Corrie ten Boom

The book most people meet her through is The Hiding Place, an account of what her family did during the German occupation of the Netherlands and what happened to them afterwards. It is the source of nearly every quotation attributed to her about hope, forgiveness and holding on to faith in conditions designed to strip it away — and the reason her words still circulate among readers who have never read the full book.

Before any of that she was a watchmaker. She worked alongside her father, Casper, and her sister Betsie, and it was in the family home that they hid Jewish people trying to escape the Nazis. Many got out. Eventually the operation was discovered, the family was caught, and she was arrested and sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp.

What she wrote later came out of that imprisonment rather than from theory. The Hiding Place tells both stories at once: the practical business of concealing people in a house, and the question of how she found and passed on hope in God while she was in the camp. She spent the rest of her life as a Christian writer and public speaker, born in Amsterdam in 1892 and dying in 1983, on the same date in April as her birth.