THE HIDING PLACE

REVIEWED BY BRETT WILLIS

Our rating: 5 out of 5

Rated:

Until this film was released, the usual fare from World Wide Pictures followed a predictable pattern of showing someone being repeatedly damaged by life, then finally going forward at a Billy Graham crusade. The Hiding Place was a major departure. In my opinion it’s the best movie ever made about the WWII anti-Nazi underground, combining a look at the heroism of “ordinary” people with an Evangelical undercurrent. Although I’ve seen this film many times and own a copy of it, I still get choked up as soon as the opening music score kicks in.

Caspar Ten Boom, in his seventies/eighties, runs a watch and clock shop in Haarlem, Holland, with the help of his two fiftyish unmarried daughters Cornelia and Elizabeth. The story opens in Spring 1940, just after the Nazi occupation of Holland, and runs through December 1944. A lot can happen in five years. Corrie remarks: “My life has been boring—until all this.” Though the great majority of the Dutch oppose the Nazi regime, most do little or nothing about it. And then there are people like the Ten Booms. Caspar (“Papa”) has a strong will and a sharp tongue, whether directed at a young German officer or a compromising Christian minister. Corrie remarks that she hates the Nazis. Betsie reminds Corrie that she can’t hate anyone and walk with the Lord.

We see brief glimpses of progressively more harsh Nazi policies. Repression of free speech and unauthorized meetings. This or that public place made off limits to Jews. All Jews to wear yellow stars. Then, hordes of Jewish families rousted out of bed in the middle of the night and taken to the railroad station for shipment to...well, we know where. Soon the Ten Booms find themselves helping some Jews escape. And since they’re doing underground work anyway, Corrie and Betsie’s brother Willem lets them know that he’s a part of an organized underground and they may as well join his network. After their house is properly equipped with a network telephone and a secret room (a Hiding Place), and they secure a source of extra ration cards, their waystation is open for business.

Though they help save many lives, the Ten Booms themselves are eventually caught and shipped to prisons and then to concentration camps. Corrie and Betsie, long separated, are reunited on the train to Ravensbruck Women’s Camp. While there, amidst the inhumanity of the prison guards and the harshness of many of the prisoners, Corrie realizes that she herself needs a Hiding Place. She does hate the Nazis, and by herself she can’t let go of the bitterness. She needs to be hidden in the center of God’s will. No skimping on the budget; the period atmosphere is faithfully re-created. The acting is excellent. Great work by Arthur O’Connell as “Papa,” Julie Harris as Betsie, Eileen Heckart as the loud-mouthed Jewish midwife who seems perfectly at home in a prison camp black market operation, and the then-unknown Jeanette Clift as Corrie.

Considering the subject matter, this film should get an award for its restraint. There’s no profanity. The newcomers’ showers we see at Ravensbruck are real showers rather than poison gas; furthermore, the showering scene is done with no explicit nudity. Much of the violence is off-camera. We know what’s going on—beatings, humiliation, selection for execution—but it’s all handled as discreetly as possible. Ravensbruck wasn’t a “death” camp like Auschwitz; the inmates were largely common criminals and mostly-Gentile political prisoners. It was theoretically possible to serve your sentence and then be released. And yet, the inmates were regarded as subhuman, and therefore usable in medical experiments. Some women were given treatments that the Nazis eventually hoped to use to sterilize entire “inferior” populations. Others received jagged, dirty cuts simulating shrapnel wounds, then were given anti-inflammatory drugs. None of this is mentioned in the film. The only disquieting moment along this subject is a statement that all pregnancies were sent to “experimental.”

At the end of the film, the real Corrie Ten Boom—in her eighties at that time—addresses the audience, reminding us that the same Jesus Who gave her the strength to do what she did is available to us all. Many explicitly Evangelical films sound a little sappy at the all-important point of the “altar call.” Not this one. After seeing an abridged and dramatized yet essentially accurate adaptation of her book of the same name, I challenge any viewer to look Corrie in the eye and tell her she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. I consider this film a must-see for teens and up.