Background of The Hiding Place
In 1940 the Nazis invaded the Netherlands and banned ten Boom's club organization. By 1942 she and her family had become very active in the Dutch underground, hiding refugees. Ten Boom was able to rescue many Jews from certain death at the hands of the Nazi SS. The family's work in saving Jews was motivated by their staunch Christian beliefs. They helped Jews without forcing conversion, and they even provided Kosher food and honored the Sabbath. The Germans arrested the entire ten Boom family on February 28, 1944 with the help of a Dutch informant (Corrie would later discover his name to be Jan Vogel); they were sent first to Scheveningen prison, then to the Vught political concentration camp (both in the Netherlands), and finally to the notorious Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany in September 1944, where Corrie's sister Betsie died. Corrie was released in December 1944. In the movie The Hiding Place, Corrie narrates the section on her release from camp by saying that she later learned that her release had been a clerical error: it so happened that the women prisoners her age in the camp were killed in the week following her release.