Betsie's Fleas

In Barracks 28 of Ravensbrück concentration camp, Betsie ten Boom knelt on a filthy straw mattress and thanked God for fleas. Her sister Corrie thought she had lost her mind. It was 1944. They had been arrested for hiding Jewish neighbors in their Haarlem watch shop. Now they slept shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of women in a lice-infested dormitory that reeked of decay.

But Betsie had noticed something. The guards refused to enter their barracks because of the fleas. That meant the women could gather freely, reading scripture aloud from a smuggled Bible, praying without fear of punishment. The very thing that made their suffering worse had become the shelter for their worship.

Betsie ten Boom lived the Beatitudes without ever preaching them. She was poor in spirit — utterly dependent on God in a place stripped of every comfort. She mourned with women who had lost everything. She showed mercy to guards who showed her none, once telling Corrie, "We must tell people what we have learned here. We must tell them that there is no pit so deep that He is not deeper still."

Betsie died in Ravensbrück just days before Corrie's release. She never saw liberation. Yet she had already found what Jesus promised on that Galilean hillside — a blessedness that no camp, no cruelty, no suffering could confiscate.