The Hiding Place: The One Hundredth Birthday Party Summary & Analysis

Corrie wakes up eagerly, wondering if it’s sunny or foggy outside her house, which she nicknames the Beje. She puts on her new maroon dress; she feels that she looks nice in the new outfit, even though she’s forty-five and losing her figure. It’s her sister Betsie who always looks graceful, no matter what she wears, but Corrie admires her, rather than envying her.

Corrie hears the doorbell ring, although it’s still early in the morning. She carefully descends the steep stairs which link the many floors in her narrow, typically Dutch house. However, Betsie gets there before her and answers the door to find a young boy delivering flowers. Looking for the card, the sisters see the gift is from Pickwick, a wealthy customer who often visits the family. Pickwick is “the ugliest man in Haarlem,” but he endears himself to everyone with his kindness and generosity.

Betsie and Corrie carry the flowers into the shop, where Father displays his wares and performs complicated watch repairs. In the center of the room is Corrie’s own bench, flanked by the workspaces of the two employees, Hans and Christoffels. At this moment, all the clocks are striking seven o’clock. Ever since she was a child, Corrie has loved to enter the room and hear their mingled chimes on the hour. And today is a special occasion, as the family is hosting a party to mark the one hundredth birthday of the watch shop.

More and more flower deliveries arrive at the house. People throughout the city are eager to offer their respects to Father, sometimes known as “Haarlem’s Grand Old Man.” Betsie is especially happy to receive them; because the house is so narrow and dark, it’s hard for her to cultivate a garden or even a window box of flowers.

Soon the apprentice Hans arrives, followed by the shop saleslady, Toos. Toos has such a harsh and negative demeanor that she’s almost unemployable, but Father has not only given her a job but charmed her completely.

Corrie goes upstairs to set out plates for breakfast. For her, the dining room is the “heart of the home.” She’s eaten all her meals here since childhood, and as a girl used to do her homework on the table and sometimes convert it into a fort. Once the table used to be crowded at every meal, but now only Father, Corrie, and Betsie use it. Her older siblings, Willem and Nollie, have married and left home, and Mama and her aunts are dead. Father has welcomed a stream of foster children into the Beje, but they too have grown up and moved away.

As Betsie brings in coffee and breakfast, Father carefully descends the stairs. He prays over the meal and then compliments Betsie and Corrie on the “new styles” they are wearing, saying their mother would have loved to see them. The sisters laugh, knowing that their dresses are very conservative and, in fact, the embarrassment of their young nieces.

Betsie reminisces that Mama could make every day into a special occasion. Since she was friends with almost everyone in Haarlem, “especially the poor, sick, and neglected,” there was always an excuse for a birthday party or celebratory meal. Caught up in memories himself, Father reminds his daughters that he was born right here, in the dining room. Since his mother had tuberculosis and communicated it to many of her babies, he was the first of his siblings to survive infancy.

Stepping back from the narrative, Corrie remarks that she could never have guessed, on that happy day, what lay in store for her family. It would have been impossible to imagine Father dead and buried in an unmarked grave, or Betsie “standing naked before a roomful of men.”

At eight-thirty, Hans and Toos come upstairs for the daily Bible reading. However, Father doesn’t begin as Christoffels is still absent. Christoffels is an old and “wizened” man, who looked like a beggar when Corrie first met him. He’d been an itinerant clock mender for his whole life, but since that trade was going out of fashion, he offered his services to Father, who immediately hired him.

Father has just begun to read when Christoffels arrives. Although he’s usually dressed in tattered clothes, today he’s wearing a new suit with a flashy tie. Tactfully, Father pretends not to notice anything different, greets him formally, and continues his reading.

Betsie and Corrie are busy for the rest of the morning, finishing the cooking and greeting callers eager to congratulate Father. Running out of cups, Betsie sends Corrie to ask their sister Nollie for hers. She changes into an old dress and zips through the city on her bicycle. She asks herself how she could have foreseen, on that carefree morning, a day when she would stand outside Nollie’s house paralyzed with fear, desperate to know what was happening inside.

Nollie gives Corrie the cups, promising to come herself when she’s finished baking cookies and her children have arrived home. She reassures Corrie that she’s bringing Peter, her musically gifted son and Corrie’s unofficial favorite nephew. When Corrie returns, the Beje is even more crowded—the mayor of Haarlem is there, as well as the postman and several policemen from the station near the house.

After lunch, neighborhood children begin to arrive, making a beeline for Father. Children love him because he’s always kind and always wearing many interesting watches. Pickwick himself arrives and sinks down into a chair. He amuses the surrounding children by pretending his enormous stomach is a table for his coffee cup.

Soon, Peter looks up from the piano to announce that “the competition” is here. He means Mr. Kan and Mrs. Kan, who own the watch shop across the street. More adept at business than Father, they have cheaper prices and always sell more. But Father admonishes Peter, telling him that the Kans are “colleagues.” Father is so oblivious to practical concerns that he often forgets to send bills to his clients. It’s Corrie who keeps the business running, managing the books and creating window displays that attract customers.

All through the afternoon, people wander in and out of the house. The guests are rich and poor, educated and illiterate. However, to Father, everyone is alike. The secret of his universal popularity is “not that he overlooked the differences in people” but that “he didn’t know they were there.”

Still, Corrie wonders when Willem will arrive. Although they’re both grown up now, Corrie feels “a great deal of little-sister worship” for her elder brother. She feels that he has true insight into what is going on in the world. Ten years ago, he wrote his doctoral thesis on the political evil “taking root” in Germany, and people laughed at him. Now, however, Germany is a source of unease to all of Europe. Indeed, many German watchmakers with whom the ten Booms have business relationships have gone out of business recently, and Willem says this is the result of aggression against Jews.

Willem is a preacher of the Dutch Reformed Church, and his job is to reach out to Jews and draw them to Christianity. However, Corrie has never seen him convert a single person. Instead, he’s built a nursing home for elderly Jews. In the last few months, many younger Jews have arrived from Germany to seek shelter with him; at the moment, the nursing home is so crowded that he and his family are sleeping in the corridor.

As Corrie refills coffee cups, she asks some acquaintances if they think Germany will instigate a war. Someone suggests that the “big countries” will figure it out, and Holland doesn’t need to worry. After all, the country was neutral in the last war.

Just then, Willem arrives, along with his wife Tine and their four children. He’s also leading a young Jewish man, whose traditional beard has been burned off his face, leaving a large wound. Willem introduces the man in German, then informs Corrie in Dutch that the man fled Munich yesterday after being attacked by a group of teenagers. Father rises to shake the man’s hand, and Corrie hurries to bring coffee and cookies.

Everyone is murmuring about this man’s misfortune, and Corrie hears someone predict that people who do such things will be punished, as “Germany is a civilized country.” That afternoon, no one dreams that events in Germany will cast a huge shadow over Holland, and that everyone in Haarlem will be affected.

As Corrie goes to bed, she feels gripped by memory. Childhood scenes flash before her, each one urgent. Looking back on that night, she knows that memories are as important to the future as they are to the past: in fact, past experiences, “when we let God use them, become the mysterious and perfect preparation for the work He will give us to do.”