When both the Sinclairs (new couple heading Baptist World Missions) and the Steadmans (couple that just retired from heading Baptist World Missions) all say they have just read a new book on Corrie ten Boom and her family during World War II, it is a good sign that you want to read that book!

That book is The Watchmaker’s Daughter by Larry Loftis.

As you recall, Corrie, her sister Betsie, and her dad “Opa” ten Boom hid Jews and Resistance members in their home in the Netherlands during the war until they were betrayed and sent to a concentration camp, where both Opa and then Betsie died. Corrie survived to travel the world and tell people there is no pit so deep that God’s love is not deeper still.

This new book ties together their story with the stories of other extended ten Boom family members and their friends, and with events in the Netherlands and Europe, in a way that the several books Corrie wrote did not. That is probably because the perspective of writing eighty years later makes that easier to do. There is some material here that was not previously published, from letters and other documentation of the time.

I was especially riveted to Loftis’s description of three homes Corrie started for people who were so ruined by the war’s horrors that they needed a place to heal afterward. One was for victims, one was for Dutch people who collaborated with the Germans, and one, in a former concentration camp, was for Germans. Corrie learned, while walking out her faith, that even those who were Nazis or who helped Nazis could come to a place of repentance and be forgiven.

This woman, too, was a missionary, though she never expected God to call her, in her 50’s, to lead up to nine Bible studies a day in a women’s concentration camp! All glory to God!