“The Watchmaker’s Daughter” is a biography of the remarkable life and deep religious faith of Dutch resistance member Corrie Ten Boom written by bestselling author Larry Loftus. Corrie, a watchmaker along with her Father, and her family hid and aided many Jews and other persons pursued and persecuted by the Nazis. She was eventually betrayed and sent to Ravensbruck Concentration Camp which she barely survived and only with the hand of God interceding to get her released via a clerical error shortly before she was to be executed. Along the way, the Nazis killed her sister, brother, nephew and Father, the persons most precious to her. Perhaps the most important part of the book is how Corrie came to forgive the Nazis that persecuted her and the Dutch informant who betrayed her to the Nazis. After the war Corrie travelled the world for decades bringing her message of Jesus being with her in the darkest places and how he allowed her to forgive her persecutors. Corrie observed that those persons who were persecuted by the Nazis that forgave them after the war were able to move on with their life while those that harbored unforgiveness were trapped in their bitterness.

Corrie wrote her classic autobiography “The Hiding Place” after the war which is renown in christian literature. However, Loftus performed substantial research and determined that “The Hiding Place” included less than 10 percent of the full story of Corrie during the war due to her writing it without the full range of research that Loftus was able to draw on. He drew on Corrie’s full collection of letters, photos, and notes along with diaries and letters from others in her circle as well as a trove of photographs and interviews with some participants still alive to produce a more full tale of that time. The book focuses on Corrie’s resistance work and persecution in the concentration camps but gives enough details of her life before and after the war to give a well rounded picture of her life. Corrie wrote many books herself about her life before and after the war so this ground was already well covered. As great a book as “The Hiding Place” was “The Watchmaker’s Daughter” was even more interesting with the additional information provided by Loftus’s research. This was an excellent book and a quick read that added much to my knowledge of the heroic Corrie ten Boom and the persons that surrounded her.