was released at the end of 1944, apparently by a clerical error.

The book was written with John and Elizabeth Sherrill and is explicitly a religious memoir — the second half is as much about forgiveness as about the camp — which is the form it should be read in.

Context: The list’s entry on ordinary people under occupation, and the only one of its Second World War titles written from the civilian side rather than by a combatant.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the list this came from.
• Corrie ten Boom — the author, a Dutch watchmaker who spent the rest of her life speaking about it.
• World War II — the occupation of the Netherlands and the camps.
• Christianity — the frame the whole book is written inside.
• Faith — tested rather than described, and the frame in which she treats the courage the book records: a decision made repeatedly, in a house, about strangers.