She forgave the man who guarded her prison camp

Corrie ten Boom was 52 years old when she was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944. She and her family had been hiding Jewish people in their home in Haarlem for two years. Up to 80 people at a time passed through a secret room built into a bedroom wall. When they were betrayed, the whole family was taken. Her father died in prison after ten days. Her sister Betsie died in Ravensbrück. Corrie survived because of what turned out to be a clerical error: she was released one week before all the women in her age group were sent to the gas chambers.

After the war she travelled widely, speaking about what she had lived through. Her message centred on forgiveness as both a theological necessity and a psychological survival mechanism. She had watched Betsie, in the camp, arrive at a place of genuine love toward their captors. She found it almost incomprehensible and tried to understand it.

The moment that became the centre of her most-quoted writing came in 1947, in Munich. She was speaking at a church and afterwards a man approached her, a former guard from Ravensbrück, one of the cruellest. He extended his hand and asked for her forgiveness. He said he had become a Christian.

Her account of what happened in that moment is worth reading in full. She describes the inability to raise her hand, the cold numbness, and then the decision to pray for the ability to forgive even without the feeling. She reached out her hand. She describes the warmth that followed as something that did not come from her. It was, she wrote, the most difficult thing she had ever been asked to do, and also the clearest evidence she had ever experienced of something working through her that was not her own.

The Hiding Place, published in 1971, has sold millions of copies. It remains one of the most direct accounts available of what it costs to live by the things you say you believe when those things require something genuinely difficult.