Corrie Ten Boom’s story remains important for Christians more than 50 years after it was first published

Veronica Zundel says the unusual approach taken in the recent screen adaptation of The Hiding Place is a necessary reminder of the horror of the holocaust.

When I was a young Christian in the early 1970s, The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom (published 1971 by Hodder & Stoughton) was essential reading for every Christian. Like other ‘martyr memoirs’ of the time, it was an edge-of-the-seat account of Christian heroism in the face of oppression. However this one was somewhat different in that it told the story of two middle-aged sisters and their elderly father in the Netherlands risking their lives by hiding fugitive Jews who were then passed on to their brother’s old people’s home and thence to emigration. Inevitably, the family were betrayed and shipped off to concentration camps, the sisters to Ravensbrück where younger sister Betsie died of illness while Corrie survived to be a witness to what she had seen.

A 1975 film was made of the story, which I believe I saw but of which I can remember nothing, though it was nominated for a BAFTA award. Now a new film has been released, taking a very different approach as it is a filmed version of a successful stage play. This would not normally be my favoured way to see either theatre or film; and indeed for the first hour or so I found the scenes rather artificial, the acting stilted and the assumed Dutch accents of the American cast irritating.