Cornelia Arnolda Johanna ten Boom was born on 15 April 1892 in Amsterdam. Her family ran the ten Boom watch shop at Barteljorisstraat 19, Haarlem, from 1837 — she was the first licensed woman watchmaker in the Netherlands.
After the May 1940 German invasion, the ten Boom family joined the Dutch resistance. A hidden room 30 inches deep was built behind a false brick wall in Corrie's second-floor bedroom, ventilated by a false chimney and accessible through a sliding panel in the linen cupboard. Between 1942 and February 1944 the family hid an estimated 800 Jews and resistance workers, most for a single night before onward transit.
"On 28 February 1944 the family was betrayed by a Dutch informant. During the Gestapo raid the six people hidden behind the wall remained undiscovered for 47 hours and eventually escaped. Corrie, her sister Betsie and their father Casper were arrested; Casper died in Scheveningen prison ten days later."
Corrie and Betsie were sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp in September 1944. Betsie died there on 16 December 1944, aged 59. Corrie was released on 28 December 1944 through what the camp records later showed was a clerical error — one week before all women her age were sent to the gas chambers.
After the war she became an itinerant preacher speaking on forgiveness, most famously of a former Ravensbrück guard she encountered at a Munich church in 1947. Her 1971 memoir The Hiding Place sold over 10 million copies. She died on her 91st birthday, 15 April 1983, in Placentia, California. The ten Boom house is preserved as a museum, the hidden room intact.