Have you ever forgiven someone who never asked for forgiveness? Corrie ten Boom lived out this question in the most extreme way possible, forgiving one of the guards responsible for her own sister’s suffering and death. Her life shows that Christian forgiveness is not born of feeling, but of a decision renewed every day.
Born on April 15, 1892, in Haarlem, the Netherlands, Corrie grew up in her father’s watch shop, in a Reformed family devoted to prayer and hospitality. In 1922, she became the first licensed woman watchmaker in the country.
With the Nazi occupation, an architect from the resistance built, in 1943, a secret hiding place behind Corrie’s bedroom in the family’s home in Haarlem. There, Jews and resistance members were sheltered from German raids; it is estimated that the network connected to the ten Booms helped save about 800 people.
On February 28, 1944, informants betrayed the family to the Gestapo. Casper died at The Hague Municipal Hospital ten days later, at the age of 84, after days of imprisonment in Scheveningen. Corrie and her sister Betsie were sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where they read together from a smuggled Bible at nightfall.
Betsie died on December 16, 1944. Corrie was released twelve days later, due to an administrative error: she later learned that, just days after her release, all prisoners her age were executed.
After the war, Corrie opened a rehabilitation home in Bloemendaal, first for concentration camp survivors and then for Dutch people who had collaborated with the Germans during the occupation. There she lived out in practice what she would go on to preach around the world: forgiving does not erase the evil suffered, but it frees a person from carrying it. She herself acknowledged, in her writings, how much that decision cost her: forgiving the Ravensbrück guard was, in her words, the hardest thing she ever had to do, requiring her to overcome her own will to refuse the outstretched hand.
In 1946, she returned to Germany and encountered former Ravensbrück guards, among them one who publicly asked her for forgiveness after a service. She later wrote that forgiveness is an act of the will, not an emotion, and that the ability to forgive comes from God, not from one’s own willpower.
In the following decades, she traveled to more than sixty countries as a preacher and writer, publishing The Hiding Place in 1971. Recognized by Yad Vashem in 1967 as Righteous Among the Nations, she died on April 15, 1983, on her 91st birthday, in Placentia, California.
