I first read the Hiding Place to create curriculum for a High School Bible class I was teaching in the Fall of 2025. I later gave the assignment to the forty or so students that I was teaching every weekday and they understandably loved the book also.

Corrie Ten Boom’s modesty about the Holocaust was refreshing to me. What I mean by modesty is that despite the horrors of the Holocaust that she and others in the Ten Boom family faced, she never ceased to be a lady while describing them. The Holocaust victims were stripped, beaten and abused in horrific ways, but Corrie Ten Boom offers a surprisingly optimistic version of the experience.

Biographies and memoirs like The Hiding Place serve us well as reminders of what we should be as Christians when the fires of persecution and adversity burn the hottest.

My Bible students were sadly unaware of the horrors of the Holocaust. This new experience led many of them to tears, and rightly so. Corrie Ten Boom’s description of the death that surrounded her was gripping. As a historian, I already knew what was coming, yet I read every page with anxious worry. I will always treasure The Hiding Place and rejoice that it is in my library.

When we get to Heaven, Corrie Ten Boom, Caspar, Betsie, Nollie, Willem and all the others will be there to greet us all. I look forward to meeting them one day and thanking Corrie for her faithfulness and her thoughtful record of her Holocaust survival.

Dr. Brad Bailey is a husband, a dad, a pastor, author and radio personality in Brandon, FL