Anne Frank
Anne Frank
This classic diary recounts the experiences of a Jewish girl hiding from the Nazis, sharing themes of hope and resilience.
The Hiding Place
by Corrie ten Boom, Elizabeth Sherrill, John Sherrill
Biographies
★☆☆☆☆1.0 (1)
A firsthand account of hiding Jews in occupied Haarlem and surviving Ravensbrück, told plainly and with an unusually direct faith that makes its forgiveness message hard to dismiss.
What It's About
The Hiding Place is a memoir of the years Corrie ten Boom spent in occupied Haarlem, where her family ran a watch repair shop and, from 1942, sheltered Jews and members of the resistance in a concealed room in their home. The book follows the family's growing involvement, the arrest that followed a betrayal, her imprisonment in a Dutch prison, and then her time at Ravensbrück, where her sister Betsie died. It was written with the help of Elizabeth and John Sherrill, and the result is a plain, forward-moving narrative rather than a reflective or analytical account.
Much of the book is small-scale and domestic: family routines, the practical problems of feeding and hiding people, the paperwork and petty cruelties of arrest and transport, and the grinding daily life inside the camp. The Christian faith running through it is explicit, and prayer and religious reflection are central to how the story is told, not decorative. Readers expecting a historian's survey of the occupation will get one family's view instead, with the wider political and military picture kept mostly in the background.
The experience is emotionally demanding but rarely lurid. The camp chapters are harrowing yet restrained, and the book is best read as a testimony of how one woman held on to faith under extreme pressure, and how her later message of forgiveness took shape.
Read this if you…
- want a firsthand view of daily life in the Dutch resistance and in a women's camp
- are open to a faith-centered memoir and want to see how belief shaped one survivor's choices
- want a readable, direct account of the Holocaust that focuses on individuals rather than statistics
Skip it if you…
- want a historian's analysis of the occupation, collaboration, or the wider war
- are looking for a secular account or find explicit Christian testimony off-putting throughout
Key Ideas
- 1
Ordinary people taking extraordinary risks
The family's decision to hide people is presented as a series of practical choices made by ordinary people with jobs, habits, and limits, not as heroism in the abstract. This makes the risk feel concrete. The reader sees how a watchmaker's household handled secrecy, rationing, and nerves day by day, which is often more gripping than the dramatic moments themselves.
- 2
Faith as a working tool under pressure
Prayer and trust in God are shown as practical resources that the family actually relied on, not as comfort added after the fact. The book asks readers to take this seriously even if they do not share the belief. Whether you find it moving or unconvincing will depend largely on how you respond to this thread, which runs through nearly every chapter.
- 3
The bond between Corrie and Betsie
Betsie, her sister, is the emotional center of the story. Their partnership in the work, and their shared endurance in the camp, give the later chapters their weight. Corrie's grief and the way she describes Betsie's steadiness and death shape the book's tone more than any single event does.
- 4
Forgiveness as a later, harder lesson
The war chapters are mostly about survival and endurance. The forgiveness theme, which made Corrie ten Boom widely known as a speaker afterward, comes more fully into focus near the end. Readers should expect the message to be developed as a personal reckoning rather than a neat argument, and to feel more earned for being approached that way.
Limitations
The book is shaped by the perspective of a devout evangelical Christian, and its providential framing can feel insistent to readers who do not share it. Because it was written with ghostwriters and reflects memory decades after the events, the voice and some details are filtered and cannot be checked line by line. The narrative focuses on one family and does not examine the broader history of the Dutch resistance or the Nazi occupation in depth. Its sentiment and pacing also reflect the conventions of its time, so some readers may find it more pious or less sharply analytical than modern Holocaust memoirs.
Questions Readers Ask
- Is The Hiding Place suitable for readers who are not religious?
- Yes, many readers without religious belief read it, but they should expect faith to be central rather than incidental. The events of the war and the camp are still vivid and accessible on their own terms. If you can read prayer and trust in God as part of the character's life, rather than a sales pitch, you will likely get the most out of it.
- How does it compare with Anne Frank's diary?
- Anne Frank's diary is a teenager's private record written while hiding, with no knowledge of its outcome. The Hiding Place is a retrospective adult memoir that covers the hiding, the arrest, and a long camp ordeal. It is more about organized resistance and survival in prison and camp, and it is written with a clear religious purpose, which Anne's diary does not share.
- Is the book still relevant today?
- Yes, it remains widely read as a firsthand account of the Dutch resistance and of women's experience in Ravensbrück. Its treatment of forgiveness is still discussed. Readers coming to it now should keep in mind its Christian framing and its mid-twentieth-century style, and may want to read a historical overview alongside it for context.
- Published
- 2006
- ISBN
- 9780800794057
- Difficulty
- beginner
- Category
- Biographies
Book details and cover from Google Books.
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