An excerpt from "The Hiding Place" by Corrie ten Boom

Thou art my hiding place; thou shalt preserve me from trouble; thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliverance.  (Psalm 32:7)

(At Ravensbruck- Barracks 8 - Quarantine Compound)

 

"It grew harder and harder, even within these four walls there was too much misery, too much pointless suffering, every day something else failed to make sense, something grew to heavy. "Will you carry this too, Lord Jesus?"

But as the rest of the world grew stranger one thing became increasingly clear. And that was the reason the two of us were here. Why others should suffer we were not shown. As for us, from marching until lights out, wherever we were not in ranks for roll call, our Bible was the center of an ever-widening circle of help and hope. Like waifs clustered around a blazing fire, we gathered about it, holding out our heart to its warmth and light. The blacker the night around us grew, the brighter and truer  and more beautiful burned the word of God.

"Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?...Nay, in all those things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us."

I would look about us as Betsie read, watching the light leap from face to face. More than conquerors...it was not a wish. It was a fact. We knew it, we experienced it minute by minute--poor, hated, hungry. We are more than conquerors. Not "we shall be."  We are! Life in Ravensbruck took place on two separate levels, mutually impossible. One, the observable, external life, grew every day more horrible. The other, the life we lived with God, grew daily better, truth upon truth, glory upon glory.

Sometimes I would slip the Bible from its little sack with hands that shook, so mysterious had it become to me. It was new; it had just been written. I marveled sometimes that the ink was dry. I had believed the Bible always, but reading it now had nothing to do with belief. It was simply a description of the way things were--of hell and heaven, of how men act and how God acts. I had read a thousand times the story of Jesus' arrest--how soldiers had slapped Him, laughed at Him, flogged Him. Now such happenings had faces and voices.

Fridays--the recurrent humiliation of medical inspection. The hospital corridor in which we waited was unheated, and a fall chill had settled in to the walls, Still we were forbidden, even to wrap ourselves in our own arms, but had to maintain our erect, hands-at-sides position as we filed slowly past a phalanx of grinning guards. How there could have been pleasure in the sight of these stick-thin legs and hunger-bloated stomachs I could not imagine. Sure there is no more wretched sight than the human body unloved and uncared for. Nor could I see the necessity for the complete undressing: when we finally reached the examination room a doctor looked down each throat, another--a dentist presumably--at our teeth, a third, in between each finger. And that was all. We trooped again down the long, cold corridor and picked up our X-marked dresses at the door.

But it was one of these mornings while we were waiting, shivering, in the corridor, that yet another page in the Bible leapt into life for me.

He hung naked on the cross.

I had not known--I had not thought ... the paintings, the carved crucifixes showed at the least a scrap of cloth. But this, I suddenly knew, was the respect and reverence of the artist. But oh--at the time itself, on that other Friday morning--there had been no reverence. No more than I saw in the faces around us now.

I leaned toward Betsie, ahead of me in the line. Her shoulder blades stood out sharp and thin beneath her blue-mottled skin.

'Betsie, they took HIS clothes too.'

Ahead of me I heard a little gasp. 'Oh Corrie. And I never thanked Him...' "


After weeks in Barracks 8 the women were moved to permanent quarters and the living conditions were no better, but Corrie and Betsie continued to minister hope to the women, an incredible and marvelous testimony of God's care and protection---His hiding place---in the midst of great trial.


"No pit is so deep that He is not deeper still; with Jesus even in our darkest moments, the best remains and the very best is yet to be.”  Corrie ten Boom


(Source: The Hiding Place, by Corrie ten Boom with John and Elizabeth Sherrill, page 194-196)