Love in its very nature is miraculous, it is self sacrificing, love also unconditionally forgives, is always patient and kind, love does not discriminate and love knows no boundaries of race or religion.
Nothing is more intrinsic to survival than a mother’s love.
A bond that never breaks, even long after the seed is blossomed, it is never truly abandoned to the force of the wind.
Love is also a creative force and the seal of love in marriage and in family ensures life always continues to exist in this world.
Love also self propagates , love inspires other acts of love in return and breaks the power of evil in one blow and harmlessly.
Love is wisdom in of itself and nothing makes more sense than it or can defeat it.
Love is also characteristically powerful when it comes to defeating hate, as hate only comes with unforgivness and the very nature of love is forgiving.
One story of love and its power is that of Corrie Ten Boom.
Corrie Ten Boom was a watchmaker’s daughter in the time of Nazi Germany in world war two.
When the Nazis began their oppression of the Jews in Germany Corrie and her family began making preparations to build a secret room in their house as a refuge for the persecuted people.
She had previously worked with disabled and handicapped children which Hitler believed served no function and should be exterminated along with the Jews and the gypsy tribes.
In rebellion to the barbaric system of the new dictatorship Corrie Ten Boom worked secretly with resistance groups. One of these was a group of young men who stole German uniforms and kidnapped Jewish babies from orphanages where they were to be murdered. Corrie Ten Boom then helped to find each one a loving home amongst the community and guarded each child with her very life.
She and her family were Christians who sought God and demonstrated love in every area of their life.
Later she met one of the precious babies she saved at two weeks old and he was so touched by her peace and love he converted to Christianity when he was 40 years old and met her for the first time.
The Ten Boom’s successfully managed to hide many families but they were eventually caught by the Gestapo and put in prison where Corrie and her family faced being shot for the large number of people they had concealed.
As food was rationed they had needed to accumulate ration books in order to feed all the people they were hiding, and this had conspired against them along with the fact they were openly Christian and Christianity is based in Judaism in the Old Testament. They also had an almost open house and regularly entertained resistance fighters, Corrie Ten Boom and her family believed strongly in helping everyone they could and they did it with a generosity of spirit that radiated strongly in a callous dark world. Their light was certainly not kept under a bushel and it would be hard not to notice it.
The Nazis on becoming suspicious sent a spy to pretend he was a Jew in need of help. He met with Corrie Ten Boom and begging her help said he desperately needed a considerable sum of money to escape and to help other Jews to do the same.
The Nazis lay in wait as he returned to the Ten Boom residence that night, on the signal of him being received at the door and handed the money poor Corrie had set about scraping together all day, the Nazis ambushed, the slippery spy received the money Corrie had painstakingly collected to help him in the first place and kept it as payment for his complicity in the set up and he slunk off into the night with his ill gotten gains.
This very act served to convict her of conspiracy to help Jews.
They brutally tore the house apart looking for other Jews and 30 people were arrested. Many of them were German resistance fighters but they couldn’t find the special secret room which was behind a brick wall in Corrie Ten Boom’s room and was cleverly concealed.
4 Jews and 2 resistance workers were saved and remained unfound in the bricked up room within the apartment which still stands to this day and serves as a museum, but sadly Corrie and her sister were eventually sent to Ravensbruke concentration camp where 97,00 women died or were killed. Corrie Ten Boom would make sure they did not die quietly at Ravensbruke and be forgotten...
Her father died after 10 days in a hospital corridor as he was already a very old man and Corrie and her sister were beaten cruelly to extract details of other Jewish hideouts or fellow conspirators, they gave the Gestapo nothing which ended up resulting in her sister being so badly beaten it left her deaf for the rest of her short life.
On arriving at the camp, people were stripped naked and had their heads shaved. The Nazis used the human hair to sell to factories that made mattresses. Other grotesque ideas for the raw materials of human slaughter included the use of human bones to make sculptures, one included three human leg bones and a pelvis to substitute a chair and this was found in the attic of a Nazi leaders family home beside a lampshade made of human skin.
Corrie was horrified at the women who were starving and being beaten by their Nazi tormentors. and the shame of being naked was a terrible thing for her. Thankfully she was unaware of the horrors I just described or the fate that lay ahead for them both.
The dehumanisation began with having all their clothing taken and replaced with uniform rags and then there was the squalor and filthy conditions they were to live within.
While people starved to death of malnutrition the guards who were young men and women frolicked in the fields with picnics and cameras taking pictures, the photographs were found later in the camps by troops that came to liberate them and they were shocked to see how happy these guards looked and how normal looking young women could oversee such a sinister reality and not appear affected by it.
People were treated like cattle and it appears the dehumanisation of the victims aided their captors who became like butchers in a slaughter house with no feelings of compassion for their fellow human beings. The propaganda machine had worked and they thought the jews were beneath them and were akin to animals who had to be culled.
Betsy Ten Boom when amidst the suffering remained strong however and she remained firm in her beliefs and adamant there was a reason for everything and that God was still in control.
Camps were housing three times as many people as they had been built to house and there was horrendous overcrowding.
All they were given to eat was a watery soup and one thin papery piece of bread, as the malnutrition set in people were more prone to disease and the slightest virus or cold would sweep through the hundreds of tightly packed women and many simply died of the terrible conditions without the need of gas chambers.
They had managed to sneak a small bible into the camp and they used it to comfort the women and speak of God’s love and demonstrate their own.
Corrie explains her sister Betsy had been thankful to God even for the fleas as this ensured the Nazi guards would not enter the tightly packed prison room for fear of disease and the infestation. This in turn allowed her to give the women hope in her bible lessons. The Bible she was using was contraband and she would have had it taken from her and told to stop if the guards had ever caught her were they willing to come near.
Betsy and Corrie then made plans about when they were free how they would communicate to the world all they had seen and experienced in the camp with the women and how God {they believed } had sent them amongst the women to show and prove he cared and even in the darkest place he sent his love.
Betsy and Corrie continued to help the women overcome spiritually in their material agony and find comfort in the wonders that were confirmed to them.
Betsy was very tender with the young girls especially ones who had come into Ravensburke as gypsy prostitutes and were shunned by the others who thought them the lowest of the low.
Betsy would hug them when they were cold and lonely at night and care for them in a motherly way to ensure they were not utterly rejected by everybody in the whole world.
Tragically, just one week before Corrie Ten Boom was released her sister died of malnutrition and disease.
Corrie’s release was a catastrophic failure on the Nazis part as she was one determined individual who would go on to expose all their atrocities including those they did in the most secret places where they thought nobody would find out.
It was a blunder in paperwork that freed her and later she found out that every other person there had died in the gas chamber shortly after she had gone. The Nazis had killed everyone left in the camp but somehow she had miraculously escaped.
On leaving Ravensbruke Corrie went to the world with her stories of Christian love and charity in respect of her sister’s memory and touched many souls. The most remarkable part in all of this however was when Corrie was preaching on love one day in the free world after the war.
An elderly man approached her and thanked her for the words she had given, as she turned to look at who had been addressing her she recoiled in shock as she recognised the facial features of one of the tormentors who had viciously beaten her dead sister even when she had been ill in the concentration camp.
This aging man had said he was now a Christian and he had tracked her down to ask her forgiveness.
Corrie said she could not do it as this had been the cruellest of the prison Nazi guards who had shown no mercy at all to her own dear, sweet and kind sister. She had thought she could have forgiven him then had it only been her who had endured the cruelties of this man but to have seen her sister suffer too was too much to ask of her in her own strength.
He had played a heavy part in their misery and suffering perpetrating the most sadistic acts in an intimate and personal way.
Over agonising prolonged periods where they endured forced labour with no food this man had beaten, threatened and humiliated both of them on many occasions.
Tormented Corrie said she bowed her two knees and asked God to give her the strength to do it.
The next day she forgave the man verbally and as she did so she felt a weight come off from her shoulders spiritually and she was set free from the bitter hate that she had been carrying since the deaths of her father and sister. Corrie maintains the conversion to being able to forgive him as miraculous and freeing for everyone involved.
Now instead of being caught up in remembering and avenging the last moments of her sisters life she was free to remember the good memories of all the other years she had spent with her and was no longer in bondage to the monsters of her past.
In forgiving the man she had cut not only him free, but also herself and she no longer felt tied to the past or the need to get revenge.
Corrie demonstrated perfect love and in actively loving everyone she came into contact with.
Corrie had loved her dear sister and bore with her in her pain, she also demonstrated a love for God when she honoured her faith and most incredibly of all she was able even to love her enemies which in turn helped her to love herself and because of this she manifested all the more acts of love from the abundance within her soul.
Corrie Ten Boom went on to preach about forgiveness and told this story to the whole world.
She also travelled extensively and gave many appearances on television and in person around the world.
Corrie Ten Boom is in heaven now after living into ripe old age.
As Corrie Ten Boom continued to tell the story relentlessly and saw its great significance, I also think it is an important part of history we should not forget and I pay tribute to her bravery and strength of spirit in writing this.
As she pursued the telling of it out of love for her sister, I too will tell their story in love and honour of both of them.
It seems sometimes it takes grey storm clouds to reveal colourful rainbows and the beauty of the moon is reflected more beautifully in the blackness of a mirroring lake.
Sometimes we get a glimpse of the magical that like the reflection of the moon in the water cannot be grasped with our hands and should instead just remain perceived by that part of us that is not physical and neither can be grasped, yet still it is and remains, like the moon, sometimes revealed and other times hidden.
All things good and evil seem to play a part in the world and we can’t always discern the meaning immediately of events nor can we see the pattern of the many interwoven threads of a tapestry while we look on the underside.
Corrie Ten Boom is a perfect demonstration and embodiment of love and I am blessed to be able to have the joy of telling her journey of personal triumph over staggering odds and I believe it should be paid tribute to and kept alive as it holds lessons that should not be forgotten.
Many tears were shed and lives lost to bring these events to fulfilment and leave us and future generations with a nugget of truth and the wisdom of love that is revealed in her story.
Written by Margaret Munoz
January 2012
