About Corrie
Corrie ten Boom, perhaps best known for her book The Hiding Place and movie of the same name, was born in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, on April 15, 1892 and died in Placentia, California on April 15, 1983, at the age of ninety-one.
The youngest child of Casper and Cornelia ten Boom, she grew up in the city of Haarlem, where her father had a watch shop in the center of town. Corrie became a Christian at the age of five years, and loved and served the Lord Jesus from that time onwards. During World War II, Corrie, her elder sister, Betsie, and their elderly father received Jewish refugees in their home. They became part of an unofficial Dutch resistance movement and with other owners of Dutch “safe houses” they assisted in saving the lives of several hundred Jewish people until their arrest on February 28, 1944. Father ten Boom died shortly after his arrest, and Betsie and Corrie were taken to the concentration camp in Vught in the Netherlands, and later transferred to the concentration camp in Ravensbrück, deep in Germany, which Corrie described as “the deepest hell that man can create.”
Betsie died of starvation in Ravensbrück at Christmas, 1944. Shortly afterwards, Corrie was released, and, as soon as World War II ended, she began a global journey which was to take her to sixty-four countries in the next thirty-three years. She told as many people as would listen how she and Betsie, through their experiences, had learned in practice what they always knew in theory, that the love of God is stronger than the deepest darkness, that there is no pit so deep His love is not deeper still, and how, through the power of the Holy Spirit, it is possible to forgive our enemies from the heart. In her case she forgave those who had caused the deaths of Betsie, father Casper, brother Willem, and nephew Kik ten Boom. Countless Christians hold her as the example of faith they would like to have in their own lives.
She wrote twenty-one books, many of which are no longer in print.
This videoclip on Youtube will give you a short but wonderful introduction to Corrie:
The Weaver: an illustration Corrie often used
My Life is like a weaving
Between my Lord and me;
I cannot choose the colors
He worketh steadily.
Oft times He weaveth sorrow
And I, in foolish pride,
Forget He sees the upper,
And I the underside.
Not 'till the loom is silent
And the shuttles cease to fly,
Shall God unroll the canvas
And explain the reason why.
The dark threads are as needful
In the Weaver's skillful hand,
As the threads of gold and silver
In the pattern He has planned.
He knows, He loves, He cares,
Nothing this truth can dim.
He gives His very best to those
Who choose to walk with Him.