After re-reading this book, I remembered why I loved it so much the first time. This is honestly one of the top 10 books I have ever read. It is so meaningful, so heart-wrenching, so inspiring. Holocaust stories always touch me deeply, especially when they are true accounts, but Corrie's experiences are just incredible. The things she went through are just unreal, but the desire she had to do good and the faith she and her family had in God are amazing. I feel like this entire book just teaches that God is real and loving and involved in our lives--in the good times but also when we are going through terrible injustices. I'm going to put some of my favorite excerpts below, but if you haven't read the book, don't read the excerpts. Just go read the whole book. :)
Rating: * * * (3/3 = Loved it)
Excerpts that stuck out to me or were particularly poignant or meaningful. I just want to have these here so I can skim through them sometime and remember how I much I love this book. Two of my favorites have *** next to them. (If you haven't read the book, these excerpts will have spoilers, so stop reading this blog post now. And go read the book.) :)
[When Corrie was a child and experienced death for the first time and was inconsolable and felt terrified that her family members would die:]
Father sat down on the edge of the narrow bed. "Corrie," he bagan gently, "When you and I go to Amsterdam--when do I give you your ticket?"
I sniffed a few times, considering this. "Why, just before we get on the train."
"Exactly. And our wise Father in heaven knows when we're going to need things, too. Don't run out ahead of Him, Corrie. When the time comes that some of us will have to die, you will look into your heart and find the strength you need--just in time."
[When young Corrie was asking her Dad what something meant that he wasn't ready to explain to her:]
At last he stood up, lifted his traveling case from the rack over our heads, and set it on the floor. "Will you carry it off the train, Corrie?" he said.
I stood up and tugged at it. It was crammed with the watches and spare parts he had purchased that morning.
"It's too heavy," I said.
"Yes," he said. "And it would be a pretty poor father who would ask his little girl to carry such a load. It's the same way, Corrie, with knowledge. Some knowledge is too heavy for children. When you are older and stronger you can bear it. For now you must trust me to carry it for you."
[Advice from Corrie's mom to young Corrie about an aunt who was always unhappy:]
"Bep has been just as happy here with us--no more and no less--than she was anywhere else."
I stared at her, not understanding.
"Do you know when she started praising the Wallers so highly?" Mama went on. "The day she left them. As long as she was there, she had nothing but complaints. The Wallers couldn't compare with the van Hooks where she'd been before. But at the van Hooks she'd actually been miserable. Happiness isn't something that depends on our surroundings, Corrie. It's something we make inside ourselves."
[When adult Corrie got her heart broken by a man and her dad gave her advice:]
"Corrie," he began instead, "do you know what hurts so very much? It's love. Love is the strongest force in the world, and when it is blocked that means pain. There are two things we can do when this happens. We can kill the love so that it stops hurting. But then of course part of us dies too. Or, Corrie, we can ask God to open up another route for that love to travel. God loves Karel--even more than you do--and if you ask Him, He can give you His love for this man, a love nothing can prevent, nothing destroy. Whenever we cannot love in the old, human way, Corrie, God can give us the perfect way."
[When Corrie's mom couldn't walk or talk but just sat in a chair by the window and still found a way to send birthday wishes to friends she saw passing by:]
Mama's love had always been the kind that acted itself out with the soup pot and sewing basket. But now that these things were taken away, the love seemed as while as before. She sat in her chair at the window and loved us. She loved the people she saw in the street--and beyond: her love took in the city, the land of Holland, the world. And so I learned that love is larger than the walls which shut it in.
[When Corrie had to find connections to help her form an Underground network:]
We didn't know, of course, the political views of all these people. But--and here I felt a strange leaping of my heart--God did! My job was simply to flow His leading one step at a time, holding every decision up to Him in prayer. I know I was not clever or subtle or sophisticated; if the Beje was becoming a meeting place for need and supply, it was through some strategy far higher than mine.
***[After Corrie's father got arrested, and the Gestapo chief saw the old man and said he'd like to send him home:]
"I'll take your word that you won't cause any more trouble."
I could not see Father's face, only the erect carriage of his shoulders and the halo of white hair above them. But I heard his answer. "If I go home today," he said evenly and clearly, "tomorrow I will open my door again to any man in need who knocks."
[After Corrie found out her father died and tried to call to a guard to help comfort her and the guard treated her horribly:]
Dear Jesus, I whispered as the door slammed and her footsteps died away, how foolish of me to have called for human help when You are here.
[When Corrie was being interrogated and talked to the lieutenant about God:]
"The truth, Sir," I said, swallowing, "is that God's viewpoint is sometimes different from ours--so different that we could not even guess at it unless He had given us a Book which tells us such things." I knew it was madness to talk this way to a Nazi officer. But he said nothing so I plunged ahead. "In the Bible I learn that God values us not for our strength or our brains but simply because He has made us. Who knows, in His eyes a half-wit may be worth more than a watchmaker. Or--a lieutenant."
[When Corrie had to leave behind her belongings and change clothes but hid a bundle underneath her dress that included her Bible:]
It made a bulge you could have seen across the Grote Markt. I flattened it out as best I could, pushing it down, tugging the sweater around my waist, but there was no real concealing it beneath the thin cotton dress. And all the while I had the incredible feeling that it didn't matter, that this was not my business, but God's. That all I had to do was walk straight ahead.
As we tripped back out through the shower room door, the S.S. men ran their hands over every prisoner, front, back, and sides. The woman ahead of me was searched three times. Behind me, Betsie was searched. No hand touched me.
At the exit door to the building was a second ordeal, a line of women guards examining each prisoner again. I slowed down as I reached them but the Aufseherin in charge shoved me roughly by the shoulder, "Move along! You're holding up the line!"
And so Betsie and I arrived at Barracks 8 in the small hours of that morning, bringing not only the Bible, but a new knowledge of the power of Him whose story it was.
***[When they were in the concentration camp:]
It grew harder and harder. Even within these four walls there was too much misery, too much seemingly pointless suffering. Every day something else failed to make sense, something else grew too heavy. "Will you carry this too, Lord Jesus?"
But as the rest of the world grew stranger, one thing became increasingly clear. And that was the reason the two of us were here. Why others should suffer we were not shown. As for us, from morning until lights-out, whenever we were not in ranks for roll call, our Bible was the center of an ever-widening circle of help and hope. Like waifs clustered around a blazing fire, we gathered around it, holding out our hearts to his warmth and light. The blacker the night around us grew, the brighter and truer and more beautiful burned the word of God. "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?...Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us."
I would look about us as Betsie read, watching the light leap from face to face. More than conquerors...It was not a wish. It was a fact. We knew it. We experienced it minute by minute--poor, hated, hungry. We are more than conquerors. Not "we shall be." We are! Life in Ravensbruck took place on two separate levels, mutually impossible. One, the observable, external life, grew every day more horrible. The other, the life we lived with God, grew daily better, truth upon truth, glory upon glory.
[Corrie describing what happened to her bottle of drops she used for medication:]
Another strange thing was happening. The Davitamon bottle was continuing to produce drops. I scarcely seemed possible, so small a bottle, so many doses a day. Now, in addition to Betsie, a dozen others on our pier were taking it.
My instinct was always to hoard it--Betsie was growing so very weak! But the others were ill as well. It was hard to say no to eyes that burned with fever, hands that shook with chill. I tried to save it for the very weakest--but even these soon numbered fifteen, twenty, twenty-five....
And still, every time I tilted the little bottle, a drop appeared at the tip of the glass stopper. It just couldn't be! I held it up to the light, trying to see how much was left, but the dark brown glass was too think to see through.
"There was a woman in the Bible," Betsie said, "whose oil jar was never empty." She turned to it in the Book of Kings, the story of the poor widow of Zarephath who gave Elijah a room in her home: "The jar of meal wasted not, neither did the cruse of oil fail, according to the word of Jehovah which he spoke by Elijah."
Well--but--wonderful things happened all through the Bible. It was one thing to believe that such things were possible thousands of years ago, another to have it happen now, to us, this very day. And yet it happened this day, and the next, and the next, until an awed little group of spectators good around watching the drops fall onto the daily rations of bread.
[Later, Corrie got some vitamins secretly given to her and then--]
"We'll finish the drops first," I decided. But that night, no matter how long I held it upside down, or how hard I shook it, not another drop appeared.
[When Betsie and Corrie got to work together as knitters after being very sick:]
And thus began the closest, most joyous weeks of all time in Ravensbruck. Side by side, in the sanctuary of God's fleas, Betsie and I ministered the word of God to all in the room. We sat by deathbeds that became doorways of heaven. We watched women who had lost everything grow rich in hope. The knitters of Barracks 28 became the praying heart of the vast diseased body that was Ravensbruck, interceding for all in the camp--guards, under Betsie's prodding, as well as prisoners.
