The Hiding Place (2023)
In 1971 Corrie ten Boom’s memoir, The Hiding Place was published, and four years later, World Wide Pictures and the Billy Graham Association released a film based on the book, with Jeannette Clift playing Corrie, Julie Harris playing Corrie’s sister, Betsie, and Arthur O’Connell playing Casper, Corrie and Betsie’s father.
It’s roughly fifty years later, and a play has been made of The Hiding Place, commissioned in honor of Jeannette Clift, who died in 2017.
For those who may not know about Corrie ten Boom, she was born on April 15, 1892 in Haarlem, a suburb of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. For over a hundred years, the ten Boom family lived and worked out of a house they called the Beje, making and repairing watches and clocks. When the Second World War came, the ten Booms took in Jews who were on their way to hiding places in other locations.
It was a complicated business. A hundred extra ration cards were procured via the underground, and a small hiding place was built in Corrie’s room at the top of the house. Drills were performed periodically to make sure everyone could get inside in roughly a minute. It didn’t matter if it was mealtime, or the middle of the night, or whatever—a drill could happen at any time. Between 1942 and 1944 the ten Booms sheltered over eight hundred Jews.
In February of 1944, Casper, Corrie, and Betsie were betrayed and arrested. Casper, who was in his eighties, died ten days after the arrest. Corrie and Betsie spent months in Schveningen Prison, then were sent to a camp called Vught and another called Ravensbruck. Only Corrie returned.
The story has an added dimension, as the ten Boom family were Christians and saw the hand of God in everything that happened to them, even when events were at their worst. For one thing, Betsie and Corrie managed, by the grace of God, to smuggle a small Bible into the camps despite the Nazis stripping them of everything else they owned.
After the war, Corrie traveled all over the world telling her story, and everyone called her Tante Corrie, or Aunt Corrie. Among other truths, she would always say, “There is no pit so deep that God’s love isn’t deeper still.”
In the new play, Nan Gurley is Corrie, Carrie Tillis is Betsie, and John Schuck is Casper, and as it’s structured like a play, there are constant revolving sets and lights directing our attention to certain aspects of a scene. However, it’s filmed like a movie, with strategic cuts and close-ups. The first act of the play is mostly flashbacks, sometimes flashbacks within flashbacks, as Corrie is being interrogated by a Nazi officer. There’s a big difference, however, between what she tells the officer and what is in her head. Above all, she sticks to her guns that the ten Booms had no Jews or ration cards.
There’s a vigorous pulse to the play, as it’s set around the rhythms and workings of a clock. In between ticks and tocks we have time to reflect and see more of Corrie’s story, which is built around the ten Booms receiving their many visitors, among them Pickwick, a family friend, and Otto, a rather sour young German who came to work at the Beje for a short time and who would go away in a huff because, as he said later, “They read the Bible at me.”
Nan Gurley was an excellent Corrie. She really captured Corrie’s accent, her mannerisms, and what she was like, and she was the first to say that she was not mild-mannered like her sister. When Otto comes to work, Corrie stares at him as if she’d like to punch his lights out.
Carrie Tillis was a wonderful Betsie. She and Julie Harris are two peas in a pod as far as their Betsies are concerned, and that’s a high compliment. The same goes for John Schuck—he’s a little less jolly than Arthur O’Connell, but not by much, and both actors bring a quiet steeliness to their turns.
The play isn’t too heavy-handed in its exposition of the Holocaust, although it does tell quite a bit. In one scene, while Betsie reads the Bible to the ladies in their barracks building, a male prisoner stands tied to a torture device, slowly dying. In another, Nazi guards mime hitting prisoners with rifle butts. In still another, Corrie stares into the crematorium as if it’s the mouth of hell. It’s extremely sobering and effective.
I think the play will hit differently depending on the prior knowledge of the viewer. I have grown up on Corrie ten Boom’s books so I had to wonder what this version was going to be like, and I couldn’t be more pleased with it, albeit with a few very minor beefs.
First of all, it might have served the play better if the film had allowed it to be a play. If we have filming angles and cuts directing our attention, having the play light and revolve scenes feels a little redundant. In this case, parking the camera and allowing the scenes to play out may have been a preferable option, and there are plenty of fine examples of where this has been done, such as Driving Miss Daisy with Angela Lansbury and James Earl Jones or Our Town with Paul Newman, both of which were films that gave their plays room to breathe (If anyone has the opportunity to see either of these, by the way, go for it. They’re on DVD from PBS and superb.).
The play does take some liberties with Corrie’s story for continuity and time, which are to be expected. In the play, Vught and Ravensbruck were combined into one. Otto, who in real life was an unsympathetic German employee that worked with the ten Booms for a short time, is also an officer and betrays the ten Booms in the play. Seriously, the guy is like a bad penny.
In real life, the traitor was a Dutchman named Jan Vogel, who would later be sentenced to death for betraying many of his countrymen to the Nazis. However, a few days before he died, Corrie received a letter from Vogel telling her he had become a Christian. Otto does this in the play as well, but he meets Corrie at a train station, and while she forgives him she can barely look at him. While it does the job of narrative shorthand pretty well, people who are familiar with Tante Corrie might have to check themselves a little bit.
There are other elements that don’t come off the way they should. In one of the first scenes when Corrie as a young girl begs to go to Amsterdam with Papa and Betsie, Papa tells Corrie to lift his suitcase, which she can’t. In actuality, this was part of an object lesson Papa gave to Corrie one day when she asked him about something she had heard about called “sexsin,” and Papa wanted to demonstrate that some knowledge was too heavy for her to carry as a young girl. To see the lesson stripped of its context felt a little odd and it didn’t make much sense.
Other than that, the play is an amazing piece of work and I’m so glad it exists. I hope as many people can see it as possible and learn about Tante Corrie and her clear message of not only helping others but obeying God and following Jesus.
The Hiding Place is currently in select theaters on August 3rd and 5th in the United States and August 16th in theaters worldwide. Not rated. The play’s website can be found here.
My grade: A+
Principal Cast: Nan Gurley, Carrie Tillis, John Schuck
Directed by Laura Matula.
Written by A.S. Peterson.