Tramp for the Lord

This memoir recounts the post-war life and worldwide ministry of Corrie ten Boom, a Dutch Christian woman who survived the Ravensbruck concentration camp during World War II. Corrie and her sister Betsie were arrested in 1944 for hiding Jews in their family's watchmaker's shop, the Beje, in Haarlem, Holland. Corrie frames the book as a series of lessons learned in "God's great classroom" during three decades of traveling to more than 60 countries and preaching the Gospel.

The memoir opens in September 1944, when Corrie, then 52, and Betsie, 59, were loaded with over a thousand women into boxcars and transported to Ravensbruck, a notorious women's death camp where more than 96,000 women died. During intake, every prisoner had to strip naked and pass guards. Corrie hid their small Bible behind a pile of benches and retrieved it under her prison dress; guards searched the women ahead of and behind her but never touched Corrie. She and Betsie held secret Bible studies in Barracks 28, which became known as "the crazy place, where they hope."

A week after Betsie died, Corrie was called forward at roll call. A young fellow prisoner named Tiny whispered that their position meant a death sentence. During the three-hour wait, Corrie shared the Gospel with Tiny, who accepted Jesus. Corrie's name was called again, not for execution but for release, the result of an administrative error. She was freed just one week before an order came to kill all women her age in the camp.

Corrie traveled by train to Holland, where she found shelter at a Christian hospital. She ate her first real meal, took a warm bath, and wept upon hearing Bach on a radio for the first time in months. She realized her life had been given back as a gift and that God would send her out as "a tramp for the Lord."

After the war, Corrie started a home for the homeless in Bloemendaal, a refuge for those who had lost their way spiritually and physically. She visited Haarlem, stood before the Beje, and recognized it was no longer her hiding place; her only security now lay in Jesus. She heard the cathedral chimes play Luther's hymn "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God" in German and half-chuckled at God's reminder of grace through the language of her former captors.

Corrie set out for America with $50 and no contacts. Weeks passed with no speaking invitations. A chance meeting with a Dutch minister led to connections with Abraham Vereide, a prominent Christian leader in Washington, D.C., who arranged a women's gathering that produced an enthusiastic response. Invitations flooded in, and Corrie spent nearly ten months crisscrossing America, speaking in churches, prisons, and universities. As the year ended, she sensed God directing her to Germany, the one land she dreaded.

Friends in Darmstadt helped Corrie convert a former concentration camp into a home for about 160 refugees. There she encountered a former music professor from the Dresden Conservatory who had lost everything but could still play Bach's "Chromatic Phantasy" on a battered piano. Corrie urged her to ask Jesus into her life. In another room, she counseled a bitter German lawyer who had lost both legs in the war, telling him how Jesus had replaced her own hatred toward the man who betrayed her family with love. A year later, the lawyer met Corrie at the train station, having surrendered his bitterness to God and begun working in the refugee camp.

One of the memoir's most vivid episodes takes place in 1947 in a Munich church basement. After Corrie spoke about forgiveness, a man approached whom she recognized as one of the cruelest guards at Ravensbruck; he did not recognize her. He said he had become a Christian and asked Corrie to forgive him, extending his hand. Corrie froze, remembering Betsie's frail body. She prayed silently for Jesus to supply the feeling she lacked, then thrust her hand into his. An extraordinary warmth flowed through her arm into their joined hands, and she told him she forgave him with all her heart.

After 12 years of traveling alone, Corrie gained her first constant companion, Conny van Hoogstraten, a young Dutch woman. When Conny later became engaged, God provided a new companion: Ellen de Kroon, a Dutch nurse. Two years after Conny's marriage, Conny fell terminally ill. On her deathbed, she asked those present to sing Psalm 23, including the verse about the valley of the shadow of death, and died what Corrie calls a victorious death.

Throughout her travels, Corrie encountered spiritual warfare. In a cathedral in a large Communist city, she commanded dark powers to leave in Jesus' name after sensing the congregation was spiritually shackled, and the people immediately responded with joy. In Africa, she visited prisons where she shared the Gospel with death-row inmates and men in despair. At one prison in Rwanda, she told the prisoners about a skylark that sang over the crematorium at Ravensbruck, and all the men, including the guards, raised their hands to accept Jesus. In a small African country where a new government was executing Christians, Corrie told a terrified congregation that God gives the strength for martyrdom "just in time." She later learned that more than half of those present were killed that week.

God's financial provision is a recurring theme. Early in her ministry, God instructed Corrie never to ask for money. When she needed funds for a trip to Russia, God told her to give away what she had; she obeyed, and that same day an unexpected publisher's advance arrived for more than the total needed. At Checkpoint Charlie, the fortified crossing point into East Berlin, Corrie was detained for hours after guards found Christian books in her bag. She turned the interrogation into a Gospel conversation. The officer who released her remarked that what they had done together was even more important than Corrie's planned visit.

At 73, Corrie fell ill and spent a "Sabbath Year" resting at a missionary house in Uganda. When the year ended, she resisted resuming her travels, preferring the comfort of sleeping in the same bed. A visiting African minister read her a passage from Revelation about the church that left its first love. Corrie recognized herself: The burning love she felt leaving Ravensbruck had cooled into attachment to comfort. She confessed, was forgiven, and set out traveling again.

Even past 80, Corrie found she had to keep practicing forgiveness. After Christian friends hurt her, she forgave them but kept rehashing the offense at night. Years later, an American friend caught her preserving old letters as evidence against those same people. Convicted, Corrie burned the letters, recognizing she could not keep sins "in black and white" that God had cast into the deepest sea.

Corrie closes with a childhood memory. At a soldiers' Bible study organized by her aunt, Tante Jans, young Corrie sang a song about a lost sheep. A Dutch officer asked how she had gone astray. She confessed she had given her heart to Jesus at five and could not remember being lost. The officer, moved to tears, said he would stop seeking the Shepherd and let the Shepherd find him. Corrie identifies this as the first time God used her to lead someone to Christ and names the secret of all her years of traveling: It happened not because of what she said, but because of the Holy Spirit within her.