Corrie ten Boom, Her Story (continued)
2. Why I Was Sent to Prison
I WANT TO tell you about my experiences in three prisons. During World War
II, I was a prisoner of the Gestapo because my family, my friends, and I had saved the lives of Jewish people in Holland. Adolf Hitler was preparing to kill all of them, and our task was to help them to escape to safer countries.
When that was no longer possible, we hid them in our houses. In the end we had a group of eighty people with whom we worked to supply the desperate needs of a hidden people: food, clothing, houses, burials. There were many other factors facing a group of helpless persons hiding in a country already stripped by the occupying army of a powerful enemy.
We were betrayed and all were arrested. My father was eighty-four years old, and lived only a short while in the prison where all his children and a grandson were also incarcerated. We never saw him again, for the prison walls separated us.
Father was a courageous man, but he understood that he was too old for prison life. "If I am imprisoned, I shall die, but it will be an honor for me to give my life for God's chosen people, the Jews," he said before they arrested him. I heard much later that he had died after only ten days' imprisonment.