The Face That Death Could Not Touch

In December 1944, Betsie ten Boom died on the cold floor of Ravensbrück concentration camp. She and her sister Corrie had been arrested for hiding Jewish families in their home in Haarlem, Holland. The Nazi guards saw another prisoner lost to disease and exhaustion — just one more number erased from the roll.

But when Corrie knelt beside her sister's body, she saw something the guards could not comprehend. Betsie's face, gaunt and hollowed for months, had become full and young again — radiant, as though the suffering had been peeled away like a husk. "It was as if I were looking at an angel," Corrie later wrote.

In the weeks before her death, Betsie had whispered words that defied everything around them: "There is no pit so deep that God's love is not deeper still." She spoke of forgiving their captors. She dreamed aloud of turning a former camp into a place of healing after the war — a dream Corrie would eventually fulfill.

The writer of Wisdom tells us that "the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment will ever touch them." To the watching world, Betsie's death looked like defeat — a body broken by cruelty. But she had been tested like gold in the furnace and found worthy. The torment touched her body but never reached her soul. What her captors meant as destruction, the Almighty received as a homecoming.