The Hiding Place

This chapter skips back in time to Corrie’s childhood in 1898, when her siblings, mother, and three of her aunts were still living in the Beje. Willem is the capable eldest child; Betsie is smart and kind, but has pernicious anemia, which limits her physical activity; and Nollie is confident and pretty. During their childhood, the family gathers around the breakfast table. Father reads Psalm 119, which mentions God as the psalmist’s hiding place: “‘Thou art my hiding place and my shield’” (23).

Corrie is six years old. It is her first day of school, and she is terrified. She resolves to stay home and help with the housework. When she announces her plan, the aunts are disapproving. Father jumps to her defense and offers to walk her to school personally. This lays a foundation for their growing relationship, built up over the years as she accompanies him to the naval observatory in Amsterdam every week. At the observatory, Father sets his timepiece and stops in and sees his clock-part suppliers, many of whom are Jewish individuals. He does business and talks about religion with them. “[T]hese,” Corrie writes, “were the visits we both liked best” (25).

On the train rides back and forth, Corrie and Father talk about life, family, and changes in the world. The chapter closes with young Corrie’s first encounter with death, on a visit to a neighbor’s house where a baby has just passed away. She is devastated by the idea of death, but Father responds with his characteristic gentle wisdom. He tells her that as he gives Corrie her train ticket just before she’ll need it, so too does God give strength: “When the time comes that some of us will have to die, you will look into your heart and find the strength you need—just in time” (29).

As Corrie becomes a teenager and enters early adulthood, major transformations shape her life. She falls in love with Karel, one of her brother Willem’s friends, an affection which develops from a teenage crush to a romance so serious that she expects a marriage proposal. Karel ends up getting engaged to someone else, convinced that his mother will not permit him to marry beneath his social station. Father comforts Corrie: “Love is the strongest force in the world, and when it is blocked that means pain. There are two things we can do when this happens. We can kill the love so that it stops hurting. […] Or, Corrie, we can ask God to open up another route for that love to travel” (44).

Corrie’s Aunt Bep passes away from tuberculosis, and then another aunt, Jans, is diagnosed with diabetes, which at that time was very difficult to treat. Jans continues writing and being active in social service, but her illness catches up with her. Tests show that she only has three weeks to live. The family reminds her of how much good she has done—good works which she can present to God in heaven. Jans’s response catches them by surprise. She proclaims the smallness of her own accomplishments and her gratitude for salvation through Jesus’s sacrificial death. This, to Corrie, fulfills Father’s earlier words on death: “I stood rooted to the spot, knowing that I had seen a mystery. It was Father’s train ticket, given at the moment itself” (40).

As Corrie’s family changes and the older generation begins to pass away, their faith allows Corrie to stand firm amid upheavals to their lives.

From Corrie’s early adulthood onward, major changes continue to impact the family. After World War I, from which Holland had largely been spared, Corrie’s mother has a stroke or cerebral hemorrhage. This leaves her with aphasia, without the ability to speak; she can only say “Yes,” “No,” and “Corrie.” At Nollie’s wedding, the mother is suddenly able to sing all the words to a hymn, something she was not able to do before or will do after: “It had been an isolated moment, a gift to us from God, His own very special wedding present” (50). Just a few weeks later, Corrie’s mother dies.

During the 1920s and 1930s, life at the Beje progresses as before, but with new roles. Corrie takes Betsie’s place working in the clock shop while Betsie looks after the house. They take in foster children, which they raise together with Father. Life runs smoothly until the late 1930s, when Germany’s political ambition begins to cast shadows over Holland. The family is untouched until they hire a young German clock smith named Otto, who turns out to be a member of the Hitler Youth, the Nazi’s youth organization. Otto callously disregards elders, assaulting another clock-mender before Father fires him. Willem tells Corrie that Otto’s attitude, so unthinkable to them, was becoming commonplace in Germany: “Germany is systematically teaching disrespect for old age. […] It is the old and the weak who are to be eliminated” (59).