The Watchmaker Who Hid the Chosen

Corrie ten Boom was born on 15 April 1892 in Haarlem, the youngest child of Casper ten Boom, a jeweller and watchmaker, and Cornelia 'Cor' Luitingh. The family lived above the watch shop in a narrow house on Barteljorisstraat that Corrie called 'the Beje.' She was named after her mother but known simply as Corrie all her life, and she grew up surrounded by her siblings Betsie, Willem, and Nollie, along with three maternal aunts who shared the household.

Corrie had not been destined for the shop counter. She spent her early years managing the housekeeping until an illness sent Betsie to bed and Corrie stepped in to run the watch business instead. She discovered a talent for its financial side, building a system of billings and ledgers, and never went back to housework. In 1922 she became the first woman licensed as a watchmaker in the Netherlands. She also ran a youth club for teenage girls, teaching religion alongside sewing and performing arts, all rooted in her family's Calvinist faith — a faith that held the Jews as precious to God and all people as equal.

When Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, the occupiers banned Corrie's youth club. Two years later, in May 1942, a well-dressed woman arrived at the Beje with a suitcase. She said she was Jewish; her husband had been arrested, her son was in hiding, and she feared returning home. She had heard the ten Booms once helped their Jewish neighbors, the Weils. Casper agreed at once to shelter her, despite the police headquarters standing only half a block away. Devoted to the Old Testament, he told her simply that in his household, God's people were always welcome.

From that moment, Corrie and Betsie opened their home to Jewish refugees and resistance members, drawing the attention of the Gestapo and its Dutch collaborators. Word of their work reached the Dutch Resistance, which sent an architect to build a hidden chamber behind a false wall in Corrie's bedroom. The space, big enough for six people, had its own ventilation system and an alert buzzer to warn occupants during police sweeps. They called it 'The Hiding Place.'

Space was not the problem — food was. Every non-Jewish Dutch citizen received a ration card for weekly coupons, but Jews in hiding had none. Through her charity work, Corrie knew a civil servant who ran the local ration office. Visiting him one evening, she meant to ask for five extra cards. Instead, she wrote later, the number that came out of her mouth was: 'One hundred.' He gave them to her, and she distributed cards to every Jew she could find.