Corrie ten Boom and the Guard

Her article opens in the basement room where she had just spoken. No one asked questions after a talk in Germany that year, she writes, and her hearers left in silence.

Then a man worked his way forward against the crowd, "a balding heavyset man in a gray overcoat, a brown felt hat clutched between his hands". In her memory she saw him in a blue uniform and a cap with a skull and crossbones. She remembered the room where the women prisoners were made to walk naked past him, and Betsie's thin form ahead of her in the line.

She remembered the leather crop that had swung from his belt, and she saw that he did not remember her among so many thousands of women.

He told her that he had been a guard at Ravensbrück and had since become a Christian. He knew that God had forgiven him "for the cruel things I did there", he said, and he wanted to hear it from her lips as well. Then he held out his hand and asked, "will you forgive me?"

She could not take his hand. She asked herself whether he could erase Betsie's "slow terrible death simply for the asking". She writes that he can only have stood there a few seconds, and that to her it seemed hours.

She knew, in her words, that "forgiveness is not an emotion", and she prayed in silence for Jesus to help her. She told Him she could lift her hand and asked Him to "supply the feeling". She put her hand into his woodenly, and she writes that a healing warmth then flooded her. She cried, "I forgive you, brother!"

The magazine's reprint, from which her words here are quoted, carries a note that dates the story to its own issue and names her as the author of The Hiding Place. PBS, on its site for the series The Question of God, prints the text under the title "I'm Still Learning to Forgive". It calls the text an excerpt from her autobiography of 1971, written with John and Elizabeth Sherrill.

The text gives its own date. It speaks of what she had learned "at 80 years of age", it recalls a hurt from "some 15 years ago", and it tells of a visit "in 1970". She died on her ninety-first birthday, by the museum's record, so she turned eighty in the spring of 1972.

A text that reaches her eightieth year was written after the book of 1971 appeared, so the PBS attribution cannot hold for all of it. Whether The Hiding Place tells the meeting as well, and in what words, is shown by neither the article nor the PBS page.

By the museum's history, the house above the shop passed from Willem ten Boom to his son Casper and then to Casper's daughter Corrie.

In the war the house became a refuge for Jews and for members of the Dutch underground. Some lived there in secret, and others stayed a few hours or days until another safe house could be found.

The museum estimates that the family and their fellow workers, whom it calls the BeJe group, saved about 800 Jews and other refugees, a figure that rests on the museum alone.

The raid was made by the Security Service of the Nazis, the Sicherheitsdienst, and it never found the people it was after. They were behind a false wall in Corrie's bedroom.

The sisters passed through Scheveningen prison and the camp at Vught on the way to Ravensbrück in Germany. Corrie's article adds only that they were arrested "for concealing Jews in our home".

Her article is the one source for the meeting. It gives a city and a year, and it gives no name for the guard or for the church and no day or month. What became of the guard after that evening is unknown.

Since the end of the war, she writes, she had kept a home in Holland for victims of Nazi brutality. Those who forgave their former enemies were able to rebuild their lives, and those who nursed their bitterness "remained invalids". It is one woman's observation of the people in her house.