I Wondered What Sort of a Person She Was

Near the end of her 1971 biographical book, The Hiding Place, Corrie ten Boom describes her time in the Ravensbrück concentration camp (northeast Germany, at the red bubble in the map below) with her sister Betsie, who was growing physically weaker by the day, though her Christian faith seemed to only grow stronger. Though Betsie was now spared heavy outdoor labor, she still had to stand the twice-daily roll call. As December temperatures fell, the roll calls became true endurance tests and many did not survive. One dark morning when ice was forming a halo around each street lamp, a feeble-minded girl two rows ahead of us suddenly soiled herself. A guard rushed at her, swinging her thick leather crop while the girls shrieked in pain and terror. It was always more terrible when one of these innocent ones was beaten. Still the Aufseherin continued to whip her. It was the guard we had nicknamed “The Snake” because of the shiny dress she wore. I could see it now beneath her long wool cape, glittering in the light of the lamp as she raised her arm. I was grateful when the screaming girl at last lay still on the cinder street. “Betsie,” I whispered when The Snake was far enough away, “what can we do for these people? Afterward I mean. Can’t we make a home for them and care for them and love them?” “Corrie, I pray every day that we will be allowed to do this! To show them that love is greater!” And it wasn’t until I was gathering twigs later in the morning that I realized that I had been thinking of the feeble-minded, and Betsie of their persecutors. (ch. 14)I read this passage aloud to my daughter last night, and I paused for several seconds at the comma of that last line, because I saw the next five words and they slapped me across the face. I should have been expecting it. Throughout the last several chapters of Corrie’s book, describing her time in Nazi prisons with Betsie, Corrie has consistently represented herself as the less pious of the ten Boom sisters, the more selfish one, weaker in faith. Betsie ten Boom was ever selfless, the embodiment of Christ. Thanks for reading Gallagher! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.(Is this how it really was? Was Betsie really so much more Christ-like than Corrie? Or is this Corrie’s own piety on display, self-deprecatingly representing her older sister—long deceased by the time this book was published—as always more saintly? Who knows? But it is certainly a selfless thing to do to represent yourself as more selfish than another.) Corrie’s idea laid out in the excerpt above is itself noble and a lofty example for Christians: to create a residence for people with cognitive challenges, especially those who had suffered under the Nazis. Corrie displays the wonderful impulse to bless victims of abuse. Betsie’s idea is something else. It is more noble, more selfless, even than Corrie’s idea. I don’t know whether Corrie ever created a residence for abuse victims [update (12 Feb 26): she did, as described in the last chapter of The Hiding Place], but I know that Betsie did not; she died at Ravensbrück. Her death is recounted at the end of the same chapter that includes the passage quoted above.I know that some people today, reflecting on the events that happened at Ravensbrück and similar camps, would say that Betsie’s idea was, perhaps, a sweet thought but impractical and even dangerous. Abusers should not get more sympathy and more help than their victims. I agree with this, I think. Betsie’s idea is impractical and dangerous and abusers should not receive more sympathy than their victims. It is a dangerous idea in part because help extended to abusers often enables further abuse. There are too many examples that have come to light in recent years for me to need to demonstrate it here. Betsie’s idea is impractical because in many cases violent abusers don’t want to be helped, they don’t want to learn, in Betsie’s words, “that love is greater.” Abuse victims often will accept help, and I know of houses set up specifically for them to get back on their feet and learn life skills and maybe encounter Jesus. I suppose there are similar houses for convicted criminals. The security concerns must be intense, both for fellow residents and for neighbors.In any case, from a Christian perspective (and, no doubt, other perspectives), Betsie’s instincts are right, that the abusers are worse off than the victims. Betsie had developed the eyes of God, who “seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart.” Betsie saw The Snake’s heart, that it was sick and twisted, that it was causing her misery. Betsie understood the truth of Augustine’s prayer, that “our heart is restless until it comes to rest in you,” and Betsie perceived that The Snake and her fellow guards were the most desperate for that rest. What Betsie did was to pray, frequently, for her persecutors. There are ways in which helping perpetrators of abuse is dangerous and impractical, but prayer is never dangerous or impractical. While one who sought to create some sort of halfway house for former Nazis would need to mirror their love with truckloads of wisdom, lest disaster ensue, prayer avoids these problems, trusting in God the all-wise to do what is best. Moreover, Corrie comes to understand that when standing before God she cannot claim moral superiority to her captors. Immediately after relating the story quoted above, Corrie tells of her own increasing selfishness (as she calls it), wanting to hoard extra supplies for her sick sister, not wanting to share a blanket with a fellow prisoner. And even if it wasn’t right—it wasn’t so very wrong, was it? Not wrong like sadism and murder and the other monstrous evils we saw in Ravensbrück every day. Oh, this was the great ploy of Satan in that kingdom of his: to display such blatant evil that one could almost believe one’s own secret sins didn’t matter. (ch. 14)Yes, victims should receive more help than abusers, but not because abusers don’t deserve help. If we’re talking about what we deserve, Corrie comes to recognize that, unfortunately, we are not so dissimilar from one another, whether we end up as a victim or a perpetrator. As a further example, read about the life of Irma Grese, the “Beast of Belsen,” and ask yourself what you would have done in her shoes. Just as Peter Bailey felt sorry for his nemesis Henry F. Potter (and “nemesis” is my word, not Peter Bailey’s), so Betsie felt sorrow for her prison guards, who were ignorantly hurting themselves and wandering so far from Christ, the only place of rest. As I said, I should have expected as much from Betsie, because it’s not the first time Corrie mentions this characteristic of her sister. Earlier, when Corrie and Betsie arrived at a prison at Vught in the Netherlands in June 1944, Corrie became frustrated with the length of their confinement, having lasted months by now.“Betsie!” I wailed, “how long will it take?”“Perhaps a long, long time. Perhaps many years. But what better way could there be to spend our lives?”I turned to stare at her. “Whatever are you talking about?”“These young women. That girl back at the bunkers. Corrie, if people can be taught to hate, they can be taught to love! We must find the way, you and I, no matter how long it takes….”She went on, almost forgetting in her excitement to keep her voice to a whisper, while I slowly took in the fact that she was talking about our guards. I glanced at the matron seated at the desk ahead of us. I saw a gray uniform and visored hat; Betsie saw a wounded human being.And I wondered, not for the first time, what sort of a person she was, this sister of mine … what kind of road she followed while I trudged beside her on the all-too-solid earth. (ch. 12)“I wondered … what sort of a person she was”—have you encountered such people, ones who display the character of Christ so clearly that you cannot look straight at them but must squint, or hide your eyes? In fact, Betsie had learned this way of being from her father; earlier in the book (ch. 5), Corrie told a similar story about Casper ten Boom, fully trusting in God’s justice and feeling pity for the German soldiers. Of course, Betsie’s attitude reminds us of Christ, hanging on the cross. “Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” Yes, I know about the textual difficulty for this prayer from the cross. The new textual commentary by Houghton indicates, by the way, that the forthcoming UBS6 Greek New Testament has downgraded the confidence in the unoriginality of the passage, from A to B. For a helpful argument that the prayer is original to the Third Gospel, see Ehrman.Even without Luke 23:34, we still have Matthew 5:44, and we still need examples of people, like Stephen in Acts 7, praying for their enemies. I’m grateful that Betsie ten Boom supplies such an example. Betsie saw in her prison guards, including the one nicknamed The Snake, a remnant of humanity, something worthy of love. More than that, she perceived that if she had any hope of calling on God to extend mercy to her, that she ought to extend mercy to others, to those who most needed it. Betsie understood that she could take greater joy in the grace of God the more she imitated it. “Betsie saw a wounded human being”—of course, Betsie was right. Even The Snake, try as she might, had not managed to rid herself of all human feeling, as the same chapter goes on to demonstrate. But I’ll let you, dear reader, discover that episode for yourself. Thanks for reading Gallagher! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit edmongallagher.substack.com