The Hiding Place
Corrie ten Boom, 1971
A Dutch watchmaker's family hides Jews in their Haarlem home, then faces the cost: a memoir of ordinary courage and stubborn faith. The voice is plain and warm, carrying you through fear and loss with a steady, stubborn hope.
Feels like hope. About death and nature.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you are drawn to quiet, first-person accounts of ordinary people acting under pressure. The steady Christian faith and wartime loss shape the account, so it may feel heavy if you want a purely secular or light memoir.
Why read it
It shows how ordinary people make costly choices under pressure, and what forgiveness looks like when it is hard-won.
A page from the book
Love doesn't disappear when it's blocked; it looks for a way through.
Do you know what hurts so very much? It’s love. Love is the strongest force in the world, and when it is blocked that means pain. There are two things we can do when this happens. We can kill that love so that it stops hurting. But then of course part of us dies, too. Or we can ask God to open up another route for that love to travel. Corrie ten Boom.Corrie ten Boom was in her late forties when the war began; afterward she travelled widely, speaking about forgiveness.
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Questions readers ask
- Is The Hiding Place for me?
- You may like it if you are drawn to quiet, first-person accounts of ordinary people acting under pressure. The steady Christian faith and wartime loss shape the account, so it may feel heavy if you want a purely secular or light memoir.
- What is The Hiding Place like?
- The voice is plain and warm, carrying you through fear and loss with a steady, stubborn hope. Feels like hope. About death and nature.
- What should I read after The Hiding Place?
- If you liked The Hiding Place, try Man's Search for Meaning (Viktor E. Frankl), Unbroken (Laura Hillenbrand) and Women Who Run with the Wolves (Clarissa Pinkola Estes).
A taste of the feed
The people who hold the world together are never the majority.
You may of course ask whether we really need to refer to “saints.” Wouldn’t it suffice just to refer to decent people? It is true that they form a minority. More than that, they always will remain a minority. And yet I see therein the very challenge to join the minority. For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best. So, let us be alert — alert in a twofold sense: Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.
Man's Search for Meaning · Viktor E. Frankl
The places that felt holier than any room with a roof.
Although I did not call her by that name then, my love for Wild Woman began when I was a little child. I was an aesthete rather than an athlete, and my only wish was to be an ecstatic wanderer. Rather than chairs and tables, I preferred the ground, trees, and caves, for in those places I felt I could lean against the cheek of God.
Women Who Run with the Wolves · Clarissa Pinkola Estes
The difference between being in the house and being present in it.
I reminded the men in the audience that being a father meant more than fathering a child; that even those of us who were physically present in the home are often emotionally absent; that precisely because many of us didn’t have fathers in the house we have to redouble our efforts to break the cycle; and that if we want to pass on high expectations to our children, we have to have higher expectations for ourselves.
The Audacity of Hope · Barack Obama
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