The Hiding Place
(Corrie ten Boom)

Corrie ten Boom was born in 1892 in Holland.  She lived in Holland in an old house called Beje for most of her life, and she never married, as she suffered an experience which made her doubt love early on in her life.  She decided it was God’s will for her to be alone when she became a minister of His word, after her experience in Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust; she spent one year in Ravensbruck which was a camp responsible for the deaths of 95,000 women.  She used her experiences during this time to write her immensely well-known autobiography “The Hiding Place”.  The autobiography has been ranked with “The Diary of Anne Frank” and Elie Wiesel’s “Night” as one of the most influential pieces of Holocaust literature. 

Following publication of her story, Boom traveled around telling her story to people who were interested in her time in the concentration camp.  Boom’s sister, on her death bed, told Boom to get out and tell the world her remarkable story of survival.  The reason Holocaust literature is so popular is because the story told from the point of view of a person who was there is all truth, whereas a person who was not there can only tell a story based on rumors and hearsay.  Boom suffered several strokes in her later life and ended up dying, surrounded by friends, on her 91st birthday.