50 Fun Facts About Corrie Ten Boom

Corrie ten Boom was the Netherlands' first woman licensed in which trade, her father Casper's craft?

Watchmaking became Corrie's trade after she took over the shop's bookkeeping while her sister Betsie was ill. She found she loved the business side and never gave the job back.

Corrie ten Boom died in 1983 on which day, which Jewish tradition reserves for the specially blessed?

Her own birthday, 15 April, was the day Corrie ten Boom died, exactly 91 years after she was born a month premature. She had outlived her brother and both sisters by decades.

What freed Corrie ten Boom from a Nazi camp in 1944, twelve days after her sister died there?

A clerical error set Corrie ten Boom free, as she learned only afterwards. She was told that the other women of her age in the camp were sent to the gas chambers soon after she left.

Behind a false wall in which room of the ten Boom house was the secret hiding place built?

Corrie's bedroom, up a steep staircase, concealed the narrow space, which was built to hold six people and had its own ventilation. Everyone in hiding practised racing up to it.

Which pests in Corrie and Betsie ten Boom's camp barracks kept guards away from their Bible meetings?

Fleas infested the barracks so badly that the guards kept their distance, as the sisters later found out. Betsie had insisted on thanking God even for them when Corrie complained.

What disrupted the 1975 Beverly Hills premiere of The Hiding Place, the film of Corrie ten Boom's memoir?

A tear-gas canister marked with a swastika was thrown into the theatre, forcing the crowd out. Corrie ten Boom said that evening that people who hate need to be loved, and the film opened the next night.

Corrie ten Boom meant to ask an official for five of what, then heard herself request one hundred?

Ration cards went only to non-Jewish Dutch citizens, so people in hiding had no way to get food coupons. The official, who ran the local card office, handed over all hundred.

Which Nazi camp for women, north of Berlin, held Corrie ten Boom and killed her sister Betsie?

Ravensbrück received the sisters in September 1944, after months in a Dutch prison and a Dutch camp. Betsie died there that December, aged 59, and Corrie walked out days later.

In which Dutch city, the capital of North Holland, did Corrie ten Boom's family keep its shop?

Haarlem had been home to the ten Boom shop since Corrie's grandfather opened it in 1837. He started the business with 100 old Dutch guilders.

What alarm did the Dutch resistance fit in Corrie ten Boom's house to send people rushing to the secret room?

A buzzer could be heard all through the house, warning of security sweeps in the neighbourhood. The resistance sent an architect to design both it and the secret room.

Which American evangelist's film company, World Wide Pictures, made the 1975 movie of Corrie ten Boom's memoir?

Billy Graham also wrote the preface to the memoir, and The Hiding Place became the most widely seen picture his studio ever produced.

Roughly how many Jews and other refugees are Corrie ten Boom's family and their helpers credited with saving?

About 800 lives is the usual estimate for the whole network, which passed most people on to other safe houses. Only five or six lived in the ten Boom home at any one time.

What has Corrie ten Boom's old family home been since 1988, five years after her death?

A museum now fills the house, where three generations of the family lived from 1837 to 1945. Visitors can look into the secret room itself.

At 85, Corrie ten Boom left the Netherlands for which American state, where she spent her final years?

California became her home in 1977, when she settled in the town of Placentia after some thirty years of almost constant travel as a speaker.

Corrie ten Boom's family church, where her brother Willem was a minister, followed which reformer's teaching?

John Calvin's teaching shaped the Dutch Reformed Church, and the ten Booms took from their faith that the Jews were precious to God and all people equal. They shared food, money and shelter.

In which German city did Corrie ten Boom shake the hand of a former camp guard after a 1947 talk on forgiveness?

Munich was where the man came up to her in a church basement and asked to be forgiven. She wrote that she could not feel it, and simply made herself lift her hand.

How was Corrie ten Boom held for her first months in a Dutch prison after the 1944 raid on her home?

In solitary confinement she waited three months for her first hearing. Betsie was being held in another cell of the same prison.

Which Jerusalem institution named Corrie ten Boom Righteous Among the Nations in December 1967?

Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, honoured Corrie first and added her father Casper and sister Betsie decades later. The title goes to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews.

What silenced Corrie ten Boom in 1978, ending three decades of public speaking around the world?

A stroke took her speech in 1978 and a second left her paralysed. She lived five more years, cared for at home by a companion who later wrote a book about that quiet time.

Honoured in Jerusalem in 1967 for saving Jews, what did Corrie ten Boom do in the Garden of the Righteous?

Corrie planted a tree in the garden as part of the ceremony, fourteen years after a visa first took her to Israel. Her father and sister received the same honour decades later.

In which war-torn country did Corrie ten Boom, aged 75, earn the nickname Double-old Grandmother?

Vietnam is where she turned 75 while working with the relief agency World Vision. Her passports over the years list her job as sanatorium director, then authoress, then evangelist.

What kind of site in Darmstadt, Germany, did Corrie ten Boom rent in 1949 as a refuge for displaced people?

A former Nazi camp, once used as a concentration camp, became her centre for war refugees, and she raised funds to keep it open until 1960. Betsie had pictured such a place before she died.

Which unlikely group did Corrie ten Boom's post-war home in the Netherlands shelter alongside camp survivors?

Dutch collaborators, left jobless after the liberation, were taken in at the rehabilitation home she set up. The idea came from her late sister Betsie.

Which Dutch prison near The Hague, nicknamed the Oranjehotel, first held Corrie ten Boom after her arrest?

Scheveningen earned its wartime nickname because so many of its prisoners were loyal to the House of Orange. Corrie's father Casper died ten days after being brought in.

At the Vught camp in the Netherlands, Corrie ten Boom was put to work in a factory making what?

Aircraft radios were assembled by prisoners at Vught, and Corrie found the work light under a kindly prisoner-foreman. Betsie, already ailing, was set to sewing prison uniforms.

Corrie ten Boom's brother Willem earned a doctorate at Leipzig in 1928 with a thesis on which rising danger?

Racial antisemitism was already spreading in Germany and France when Willem studied it. He later ran a nursing home in Hilversum that took in Jews fleeing Nazi Germany.

Corrie ten Boom's nephew Kik, a resistance worker, died in which Nazi camp where Anne Frank also perished?

Bergen-Belsen claimed Kik, whose real name was Christiaan, after his arrest for underground work. The family did not learn what had become of him until 1953.

What did Corrie ten Boom's grandfather begin in 1844 that her family kept up in the same house for a century?

Prayers for the Jews and for the peace of Jerusalem began as a small group, an unusual idea among Christians of the day. Three generations of the family kept it going.

Corrie ten Boom's memoir The Hiding Place opens with a crowded party celebrating which family milestone?

The shop's centenary brought half the town to the house in 1937. Among the guests was a Jewish man just escaped from Germany, whose beard had been burned off by thugs.

In The Hiding Place, how did Corrie ten Boom's romance with Karel, the only man she loved, end?

He married a rich woman, and Corrie never wed. She and her elder sister Betsie stayed on in the family home with their father for the rest of his life.

The title of Corrie ten Boom's memoir The Hiding Place echoes a verse from which book of the Bible?

Psalms supplies the phrase, in a verse of Psalm 119 that calls God a hiding place and a shield. The title points just as much to the real secret room.

Which American husband-and-wife team co-wrote the 1971 memoir The Hiding Place with Corrie ten Boom?

John and Elizabeth Sherrill first heard about her while researching another book, whose subject kept telling stories of his old travelling companion. She was then in her mid-seventies.

Which Dutch Bible smuggler's stories about his travelling companion led to Corrie ten Boom's memoir?

Brother Andrew, born Andrew van der Bijl, was the subject of God's Smuggler, the book its authors were researching when his tales about Corrie caught their attention.

Which actress earned a Golden Globe nomination for playing Corrie ten Boom in the 1975 film The Hiding Place?

Jeannette Clift, a stage actress from Houston, was nominated as New Star of the Year for the role. She had founded her own theatre company, the A.D. Players, in 1967.

Which five-time Tony Award winner played Betsie ten Boom in the 1975 film The Hiding Place?

Julie Harris had won four of her five Tonys when she took the part, and earned the fifth two years later for playing Emily Dickinson on Broadway.

Which Corrie ten Boom book, written with Jamie Buckingham, tells short stories from her travels as an evangelist?

Tramp for the Lord takes its chapters from Africa, Asia and the Americas, and from countries as hard to enter as Cuba and the Soviet Union. She visited more than sixty in all.

Which Corrie ten Boom memoir, published in 1976, covers her family's life in the years before The Hiding Place?

In My Father's House carries the subtitle The Years Before the Hiding Place and recalls her childhood above the shop. It appeared a year after the film of her wartime story.

Jans, Bep and Anna, three women who shared Corrie ten Boom's crowded childhood home, were her what?

Maternal aunts all three, they were sisters of Corrie's mother, and the last of them, Anna, lived with the family until she died in 1925.

What did Corrie ten Boom found in the 1920s that the German occupiers banned after invading in 1940?

A girls' club was her project for teenagers, offering religious teaching alongside classes in sewing, handicrafts and the performing arts. Its Dutch name meant the Triangle Girls.

Whose children did Corrie ten Boom's family foster in the 1920s and 1930s while the parents worked overseas?

Missionaries serving abroad left their children with the ten Booms, who had also housed displaced German families after the First World War.

Whose worth did Corrie ten Boom defend at her 1944 hearing when a Nazi lieutenant scoffed at her work?

Mentally disabled people, she told him, might matter more in God's eyes than a skilled tradesman or a lieutenant. She had run church services for disabled children for twenty years.

Corrie ten Boom's father Casper grew so absorbed in his workbench repairs that he often forgot to do what?

Casper would forget to charge his customers, and it was Corrie, with her system of bills and ledgers, who finally made the shop turn a profit.

Offered freedom on account of his age, what did Corrie ten Boom's father Casper tell the Gestapo he would do?

Help anyone who asked was his plain answer, so the 84-year-old stayed in custody and died ten days after the arrest. After the war he was reburied in a national cemetery of honour.

What displayed in the ten Boom shop window told resistance callers it was safe to come into the house?

An Alpina sign, triangular and half hidden by the curtains, meant the coast was clear. Corrie used her work in the shop as cover for meeting resistance contacts.

Betsie ten Boom told her sister Corrie in their camp that both would be released before which date?

The New Year was the deadline in the last of three visions Betsie described. She died on 16 December 1944, and Corrie walked out of the camp before the month ended.

Corrie ten Boom was born small and a month early on which day of the Christian calendar in 1892?

Good Friday fell on 15 April in 1892. An uncle remarked that so frail a baby would not live long, and she went on to reach the age of 91.

Which lifelong blood disorder left Betsie ten Boom frail and led her to decide early never to marry?

Pernicious anemia had weakened her since birth, and she chose not to marry because she could not bear children. She kept house for the family while Corrie worked in the shop.

Who freed the six people in the ten Boom hiding place two days after the raid, despite a guard on the house?

Dutch policemen who belonged to a resistance group freed them after 47 hours. Four of the six were Jews and two were underground workers.

In 1952 Corrie ten Boom needed approval from the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers to visit which country?

Japan was in the last weeks of Allied occupation when her tourist visa was issued in April 1952. Her work was spreading beyond Europe, and a visa for Israel followed a year later.

Where did Corrie ten Boom come among the four children of Casper ten Boom who lived to adulthood?

The youngest, she was born seven years after Betsie, the eldest. A fifth child, Hendrik Jan, died as a baby in 1889.