The Day the Camps Were Opened

On April 15, 1945, British soldiers rolled through the gates of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. What they found defied description — thousands of unburied dead, tens of thousands more barely clinging to life. Among the survivors was a young Dutch woman named Corrie ten Boom, who had been transferred out weeks earlier to Ravensbruck, then released through what she later called a clerical error orchestrated by God. Her sister Betsie had not survived.

Years later, Corrie described the moment of liberation — not with triumph, but with a strange, aching incompleteness. Freedom had come, yet Betsie's bunk was still empty. The lice-infested barracks still haunted her dreams. Liberation was real, but it was not yet restoration.

This is why Revelation 21 matters so deeply. The Apostle John does not simply promise escape from suffering. He describes something far greater — the Almighty making His dwelling among His people, reaching out with tender hands to wipe every tear from their eyes. Not just freedom from the camp, but the end of everything that made the camp possible. No more death. No more mourning. No more pain. The old order of things, with all its cruelty and loss, passed away entirely.

Corrie spent her remaining decades telling audiences across the world that no pit is so deep that God's love is not deeper still. But the fullest answer to Bergen-Belsen is not a deeper love alone — it is a new creation, where every Betsie is restored and every tear is finally, personally, wiped away by the hand of God Himself.