The Great Gabsy
...o eat while German had control over Holland, and ration cards were not issued to Jews. So Corrie would take the ration cards that were hidden and give them to Jews. After a year or so, Corrie and her family ran out of places to send Jews for hiding, so they were forced to keep 7 Jews in their own house. A fellow “member” of the “Dutch Underground” warned the ten Boom family that if their house was ever to be searched by soldiers and they had Jews in their house, they’d be in trouble. For families living in the country this wasn’t much of a problem, but the ten Boom house (the Beje), was located on the main street of the city and around the corner from the German headquarters! Since the Beje also served as a pretty famous watch store, this could also be a problem because random people could come in during open store hours. To fix this problem, a man offered to build a “secret room” located somewhere in the Beje. This room is where the Jews would hide if the Beje had been broken in and searched through by the Germans. The man had built the “secret room” into the back of Corrie’s personal bedroom. When he was done, it was completely unnoticeable to the naked eye that there was a hidden room behind her bedroom wall. For months, the 7 Jews (Eusie, Jop, Henk, Leendert, Meta, Thea, and Mary) just slept in it. On February 28th, 1944, the “Secret room” got its first and only time to actually hide the 7 Jews in the ten Boom household. It seemed, somehow, someone had leaked information that the Beje and the ten Boom family was the center of the “Dutch Underground.” The morning of the 28th of February, the Beje was taken under siege by the German Gestapo (police). Corrie, Betsie, Nollie, Willem, Casper, and 20 some-odd others were taken into captivity. After the raid of the Beje, Corrie and most of her family were placed into a jail in Scheveningen, Holland. After several weeks inside her own personal jail cell, Corrie found out that her older sister Nollie had been released, her nephew Peter was released, her older brother Willem was released, and her father was what she called, released to heaven. Casper ten Boom died after 10 days in jail; he was in his 80’s. Corrie and Betsie were the only Ten Boom’s left in prison, and after an evacuation of the prisoners of Scheveningen, all the prisoners were taken to Vught, a Nazi concentration camp (still in Holland). After weeks in Vught, they were sent to Germany to “Ravensbruck,” a Nazi women’s extermination/concentration camp. Due to a accounting error, Corrie was released from Ravensbruck one week before all women her age were killed. Betsie had already died from sickness on December 16th, 1944. Corrie made her way back to Haarlem, and tried for a while to go back to her profession of watch making, but found that she was no longer content doing that. She began traveling and telling the story of her family and what she and Betsie had learned in the concentration camp. Eve...