Skin On The Hands Of God

Skin On The Hands Of God

Only 25 percent of the Jews living in Holland survived the Holocaust.

GOD CHOSE to stop Hitler short of his “final solution” by using Gentile rescuers: human hands that hid, fed, and protected the Jews from the grisly Nazi onslaught. Two of those hands belonged to Corrie ten Boom. She later said she was simply “the skin on the hands of God.”

February 28, 1944, started like many other days in the ten Boom family watch shop in Nazi-occupied Haarlem, Holland. Corrie, the first woman watchmaker in Europe, was helping her father, Casper, repair watches, and her sister, Betsie, was doing housework in their home attached to the back of the watch shop. The machine-gun-armed gestapo that patrolled the streets was unaware of the six Jews hidden in a crawl space behind a bookcase in the ten Boom house.

Corrie wasn’t surprised when a stranger, under the pretense of showing her a broken watch, whispered that his family was also hiding Jews. His wife had just been arrested. Could she help? Believing that God called her to resist the evil embodied in the Third Reich, Corrie led a clandestine network of rescuers hiding Jews in Haarlem. By 1944 Jews still alive in Nazi-occupied countries had two choices: hide or die.

Corrie agreed to help the stranger, and then he left the shop.

During the night, sleep in the ten Boom house was shattered by a gestapo raid. That night Corrie, Betsie, Casper, and thirty-three other rescuers in their network were arrested, beaten, and charged with hiding Jews. But in spite of a two-day search, the gestapo never found the six people in the ten Boom’s hiding place.

Casper ten Boom, Corrie’s father, died in prison ten days after his arrest. Corrie and Betsie were transferred to the Ravensbruck death camp, where Betsie later died Christmas Day. The Jews behind Corrie’s bookcase were freed, hidden again, and ultimately survived the Holocaust.

In June 1945, four months after her release from Ravensbruck, Corrie forced herself to write a letter that pained her greatly. It was to the Dutch stranger who had asked for help that day in the shop and whom Corrie now realized had betrayed her family to the Nazis.

I heard that most probably you are the one who betrayed me. I went through ten months of concentration camp. My father died . . . and my sister died in prison.

The harm you planned was turned into good for me by God. I came nearer to Him. I have prayed for you, that the Lord may accept you if you will repent. I have forgiven you everything. God will also forgive you everything if you ask Him.

Rescuing dozens of Jews in Holland turned out to be the beginning of her life’s work. God led her first to forgive her betrayer, then sent her out at age fifty-four with a message to the postwar world.

She began in Haarlem, where Corrie established Christ-centered rehabilitation homes for people of all faiths scarred by the war.

Then she went to America, where her story of the Holocaust put a new face on the horror that many had managed to keep at arm’s length. In Corrie they saw their grandmothers, their mothers, themselves. Many searched their hearts: Would they have hidden Jews? Could they have survived concentration camps? Corrie’s message was: “My survival is not my personal miracle, but the reality of Jesus!”

Into Corrie’s seventies and eighties, God gave her opportunities to speak to thousands of people who turned to him through her message. Her aged hands, scarred from the concentration camp, wrote five best-selling books. Several strokes took away her ability to speak, but her books continued to minister. She died in 1983 at the age of ninety-one.

Reflection

If you had been living in Holland at the time of the Nazi takeover, would you have hidden Jews in your home? Why or why not? Who around you right now might be in need of protection or help?

Love your neighbor as yourself.

Matthew 22:39