Corrie Ten Boom - Harboring Refugees

Harboring Refugees

In May 1942, a well-dressed woman came to the ten Boom door with a suitcase in hand. She told the ten Booms that she was a Jew and that her husband had been arrested several months before, and her son had gone into hiding. As Occupation authorities had recently visited her, she was afraid to return home. Having heard that the ten Booms had helped their Jewish neighbors, the Weils, she asked if she might stay with the family. Corrie ten Boom's father readily agreed. A devoted reader of the Old Testament, Casper ten Boom believed Jews are the chosen. He told the woman, "In this household, God's people are always welcome."

Thus the ten Booms began "the hiding place", or "de schuilplaats", as it was known in Dutch (also known as "de Béjé", pronounced in Dutch as 'bayay', an abbreviation of the name of the street the house was in, the Barteljorisstraat). Corrie and sister Betsie began taking in refugees, some of whom were Jews, others members of the resistance movement who were sought by the Gestapo and its Dutch counterpart. While they had extra rooms in the house, food was scarce for everyone due to wartime shortages. Every non-Jewish Dutch person had received a ration card which was required to obtain weekly coupons to buy food.

Thanks to her charitable work, Corrie knew many people in Haarlem, and remembered a couple who had a disabled daughter. For about twenty years, Corrie had run a special church service program for such children. The father was a civil servant who by then was in charge of the local ration-card office. She went to his house one evening, and he seemed to know why. When he asked how many ration cards she needed, "I opened my mouth to say, 'Five,'" Ten Boom wrote in The Hiding Place. "But the number that unexpectedly and astonishingly came out instead was: 'One hundred.'" He gave them to her, and she provided them to every Jew that she met.