Telling Corrie’s story

Millions of people have read the Ten Boom family story of courage and faithfulness during World War II as shared in the 1971 bestseller The Hiding Place. Corrie ten Boom, along with her father and sister, coordinated underground work during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, hiding Jews and other underground workers in their home. Larry Loftis’ The Watchmaker’s Daughter (William Morrow 2023) pulls together information from letters, journals, and books written by Ten Boom family members or their friends to tell about their underground activities and their faith even after Nazis arrested them.

The Watchmaker’s Daughter sets out to tell what The Hiding Place left out, and it succeeds. Loftis intersperses accounts familiar to The Hiding Place readers with details of Allied and Nazi military tactics and espionage attempts as well as wartime experiences of Anne Frank and Audrey Hepburn, who both lived in the Netherlands at the time.

Loftis includes Corrie’s post-war travel, as she told her family’s story in more than 60 countries, and a final ­section that tells what happened to ­several people during or after the war. He describes Nazi atrocities in slightly more detail than Corrie shared, but his accounts are not overly graphic.

The Watchmaker’s Daughter includes ample references to Dutch Christians’ faith, including several accounts of ­various Ten Booms’ evangelistic conversations with a Nazi officer who interrogated them individually. “Because I had lived so close to death, looking it in the face day after day, I often felt like a stranger among my own people—many of whom looked upon money, honor of men, and success as the important issues of life,” Loftis quotes Corrie. “Standing in front of a crematorium, knowing that any day could be your day, gives one a different perspective.”

But while Loftis largely succeeds in including material The Hiding Place left out, he ironically leaves out much material that Corrie’s bestseller left in. For instance, the Ten Boom family’s faith defined them long before the Luftwaffe began bombing Dutch cities, but The Watchmaker’s Daughter rushes through decades of the family’s pre-war story. It’s also questionable whether Corrie would have agreed with some of Loftis’ comments, such as a mention of Corrie’s “Road to Damascus” and his assertion that Corrie’s sister Betsie “had taken the place of their father as her spiritual leader and guide.”

The Ten Booms testified to God’s faithfulness even in unimaginably dark times. The Watchmaker’s Daughter faithfully puts the Ten Boom story before us again, reminding us that God is working in our times, too. As Corrie wrote to a friend, “It is great to know that whatever we do in love for the Lord is never lost and never wasted.”