Corrie ten Boom was a fifty-year-old Dutch watchmaker living with her elderly father and sister above their shop in Haarlem when the Nazis occupied the Netherlands. The ten Booms were devout Calvinists. When Jews began disappearing from their neighborhood, the family built a hidden room behind a false wall in Corrie's bedroom and began taking people in. Over two years, the ten Boom house sheltered an estimated 800 Jews and resistance members, moving them through safe houses across the country.
In February 1944, an informant betrayed them. The Gestapo raided the house. Corrie's father, Casper, was eighty-four. When an officer offered to release him if he promised to stop harboring Jews, the old man said: "If I go home today, tomorrow I will open my door again to anyone who knocks." He died ten days later in Scheveningen prison. Corrie and her sister Betsie were sent to Ravensbruck concentration camp. Betsie died there that December. Corrie survived, released due to a clerical error — one week before every woman her age in the camp was executed.
After the war, she spent the next thirty-three years traveling the world preaching forgiveness. In 1947, she came face to face with a former Ravensbruck guard at one of her speaking engagements. He extended his hand. She wrote later that her arm froze at her side, and she had to pray for the strength to reach out and take it.
She lost nearly everything to cruelty and spent the rest of her life insisting that cruelty does not get the last word. That is not naivete. That is the hardest thing a human being can do.
"Perhaps the reason the Universe gave you a broken world is so that you could have a chance to fix it."