Israeli Ambassador to the Netherlands Harry Kney-Tal handed out the ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ award for Casper ten Boom and his daughter, Elisabeth (Betsy), "for their wartime heroism," said the Corrie ten Boom House Foundation in a statement seen by BosNewsLife Thursday, April 17.
The award is bestowed by Israel’s Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, Yad Vashem, to non-Jews who saved the lives of Jewish people during the Second World War.
At a solemn ceremony in the Dutch town of Haarlem speakers recalled that as devout Christians, the Ten Boom family participated in the resistance against the Nazis and willingly sheltered those seeking refuge, both Jews and non-Jews.
FAMILY DETAINED
By the time the entire Ten Boom family was detained in February 1944, they had managed to save almost 800 Jews, according to Israeli estimates. They were sent first to Scheveningen Prison in Holland, where 84-year-old Casper ten Boom died soon after being captured.
Elisabeth and her younger sister, Cornelia (Corrie), were then sent to the notorious Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany in September 1944, where Betsie died. Corrie Ten Boom survived only because she was released – due to a clerical error – in December 1944, according to historic accounts.
At the time of the family’s arrest, Nazi Germany’s feared secret police the Gestapo, carefully searched the Ten Boom’s house, but could not find any fugitives. They did not discover that two Jewish men, two Jewish women, and two members of the Dutch underground were hidden behind a false wall in Corrie Ten Boom’s bedroom.
"HIDING PLACE"
From this "hiding place" (the title of Corrie ten Boom’s book about the period) resistance fighters eventually freed the fugitives some two days later. They were the last of the hundreds of Jews, and many Dutch underground workers, saved by the Ten Booms.
When Casper ten Boom was asked by his captors if he knew he could die for helping Jews, he replied, "It would be an honor to give my life for God’s ancient people," according to witnesses.
Michael D. Evans, founder and chairman of the board of the Corrie ten Boom House Foundation, spoke of the spiritual "revival of the century-old Ten Boom tradition of praying for the peace of Jerusalem," according to a transcript of the ceremony.
WEEKLY PRAYERS
Begun in the Netherlands by the Christian Zionist family in 1844, the weekly prayers for Jerusalem continued until they "were brutally halted when the Nazis sent family members to their deaths," the Corrie ten Boom House Foundation said.
The Jerusalem Prayer Team, headed by Evans, renewed the tradition of the ten Boom family and has spread it throughout the world, where millions of Christian Zionists pray for the peace of Jerusalem each week in some 200 countries.
Following World War Two, Corrie ten Boom began world-wide evangelistic work which took her to over 60 countries in some 33 years. She was the first ten Boom to be honored by Yad Vashem and lived until 1983, when she died at the age of 91.
The heritage of the Ten Boom family is preserved at the Corrie ten Boom Museum in Haarlem. Her book, The Hiding Place (1971), was made into a film by World Wide Pictures in 1975. (With reporting from the Netherlands and Christian News Wire).
