During Lent, I have been reading my family The Hiding Place, the account of how Corrie Ten Boom’s family hid Jews in their home, were discovered, and got sent to a concentration camp.
Four of the Ten Booms died—the number of Jews they saved is something like 800.
I last read this book as a teenager, and the dramatic scenes of great cruelty met with great holiness made a huge impression on me.
I remember the miraculously multiplying vitamin drops that kept the prisoners alive; I remember the scene where Corrie’s sister was thanking God for everything they had, including a horrendous infestation of fleas.
Corrie was horrified that her sister wanted her to thank God even for the fleas, but her sister insisted. Later, it turned out these vermin were a kind of protective army for the prisoners—the guards didn’t want to come into the infested barracks, and so the prisoners were allowed to continue the prayer and scripture readings that kept them from despair.
I also remember reading an account of Corrie Ten Boom, many decades later, meeting one of the very guards who imprisoned and tortured her family, and how she took his hand and forgave him.
The flea story very often comes to mind, and I use it as shorthand for when I’m stymied by something in my life and I can’t think of any way to deal with it rationally. So I just go, “Okay, God, thanks for the fleas, I guess.”
I can’t really relate to Ten Booms’ heroic level of trust in God’s goodness, and in fact I tend to crumble under some extremely light burdens. I don’t think I’d be one of the ones organizing prayer sessions in a prison barracks.
But I understand the general concept of what they were doing. I can break off a little piece of this story for myself and carry it around for when things get hairy, by my standards.
As for the other story, the story of supernatural forgiveness of a sadistic murderer—I remember it, but it goes way over my head. It’s something beyond my experience and beyond my imagination, and all I can do is stand in my low place and behold it, like a fiery sign in the sky.
But they are both part of the account of how the Ten Booms lived, and how they died; and the entire book is hitting me very different, this time around. The parts that are standing out to me are not so much the brilliant acts of holy heroism by this family, or even the more relatable inspiring examples they set. Instead, I’m noting all the little things that got them there.
The book doesn’t begin in the concentration camp….Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly.
Image: A group of German Wehrmacht soldiers in a village via Picryl (Public Domain)
