collected
Nonfiction · Biography & Memoir · History · Religion & Spirituality
About 5 h · at 30 minutes a day, about 11 days
Estimated from the page count of this edition. Dense books can take longer than the estimate.
Corrie ten Boom recalls how her Christian family turned their home above a Haarlem watch shop into a refuge for Jewish people during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Living with her father, Casper, and her sister Betsie, she joins the Dutch resistance and helps conceal people threatened with arrest. The memoir follows their rescue work into imprisonment and the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where Corrie and Betsie struggle to sustain their faith.
Family conversations and everyday decisions anchor the first-person narrative, even as it reaches the brutality of concentration-camp life. Christian belief is the book's guiding framework: prayer, forgiveness and trust in God recur throughout, so the religious testimony is inseparable from the wartime memoir.
Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).
No, the prose is conversational and direct, and the first-person account follows events chronologically. Family conversations and everyday decisions make the narrative approachable, though the concentration-camp experiences are emotionally intense.
Christian faith is the guiding framework throughout the memoir. Prayer, forgiveness and trust in God shape Corrie and Betsie’s response to imprisonment, so the religious testimony is inseparable from the wartime account.
Concentration-camp brutality and the persecution of Jewish people are central, even though depictions of violence and abuse are mild. The account follows rescue work into imprisonment at Ravensbrück, making survival and oppression emotionally intense subjects.
No, it is a personal memoir focused on Corrie ten Boom’s family, their rescue work and their imprisonment. It suits someone seeking an intimate account of wartime choices and faith, with reflection grounded in personal experience.
256 pages in the Bantam 1984 mass market paperback edition.
Bantam · 1984 · Mass Market Paperback. ISBN 9780553256697.
About 5 hours at 50 pages an hour, based on the 256-page Bantam edition. Dense books can take longer.
Corrie ten Boom was a Dutch watchmaker, resistance rescuer, concentration-camp survivor, Christian writer, and international speaker. Her books and talks grew directly from her family’s efforts to shelter Jewish people during the Nazi occupation, her arrest and imprisonment at Ravensbrück, and her life after the war. Faith supplies both the motive and the interpretive frame of her work, shaping her treatment of suffering, hope, and forgiveness. In her best-known memoir, The Hiding Place, domestic particulars such as the family home and watch shop widen into an account of clandestine resistance and camp imprisonment. Shaped with John and Elizabeth Sherrill, its scene-based storytelling makes historical catastrophe legible through memory, practical choices, and family life.
Elizabeth Sherrill was a Christian nonfiction writer and longtime Guideposts editor whose best-known work grew from collaborative testimony. She and John Sherrill interviewed subjects and surrounding witnesses, checked photographs, and visited locations, then shaped the material into clear first-person narratives that kept the witness in front. Her compact structures tend to begin with crisis and move scene by scene toward resolution, locating faith in practical danger rather than abstract argument. In The Hiding Place, the Sherrills helped Corrie ten Boom reconstruct the physical world of resistance and imprisonment while preserving her doubt, weariness, and difficulty forgiving. God's Smuggler applies the same method to Brother Andrew's clandestine Cold War journeys, using border crossings, humor, and reversals to carry the spiritual testimony.
John Sherrill brought a magazine editor's command of scene and pacing to Christian nonfiction, usually working with Elizabeth Sherrill and the person whose experience supplied the story. His collaborative books place belief inside events where choices have immediate consequences. The Hiding Place, coauthored with Corrie ten Boom and Elizabeth, joins the ten Boom family's rescue work and imprisonment to the difficult practice of forgiveness. God's Smuggler treats Brother Andrew's Bible missions behind the Iron Curtain as a sequence of crossings, inspections, and answered prayers rather than a theological lecture. In They Speak with Other Tongues, Sherrill becomes both reporter and participant, moving from skeptical investigation of charismatic worship to an account that includes his own experience.
Viktor E. Frankl
Biography & Memoir · History · Religion & Spirituality
