Casper ten Boom (1859-1944), Corrie ten Boom’s father, was a Dutch storekeeper who helped to hide Jews escaping the Nazi Holocaust during World War II. A member of the Dutch Reformed Church, he was in his eighties when Germany occupied his hometown of qHaarlem in The Netherlands. When Jews were forced to wear the Star of David on their clothing as a way of marking them for increasing levels of abuse and persecution, Casper chose to wear it also, as a way of identifying with his Jewish neighbors. He was arrested with his family during a Gestapo raid on their home, and died shortly after his imprisonment on March 9, 1944.
In this account shared by his grandson Peter, Corrie’s father is remembered for his last recorded words.
The long hours crept by slowly as we stood there facing the yellow brick wall. My heart was full of questions. I kept thinking of the Psalm which Grandfather had read the evening before. After our imprisonment we had been taken to the police station at Haarlem. In the gymnasium there, with thirty other prisoners lying and sitting on the floor around him, Grandfather had taken his Bible and read the Ninety-first Psalm. How peaceful those words had sounded to our anxious souls: ‘He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in Him will I trust.”
But now, standing in the corridor of Scheveningen prison, doubt filled my heart. “A thousand shall fall at thy side,” Grandfather had read, “and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee.”
But tragedy had struck. Where was the host of angels we had prayed for so often? Had God forgotten us? Then I glanced over at Grandfather sitting in the corner. There was such an expression of peace on his pale face that I could not help marveling. He actually was protected. God had built a fence around him. Suddenly I knew: The everlasting arms are around all of us. God does not make mistakes. He is at the controls.
At last they took me to my cell. As I walked past Grandfather, I stopped, bent over him, and kissed him goodbye. He looked up at me and said, “My boy, are we not a privileged generation?”
Those were his last words to me.
Source: Corrie Ten Boom, Father Ten Boom (Fleming H. Revell Company, Old Tappan, New Jersey, 1973), 10-11.