A Bible Hidden Under a Dress

In September 1944, Corrie ten Boom and her sister Betsie arrived at Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany. They had been arrested for hiding Jewish families in their Haarlem home. They had lost everything — their father had already died in custody, their possessions were confiscated, and their freedom was gone.

And yet they carried something the guards never found.

During processing, Corrie smuggled a small Dutch Bible past the inspection line, hidden beneath her dress. In Barracks 28, crammed among hundreds of desperate women, the ten Boom sisters began holding nightly worship services under a single dim bulb. Women who spoke German, Polish, Russian, and French gathered close as passages were read and translated in whispers from one language to the next. The grace of God moved through that barracks like warmth through frozen hands.

Betsie, growing weaker each day, told her sister, "There is no pit so deep that God's love is not deeper still."

They lacked every earthly comfort. Yet they did not lack the one gift that mattered most: the faithful presence of Christ in their fellowship.

Paul wrote to the Corinthians that God "will keep you firm to the end" and that "God is faithful, who has called you into fellowship with His Son." Corrie ten Boom discovered this was no abstract theology. It was a Bible hidden under a dress, a hymn whispered in the dark, and a God who would not let go.