Podcast: The Life and Legacy of Corrie ten Boom (Jennifer T. Kelley)

September 29, 2025 by:

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

The Life of Corrie ten Boom

In this podcast, Jennifer T. Kelley discusses the life of Corrie ten Boom and her dedication to help the Jewish people in World War II, as well as how God used her life even in prison and a concentration camp. Jennifer shares how Corrie ten Boom’s story can have a meaningful impact on the lives of children today and teach them to trust God and forgive others.

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | RSS

The Story of Corrie ten Boom

The Story of Corrie ten Boom

Jennifer T. Kelley

This biography takes middle-graders on an exciting journey through World War II hero Corrie ten Boom’s life, exploring the importance of forgiveness, love, and spreading the gospel. Part of the Lives of Faith and Grace series, this book shows how God works through ordinary people.  

Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:30 - Who Was Corrie ten Boom?

Matt Tully
Jennifer Kelly taught high school for fifteen years. She and her husband, Aaron, serve in leadership roles at their church in Columbia, South Carolina, where they have one young son. She’s also the author of The Story of Corrie ten Boom: The Watchmaker Who Forgave Her Enemies, which is part of Crossway’s Lives of Faith and Grace series for kids. Jenny, thanks so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Jennifer Kelley
Thanks for having me.

Matt Tully
Corrie ten Boom’s story is a story full of adventure and sorrow and really remarkable faith on her part. Can you share a little bit of the first time that you encountered her story?

Jennifer Kelley
I remember hearing about Corrie ten Boom as a child. I grew up in church, going to Christian school, and going to Christian camp, and so I feel like I always heard missionary stories growing up—stories of great men and women of the faith. And I remember watching “The Hiding Place” movie. It might have been when we had a substitute at our Christian school. I don’t remember what the circumstances were, but I do remember watching the movie and then always hearing about her in stories. I think it was sometime in adulthood when my sister was talking about the book, and I thought, I need to read that again. That would be a great idea. So I was about thirty-five, I was single and teaching, I had just been visiting my family in the Atlanta area, and I was driving back early one morning to South Carolina to get to school in time (8 AM) to get to my class. I wasn’t paying any attention, and I was listening to the book at a very pivotal, sad time in the book. I’m bawling my eyes out and not paying attention to the speed. All of a sudden, I saw lights behind my car, and I got pulled over at about 6:45 in the morning. I’m already trying to suck up my tears as the policeman comes, and I got my first and, thank the Lord, only ticket in my life. I think I was going at least twenty-five over. I wasn’t paying attention at all. And so I got my first speeding ticket listening to The Hiding Place. So it always has this little place in my heart of funny but also a tender story in my life.

Matt Tully
Did you try to explain to the officer why you were going so fast and why you were crying? Or did it just all kind of blend together?

Jennifer Kelley
I didn’t. I thought I would sound really silly—I’m listening to this book, and her sister is dying and it’s sad! I decided not to worry about it. I just apologized and thanked him.

Matt Tully
It is a powerful story about Christian faith motivated by Christian love. There’s a reason why it’s persisted in evangelical culture, especially as this incredible testament to the gospel. So I wonder if you could just kind of take us back to the beginning of the story. Set the stage for us. Who was Corrie? Where did she live, and what was going on around her?

Jennifer Kelley
Corrie was born in 1892 in Amsterdam (in the Netherlands). She was the fourth child in their family. There was a sister, a brother, and another sister. And that’s actually another reason I’ve loved Corrie is because I’m actually the fourth child. I have a brother and two sisters, so I always feel like, Oh, me too! I’m the baby of my family of four. So, they had a large family. Her dad’s name is Casper, and he was from a family of watchmakers in a small town outside of Amsterdam called Haarlem. When Corrie was young, their family moved back to Haarlem, back to the family watch shop, and moved in above the watch shop. And so her three older siblings and then eventually three aunts (the mom’s name was Cornelia, and Corrie is named after her mom) all moved in together, and they lived above this watch shop in this small town of Haarlem. When you think of Haarlem, think of winding cobblestone streets coming off of a central market with a huge cathedral. You’ve got canals that freeze over in the winter and huge windmills with the tulip fields out in the country. It’s very Dutch. She grew up as a little girl above the watch shop, and she and her siblings would jump rope in the streets outside the watch shop and ice skate on the canals in the winter—they had a great childhood. But their house was pretty small above the watch shop, so they were having to make do. And then their dad decided to buy the house behind the watch shop, and they realized that both of the houses were hundreds of years old—very ancient houses. They decided to enclose the space between the two houses and put them together. The bad part is the front part of the house where the shop was three floors, and the house behind it was four floors, and so they did not match. And so they actually enclosed the two between them and kind of had this odd-shaped, cobbled together house that they nicknamed the Beje. It was named after the street that they lived on. And so it was this big family with aunts and children all living above the shop where their dad worked.

Matt Tully
What do we know about Corey’s upbringing in terms of her faith?

Jennifer Kelley
Her family was very religious, and each generation, it seems, had put their faith in Christ. And her parents were faithful attenders at the church, the large cathedral there in the center of their village. When she was five, she was playing with her doll, who she named Casperina, which was named after her dad, Casper. And as she was playing, she was knocking on the door and she was asking it to come in. And that’s when her mother said, “Just like you’re knocking on this imaginary door, Jesus is knocking on the door of your heart.” And so that’s when she accepted Christ as her Savior. It sounds like their family was just full of church and going to teaching times and lessons as well as concerts. They had Bible time at their home every night. The parents wanted the children to learn to read in multiple languages and speak multiple languages, so they had Bibles and various languages, and they would study the Scripture in English and German and Dutch, of course, and then even some of the ancient languages. One other thing about their family was that her Corrie’s grandfather, whose name was Willem (her brother was Willem as well), in the 1830s he had started to pray for the Jewish people. He was struck with the idea that he needed to pray for the Jewish people in his community, and so he decided to pray every day for his Jewish neighbors. And so that continued down from the grandfather, down to Corrie’s father, down to Corrie. And so that was part of their daily time in the Bible and time of prayer was praying for their Jewish neighbors.

Matt Tully
It sounds like she grew up in a really solid, loving Christian home that cultivated this kind of faith that we would see play itself out later in her life. Why do you think it is so important for kids to be exposed to these stories of other Christians from throughout church history? What impact did that have on you, and what might that have on other kids today?

Jennifer Kelley
I think people like Corrie are such an example of faith, which obviously is God’s working in them even as a young person, which I think is an amazing thing to see that God can work in the lives of little children and can use little children. Even little children can know God. As a little child, one of the things that she used to do was she played in the streets. Behind them about a block away there was a police station, and there were prisoners that she could see behind the bars in the prison. And she started praying for them because she knew that they obviously had made some wrong choices and they might need Jesus. And so she started praying for them. And I think that even that simple faith of a child, praying for people that she would never meet, is an amazing example of how children can know God. Children can have a prayer life. And even as these faithful parents who may not have actually gone to seminary, but just faithful parents who owned a shop and they lived in the little spaces above and behind it, that they were faithful in teaching their children and obviously the Lord doing the work in the kids. But the faithful prayers and the faithful day by day instructing and teaching and handholding of these children in their faith.

Matt Tully
That can just be such a powerful thing in a kid’s life, especially when you think about the fact that Corey came from this pretty “insignificant” family in a little tiny town and then went through all these terrible things and probably didn’t necessarily know where it was all going to go and the impact that she would eventually have. It leads to one question I had: How was it that her story got told after her experiences?

Jennifer Kelley
Just at the new year of 1945, when she went home to Haarlem, she started talking to people in church or just in the community about what had happened. And then pretty much within the first year of being home she wrote a book about her experiences in prison. And then she started traveling. She decided that she needed to go. She had felt God’s call on her life to go and to leave home and to spread her story. And so she, on faith, went to America and started meeting people and was asked to speak in churches. And then from there she met more people and met more people. And she eventually wrote over twenty-five books. She has quite a large library of her life, whether it’s stories about her childhood or all the way up to her travels. And then at some point she crossed paths with the Billy Graham Association, and that also brought some notoriety to her and speaking engagements. And then in the 1970s, her most famous book called The Hiding Place was written alongside Elizabeth and John Sherrill, and so that is where I think a lot of people found out about her. And then a few years later, they made "The Hiding Place" movie, and she had a hand in that as well. So I feel like that’s kind of where she became famous because of some of those things.

11:15 - The Dutch Resistance

Matt Tully
Take us back to the dawn of World War II. Just briefly walk us through the key events that followed from that.

Jennifer Kelley
By this point, her mother had passed away. Those three elderly aunts that lived with them had passed away. Two of her siblings had gotten married and moved away to have their own families. So all that was left in the Beje was their dad (he was over eighty years old) and her sister, Betsy, and her. And so it was three of them living a normal life working in the watch shop. In May of 1940, the Nazi German army invaded. Back during World War I, Holland had been neutral. Germany did not invade, and so they were not under the threat of war. Although I will say that back in World War I, the ten Booms opened their house to the children of German watchmakers because Corrie’s dad, Casper, was very connected in the watchmaking community. And so he invited all of these children who were in danger from the war to come and stay with them. So they opened their house to those children back in World War I. Back to World War II, they are thinking they might survive being neutral again, but the Nazi German army invaded, and the Dutch army fought for about four or five days, and then ended up surrendering. And so things got very difficult quickly—restrictions, curfews, not allowed to be outside your house after ten o’clock and then nine o’clock, and then that just kind of progressed. Everyone had to surrender their radios so that you couldn’t hear what was going on outside. But the ten Booms actually had two radios, and so they submitted one. Corrie walked theirs down to the department store to drop it off, but then they actually kept one and they hid it in a compartment in that spiraling staircase that was between those two parts of their house. There was a hidden compartment, and so they hid it, and so then at night they would listen to radio broadcasts. Maybe someone would play the piano really loudly in the sitting room, and then they would listen to the radio and get reports from England and find out what was going on.

Matt Tully
And that was just the very beginning of what seems to be a pattern of some quiet resistance that the ten Boom family started doing. What are some of the other things that they did over the course of the war that maybe they didn’t want their Nazi occupiers knowing about?

Jennifer Kelley
They were very brave, and I think it was probably a hard decision for them because they had been faithful Christians and obeying, and then here comes this invading army. Do they defy them or not? But a couple things happened. One of the things that happened was the very difficult and strict regulations enforced on the Jewish community. They would walk around town and they would see signs going up that said “Jews will not be served.” And so obviously Jewish people were not allowed to go to those theaters or restaurants. And they noticed that some of their Jewish neighbors were disappearing or their shops were being ransacked. And then the Jewish people had to wear these yellow stars that said “Jude” on them, and it was just very oppressive. One day Corrie was in the watch shop, and a group of Gestapo men come down the street, and they start ransacking one of the neighbor’s Jewish-owned shop. So Corrie and Betsy run out into the street and they grab their neighbor and they bring them inside up into the dining room while his shop is getting ransacked. And so he stays with them that day, and they’re trying to figure out what to do. So Corrie goes to a neighboring town where her brother Willem lives. He’s a pastor, and he’s also been helping Jewish people. And so Corrie goes and asks Willem, “What can we do?” And so Willem says, “Alright, tell Mr. Veal to be ready tonight. Tell him to be ready to go.” And so Corrie goes home, tells him to be ready to go, and that night after curfew, Corrie’s twenty-or-so-year-olds nephew shows up at the door and takes the man away. They just disappear. They go off into the street, and Corrie doesn’t see them again. Later she sees her nephew and says, “Hey, what happened to Mr. Veal?” And he says, “Aunt Corrie, if you’re going to work for the resistance, you can’t ask those types of questions.” And she thought, Oh, am I working for the resistance now? And so that was kind of the beginning of it. After that families started showing up at the door, knocking at the side door of the Beje, asking for help. They basically said if someone knocks on the door, we will let them in. And so they started making connections with people and trying to sneak people out to the countryside. The problem was that at that time everyone had to use ration cards. Each citizen had to get a ration card. It was basically like coupons. If you didn’t have a coupon for milk, you couldn’t buy milk. And if you didn’t have a coupon for bologna and cheese, you couldn’t have bologna and cheese. So the problem with feeding people staying at their house was they didn’t have enough food, and the Jewish people were not issued ration cards. So Corrie was trying to figure out what to do. So she took the train back out to her brother’s town and said, “Willem, what do I do? I need to feed these people at the house. There are three people staying with us right now. I don’t know what to do.” And Willem said, “I can’t help you. You’re going to have to steal them.” And she said, “Steal them? You’re a pastor! What?” He said, “You’ve got to figure it out. I can’t help. I don’t have connections. I can’t help you.” So Corrie’s thinking about it on the way home on the train trip, and she remembered a man who had been their meter man. I know that’s an old phrase, but it’s a person that would come around and see how much electricity you had used. And so she went to go see him, because that man was now working in the food office for the Nazi regime. And she wasn’t sure if she could trust him, but she thought it was worth a try. And she prayed, God, if Fred is not trustworthy, please stop me before I ask him. And so she knocked on Fred’s door and said, “I am having people staying at the house, and they’re Jewish.” And she was kind of waiting, and he didn’t react. She said, “I need ration cards.” And he said, “I can’t give you ration cards because every single ration card has to be accounted for.” She said, “There’s nothing that can be done?” And he said, “Well, Maybe. Maybe if we stage a robbery.” And so he concocts this idea of staging a robbery, and Corrie said, “Stop. Don’t tell me anything more. I don’t want to know.” And so he asked her, “How many do you need?” She needed five, but instead of saying five, she said, I need 100. And so he stages a robbery. He has a friend beat him up, and then a few days later at the side door at the Beje, Corrie answers the door, and it’s Fred. He is all beaten up. He’s got black and blue eyes, and he holds out a packet, and inside are the 100 ration cards that Corrie can then use and distribute to Jewish people.

Matt Tully
That’s incredible. It’s just so dramatic and so amazing to see the work and the strategizing and the secret attempts to protect these Jews who are eventually living with them in their house. But at some point, eventually Corrie is arrested, and she’s sent to a concentration camp. How did that actually happen? How did they find out that the ten Booms were not who the Nazis thought they were?

Jennifer Kelley
Corrie knew that any day, any time they could be arrested. They did have safeguards in place with code words and things like that, but they knew that at any time they could be arrested. The police station where she used to pray as a child for the prisoners was just around the corner, so they knew that they could be in danger any time. One day in February of 1944, Corrie was sick, and so she actually was in bed. Betsy came and said, “There’s a man in the watch shop who wants to talk to you, specifically you.” And so she got dressed, went downstairs to the watch shop, and she said she just felt like something was off, but she herself was sick, so she didn’t really think too much of it. A guy was asking about money because his wife had been taken, and Corrie didn’t even think to use code words. And so she said, “Come back later. We’ll have the money for you.” And so he left, and she went back to bed because she was ill. The house was actually very full that day. There was not just the family, but her older sister and older brother were there with their families because they were having a Bible study, and there were resistance workers, and then also the people hiding at the house. It was a very full house that day, and she was sick. And then later that day, the Gestapo comes to the door and busts in and everything just became chaotic. Dozens of people were arrested that day, but not everybody.

20:28 - God Gives the Power to Forgive

Matt Tully
And so then she goes to this concentration camp, and that’s a huge part of the book and of her story is just the suffering that she experiences there. She’s moved around a little bit. She meets a guard there who becomes a pretty important character later in her story, even years later. Tell us a little bit about what happens there and when she comes face to face with this guard again.

Jennifer Kelley
She initially went to a Dutch prison. She was there for a few months and in solitary confinement. Then she and Betsy were moved to a Dutch concentration camp. And then eventually they were taken, in very terrible circumstances, to an all-woman concentration camp in Germany, north of Berlin. It was very harsh and just very terrible circumstances. There were many women and men guards there, and one of the men was especially cruel, especially when the women first arrived. They had been squished into boxcars to be transported on their journey. They were weak and sick, and they had to give up all of their belongings. They had to strip down and take showers, and some of the guards were mocking them and very, very cruel. So then after she is released and she is actually back in Germany and teaching at a church—

Matt Tully
This is after the war, right?

Jennifer Kelley
After the war. She actually had said, God, I will go anywhere you tell me to go except Germany. She did not ever want to go back there. And then, of course, the Lord said, Hey, I would like you to go to Germany. So she goes back to Germany, is teaching in a church, and people are devastated. After the war their country is just torn to pieces, there’s devastation and homelessness, and they need the gospel. And so she goes back to Germany. Even though it was hard for her to go back to Germany, she does go and she spends a lot of her ministry there actually. A tall man in the back of the room starts moving toward the stage, whereas everyone else is moving toward the back door. And she sees this man and she realizes, I know him. And in her mind, instead of just seeing street clothes, she sees a military uniform and a skull and crossbones on the hat. And she’s taken back in her mind to this horrible guard who is laughing and cruel and just a terrible person. He comes to her and says, “You mentioned in your talk that you had been at Ravensbrück. I was a guard at Ravensbrück, and since then I have become a Christian. Now that I’m a Christian, I would love to ask your forgiveness for the way I treated the prisoners there.” And Corrie just felt such hatred in her heart. He had been so cruel that she just did not want to forgive him. And so she said she stood there for what felt like ages, but it really was just a few seconds, and he extended his hand and said, “Will you forgive me?” And she didn’t want to forgive him, even though the talk she had just given in this church was about God’s forgiveness. She just did not want to forgive. But then she said that in her heart she prayed, God, if you want me to forgive, please help me to forgive this man. Help me to be able to raise my hand and forgive him and shake his hand. And she did. And she said that God gave her the power to forgive. And that was pretty much her theme through most of her teaching time after the war. First of all, she preached Jesus. Jesus is the victor. She preached all about the gospel of Jesus. And then secondly, she also preached forgiveness. Those were the two biggest themes of her time post-war.

Matt Tully
This book is written for kids aged 8–13—this kind of middle grade age. As you talk about some of the really terrible things that Corrie experienced, how did you approach telling Corrie’s story in a way that was true to what happened but also age appropriate?

Jennifer Kelley
It is definitely difficult to think about explaining a concentration camp to a child. I definitely wanted to be sensitive and careful and tended to use more general language and softer language to explain things that, at some point in their older lives, they can learn more about. Like, “They marched away and they never came back.” Or, “There were unnameable fears,” or things like that. Just more general but also still communicating that bad things happened.

Matt Tully
And I think you did a really good job with that in the book. It’s a tricky thing to navigate, though. In the book you include so many vivid historical details, cultural details, locational details, life in Holland, the Dutch underground, and even some Dutch words occasionally. What did your research for the book look like?

Jennifer Kelley
Corrie ten Boom wrote so many books on her own, and she also wrote articles and journals, so I read a lot of the books she wrote as well as journal articles. And I have to say I loved it. It was such a pleasure to read her work. She is such a delightful person. Just an absolutely incredible writer and delightful person. I read many of her books and then also did other research on Holland and things about World War II. I love history, so it was actually fun to read about bicycles during World War II and the bicycle culture in Holland. I also enjoyed adding the details about the tulips because that is such a part of the Netherlands, and it does play a part in World War II as well, because as the people are starving, they actually end up eating their tulip bulbs because they didn’t have potatoes or other food. So it was interesting to read the historical details that were specifically centered on Holland, on the Netherlands, especially during World War II.

Matt Tully
And I think some of those details are, ironically, things that stick with us as modern readers and certainly as kids. We can latch onto the details and they really help us to see that these stories from history are true stories. These were real people who lived and had lives just like all of us. And sometimes when you just look at the big events, you lose a little bit of that earthiness to the stories. Maybe now, as a final question, Jenny, as you think about the young readers who are going to come to this book and read it as it’s published, maybe even your own son, as he gets older and reads this book, what do you hope that they take from the story of Corrie’s life?

Jennifer Kelley
I think some of the takeaways for me, which I would also hope would be for the young readers and for their parents, would be some of Corrie’s famous quotations: “Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God.” I feel like that truth is so resonant, whether you are facing a soccer tryout, a spelling test, or you are thinking about your job or what’s happening next week with certain meetings—that unknown future that we can trust to our known God. When it comes to forgiveness, I feel like Corrie is such an amazing example of true heartfelt forgiveness for people who did horrible things to her and to her family. And yet she willingly and gladly forgave them through God’s power. And I feel like, too often, it is easy to hold grudges against people for the slightest things and not have that heart of forgiveness. And I feel like she’s an amazing example, and I think that’s something that we all can take away from this. Because of what Jesus has done and how he has forgiven us, then we now have the power to forgive other people.

Matt Tully
Jenny, thanks so much for walking us through the incredible life and story of Corrie ten Boom and for writing this book that will hopefully introduce our kids and the kids that we love and know to this amazing story of faith and forgiveness. We appreciate it.

Jennifer Kelley
Thank you so much.

Popular Articles in This Series

View All

Podcast: Help! I Hate My Job (Jim Hamilton)

January 06, 2020

Jim Hamilton discusses what to do when you hate your job, offering encouragement for those frustrated in their work and explaining the difference between a job and a vocation.

Crossway is a not-for-profit Christian ministry that exists solely for the purpose of proclaiming the gospel through publishing gospel-centered, Bible-centered content. Learn more or donate today at crossway.org/about.