This article is an excerpt from the Shortform summary of "The Hiding Place" by Corrie ten Boom. Shortform has the world's best summaries of books you should be reading.
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What are The Hiding Place quotes that best share the spirit of the book? How do the Corrie ten Boom quotes from The Hiding Place teach you about her outlook?
This list of The Hiding Place quotes shows how important religion was to Corrie ten Boom. Use this list of The Hiding Place quotes to deepen your understanding of the book.
The Hiding Place Quotes
This set of Corrie ten Boom quotes from The Hiding Place show her deep and unshakable faith. Each one of The Hiding Place quotes is followed by a part of the book that helps better explain the quote. Read 3 of the best The Hiding Place quotes below.
“No pit is so deep that God is not deeper still”
The inmates of Barracks 28 were from all the occupied countries of Europe—Belgium, France, Holland, Poland, Austria, the Soviet Union—and spoke a multitude of languages and dialects. The difficulty of communication, combined with the general misery of their conditions, exacerbated tensions among the prisoners and made quarrels a constant feature of camp life. But, gradually, the women learned to cooperate and share what few resources they had. They were all in it together.
Corrie and Betsie were assigned to a work detail in the Siemens factory, where they were forced to unload heavy metal plates from the railroad depot and transport them inside the factory. Their only meal during the grueling 11-hour workday was a boiled potato and thin soup. Once back in the barracks, prisoners would receive a small portion of turnip soup.
But the barracks became a spiritual sanctuary for the women living there. Corrie and Betsie led daily prayer sessions, giving their fellow prisoners the strength they needed to persevere through their ordeal. Corrie recalled the moving power of these barracks religious services, as women translated the Bible to each other across the Dutch, German, French, Polish, Russian, and Czech languages. The women were of all different Christian denominations, but they shared in the redeeming strength of God’s word.
“When He tells us to love our enemies He gives, along with the command, the love itself.”
One day in Munich, after a church service, Corrie encountered a man she didn’t expect to see: one of the former SS guards she had known at Ravensbruck. This presented Corrie with one of her hardest challenges yet. This man had caused her untold suffering. When he reached his hand out to Corrie, she struggled to accept it and found herself searching for the strength to forgive this man. And yet, she did—for Corrie had come to understand that the world hinged on God’s love and forgiveness. If God could see a way to salvation for this man, so could Corrie ten Boom.
“Today I know that such memories are the key not to the past, but to the future. I know that the experiences of our lives, when we let God use them, become the mysterious and perfect preparation for the work He will give us to do. ”
Corrie believed that God had given her certain experiences in life, as a concentration camp survivor, to prepare her for her true mission and purpose. Corrie first traveled to war-torn Germany, the home of her persecutors, to share the message of Christ the redeemer to a traumatized people. She helped people whose lives had been destroyed by war and hate find hope and meaning in the world.
Corrie knew that she could not keep her efforts to spread the word of Jesus Christ confined to Haarlem, or even to The Netherlands. She was compelled by Christian duty to take the message to all corners of the world. And for the next four decades until her death in 1983, this is precisely what she did.
Later, Corrie spearheaded the efforts to open a rehabilitation center in Germany—on the site of the former Darmstadt concentration camp. This was the ultimate fulfillment of Betsie’s dying dream at Ravensbruck, to transform a symbol of hatred and destruction into one of love and renewal.
Corrie ten Boom went on to travel the world as a renowned public speaker, visiting more than 60 countries in her lifetime. She went to far-flung and dangerous places, including Russia, China, Cuba, and other Communist-aligned countries. She saw scenes of dire poverty and oppression, just as she had witnessed in the concentration camps—but she also saw hope and love. In Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Europe, she shared her personal story and delivered her constant, unchanging message: that Jesus’s love was unconquerable. This is reflected in many of The Hiding Place quotes.
This list of The Hiding Place quotes shows how religion is a key part of Corrie ten Boom’s life and what got her through WW2. The Corrie ten Boom quotes from The Hiding Place demonstrate how she turned to faith when she faced adversity.
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Here's what you'll find in our full The Hiding Place summary :
- Why devout Christian Corrie ten Boom decided to stand up to the Nazi occupation
- How ten Boom and the Jewish neighbors she was hiding were caught
- How ten Boom survived the concentration camp and left with even stronger faith
