Peter van woerden biography of rory

The Watchmaker's Daughter:
The True Story of World War II Heroine Corrie ten Boom
by larry loftis
william morrow, 384 pages, $16.49 

Eighty years ago, on February 28, 1944, the Nazis arrested a Dutch family in Haarlem in the Netherlands.

The eighty-four-year-old watchmaker Casper ten Boom—known as “Haarlem’s Grand Old Man”—and his daughters Betsie and Corrie (ages fifty-eight and fifty-two), had been hiding Jews; six people were huddled in a tiny secret room behind a false wall in Corrie’s top floor bedroom.

It would become known to millions of people as “the hiding place”; those who sought safety there called it “the Angel’s Den.”

The story of the ten Booms is one of extraordinary power: of a family sacrificing all for the Jewish people, of faith and courage under brutal conditions, of seemingly impossible forgiveness.

It is a story for all times, but especially for our times, as anti-Semitism rears its ugly hea