![]() “Those who were able to forgive their former enemies were able also to return to the outside world and rebuild their lives, no matter what the physical scars. Since the end of the war, Corrie had started a home in Holland for victims of Nazi brutality. ‘If you do not forgive men their trespasses,’ Jesus says, ‘neither will your Father in heaven forgive your trespasses.'” The message that God forgives has a prior condition: that we forgive those who have injured us. “It could not have been many seconds that he stood there, hand held out, but to me, it seemed hours as I wrestled with the most difficult thing I had ever had to do. Betsie had died in that place–could he erase her slow terrible death simply for the asking?” she added. “I stood there–I whose sins had every day to be forgiven–and could not. Fräulein’–again the hand came out–’will you forgive me?’ ![]() I know that God has forgiven me for the cruel things I did there, but I would like to hear it from your lips as well. ‘But since that time,’ he went on, ‘I have become a Christian. ‘I was a guard in there.’ No, he did not remember me. “‘You mentioned Ravensbrück in your talk,’ he was saying. It was the first time since my release that I had been face to face with one of my captors and my blood seemed to freeze,” she said. “I remembered him and the leather crop swinging from his belt. “Betsie and I had been arrested for concealing Jews in our home during the Nazi occupation of Holland this man had been a guard at Ravensbrück concentration camp where we were sent.”Ĭorrie recalled her shock when a previous captor approached her and asked for her forgiveness. Betsie, how thin you were!” she continued. I could see my sister’s frail form ahead of me, ribs sharp beneath the parchment skin. “It came back with a rush: the huge room with its harsh overhead lights, the pathetic pile of dresses and shoes in the center of the floor, the shame of walking naked past this man. One moment I saw the overcoat and the brown hat the next, a blue uniform and a visored cap with its skull and crossbones. “And that’s when I saw him, working his way forward against the others. People stood up in silence, in silence collected their wraps, in silence left the room,” she explained. There were never questions after a talk in Germany in 1947. “The solemn faces stared back at me, not quite daring to believe. Maybe because the sea is never far from a Hollander’s mind, I liked to think that that’s where forgiven sins were thrown,” she continued, adding: “‘When we confess our sins,’ I said, ‘God casts them into the deepest ocean, gone forever.'”Ĭorrie remembered that her audiences, often groups of German, left her talks in silence. “It was the truth they needed most to hear in that bitter, bombed-out land, and I gave them my favorite mental picture. “It was 1947 and I had come from Holland to defeated Germany with the message that God forgives. People were filing out of the basement room where I had just spoken, moving along the rows of wooden chairs to the door at the rear,” she wrote. “It was in a church in Munich that I saw him, a balding heavyset man in a gray overcoat, a brown felt hat clutched between his hands. In an article from 1972, Corrie recalled how she came face to face with one of the concentration camp guards where her sister died. ![]() Her story is also portrayed in the Movieguide® Award-winning movie RETURN TO THE HIDING PLACE. ![]() The Dutch Christian worked as a watchmaker with her father Casper ten Boom and would work with her sister Betsie ten Boom and other family members to help Jews escape Nazi persecution during the Holocaust in World War II.Ĭorrie would later chronicle parts of her experience in the famous book, “The Hiding Place.”Īlthough bravery, sacrifice and unshakable faith in God marked Corrie’s life, perhaps most astonishing was her ability to forgive. What Happened When a Former Nazi Guard Asked Holocaust Hero Corrie ten Boom for ForgivenessĬornelia Arnolda Johanna “Corrie” ten Boom is a treasured example of the power of forgiveness in the face of unspeakable evil. Published: AugScreenshot from Museum of the Bible YouTube
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