As you read the following about Ravensbruck, and look at the statistics of those who survived and were released at the end of Nazi occupation of European nations, including Holland, you will realize what a miracle it was that Corrie Ten Boom was among the survivors.
Image - Women at work at Ravensbruck when it was in operation, a Wikimedia Commons photo.
Much of the following information is not found in Corrie ten Boom's books.
Ravensbruck, which is also spelled Ravensbrueck at times, was a World War II concentration camp, unique in that it wasn't common to have concentration camps devoted entirely to women. It was located in northern Germany near the village of Ravensbruck.
SS leader Heinrich Himmler oversaw the construction of the camp at the end of 1938. It opened in 1939, and a men's camp was built next to it in 1941.
In the approximately 6 years of operation, over 130,000 female prisoners passed through the Ravensbruck camp system. Less than 1/3 of these woman survived. Polish women made up a majority of the inmates, though there were women representing all German occupied European countries in Ravensbruck.
Children were also present in the prison camp, arriving with their mothers who were Jews and sometimes Gypsies. Some were born to women who were imprisoned while pregnant. At the beginning there were few children, but as time went on almost every nation in Europe that Germany occupied had children confined in the prison camp.
According to Wikipedia, "Among the thousands executed by the Germans at Ravensbruck were four female members of the British WWII organization Special Operations Executive: Denise Bloch, Cecily Lefort, Lilian Rolfe and Violette Szabo. Other victims included the Roman Catholic nun Elise Rivet, Elisabeth de Rothschild (the only member of the Rothschild family to die in the holocaust), Russian Orthodox nun St. Maria Skobtsova, the 25-year-old French Princess Anne de Bauffremont-Courtenay and Olga Benario, wife of the Brazilian Communist leader Luis Carlos Prestes. The largest group of executed women at the Ravensbruck camp was composed of 200 young Polish patriots who were members of the Home Army.
"Among the survivors of the Ravensbruck camp was Christian author and speaker Corrie ten Boom. Corrie ten Boom and her family were arrested by the Nazis for harboring Jews in their home in Haarlem, the Netherlands. The ordeal of Corrie and her sister Betsie ten Boom in the camp is documented in her book "The Hiding Place" which was eventually produced as a motion picture. Countess Karolina Lanckoronska, a Polish art historian and author of Michelangelo in Ravensbruck also was imprisoned in the camp from 1943-1945."
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@sandyspider She truly was a remarkable woman, and gives all the credit to God, not her own strength.
@Always-Writing Thank you very much, I have been absent from here due to family emergencies for a bit as you can see, appreciate your visit and comment, yes, she is/was a wonderful woman of God.
Interesting review of this courageous woman and her family.
Love this article, and I have always loved Corrie Ten Boom!
@dustytoes It is a very hard but also inspirational story if you find the time to read it, view the movie or even listen in audiobook, I've listened and watched the movie.
Corrie ten Boom has a very inspirational story and I have heard of her, but I'd love to read her book to learn more.
She may well have met Corrie, but since she has died, I cannot ask her.
@frankbeswick Oh my, and it seems even more so these days. I guess just like many who were in battle during the war find it hard to share their stories, so would people like her. Corrie was an exceptional exception, and one wonders if your friend ever met her. The conditions were so deplorable.
She spoke little, only to say that she had been there. But once in the 1980s when she was telling me that she, a woman in her sixties, had been verbally abused by two louts on a bus she said that she had seen their type before, but then they were wearing SS uniform. In saying this she alerted me to the dangers lurking in all societies, including ours.
@Raintree I'm glad you took time to listen to the video, she was/is a precious woman of strength and faith.