The Watchmaker's Daughter Who Found Hope in Ravensbrück

In 1944, Corrie ten Boom stood shivering in the delousing shower at Ravensbrück concentration camp, stripped of everything — her home in Haarlem, her watchmaking trade, her beloved father Casper, who had died ten days after their arrest for hiding Jewish families. She had every reason to despair.

Yet something unbreakable held. In the barracks where fleas infested every straw mattress, Corrie and her sister Betsie gathered women each evening to read from a smuggled Bible. The guards, repulsed by the fleas, never entered to stop them. Suffering was producing something — not bitterness, but perseverance. Night after night, Betsie whispered words that defied their circumstances: "There is no pit so deep that God's love is not deeper still."

When Betsie died that December, Corrie carried those words like a coal against her chest. Released weeks later through a clerical error — an error she would call providence — she spent the next thirty years traveling the world, telling anyone who would listen that hope born through suffering is hope that cannot disappoint.

Paul wrote to the Romans that we "glory in our sufferings, because suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope." Corrie ten Boom lived that chain link by link. The God who justified her by faith did not remove her suffering — He walked straight through it with her, forging an unshakable hope that no camp could contain.