Corrie ten Boom
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
50 free Corrie Ten Boom trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Corrie ten Boom was a middle-aged Dutch shopkeeper's daughter when the German occupation turned her family home into a refuge for Jews and resistance workers. Betrayed and arrested, she lost her father and sister in captivity, survived, and spent the rest of her long life telling audiences around the world that forgiveness is possible. These questions follow the whole story: the crowded house of her childhood, the secret room and the raid, the prisons and camps, the bestselling memoir The Hiding Place and the film made from it, and the later years of travel, writing and honours. The quiz suits readers of The Hiding Place, church and homeschool groups, students of the Second World War, and anyone who enjoys facts about a remarkable life. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Corrie ten Boom was the Netherlands' first woman licensed in which trade, her father Casper's craft?
Watchmaking
Watchmaking became Corrie's trade after she took over the shop's bookkeeping while her sister Betsie was ill. She found she loved the business side and never gave the job back.
Q 02Corrie ten Boom died in 1983 on which day, which Jewish tradition reserves for the specially blessed?
Her own birthday
Her own birthday, 15 April, was the day Corrie ten Boom died, exactly 91 years after she was born a month premature. She had outlived her brother and both sisters by decades.
Q 03What freed Corrie ten Boom from a Nazi camp in 1944, twelve days after her sister died there?
A clerical error
A clerical error set Corrie ten Boom free, as she learned only afterwards. She was told that the other women of her age in the camp were sent to the gas chambers soon after she left.
Q 04Behind a false wall in which room of the ten Boom house was the secret hiding place built?
Corrie's bedroom
Corrie's bedroom, up a steep staircase, concealed the narrow space, which was built to hold six people and had its own ventilation. Everyone in hiding practised racing up to it.
Q 05Which pests in Corrie and Betsie ten Boom's camp barracks kept guards away from their Bible meetings?
Fleas
Fleas infested the barracks so badly that the guards kept their distance, as the sisters later found out. Betsie had insisted on thanking God even for them when Corrie complained.
Q 06What disrupted the 1975 Beverly Hills premiere of The Hiding Place, the film of Corrie ten Boom's memoir?
A tear-gas canister
A tear-gas canister marked with a swastika was thrown into the theatre, forcing the crowd out. Corrie ten Boom said that evening that people who hate need to be loved, and the film opened the next night.
Q 07Corrie ten Boom meant to ask an official for five of what, then heard herself request one hundred?
Ration cards
Ration cards went only to non-Jewish Dutch citizens, so people in hiding had no way to get food coupons. The official, who ran the local card office, handed over all hundred.
Q 08Which Nazi camp for women, north of Berlin, held Corrie ten Boom and killed her sister Betsie?
Ravensbrück
Ravensbrück received the sisters in September 1944, after months in a Dutch prison and a Dutch camp. Betsie died there that December, aged 59, and Corrie walked out days later.
Q 09In which Dutch city, the capital of North Holland, did Corrie ten Boom's family keep its shop?
Haarlem
Haarlem had been home to the ten Boom shop since Corrie's grandfather opened it in 1837. He started the business with 100 old Dutch guilders.
Q 10What alarm did the Dutch resistance fit in Corrie ten Boom's house to send people rushing to the secret room?
A buzzer
A buzzer could be heard all through the house, warning of security sweeps in the neighbourhood. The resistance sent an architect to design both it and the secret room.
Q 11Which American evangelist's film company, World Wide Pictures, made the 1975 movie of Corrie ten Boom's memoir?
Billy Graham
Billy Graham also wrote the preface to the memoir, and The Hiding Place became the most widely seen picture his studio ever produced.
Q 12Roughly how many Jews and other refugees are Corrie ten Boom's family and their helpers credited with saving?
About 800
About 800 lives is the usual estimate for the whole network, which passed most people on to other safe houses. Only five or six lived in the ten Boom home at any one time.
Q 13What has Corrie ten Boom's old family home been since 1988, five years after her death?
A museum
Q 21In which war-torn country did Corrie ten Boom, aged 75, earn the nickname Double-old Grandmother?
Vietnam
Vietnam is where she turned 75 while working with the relief agency World Vision. Her passports over the years list her job as sanatorium director, then authoress, then evangelist.
Q 22What kind of site in Darmstadt, Germany, did Corrie ten Boom rent in 1949 as a refuge for displaced people?
A former Nazi camp
A former Nazi camp, once used as a concentration camp, became her centre for war refugees, and she raised funds to keep it open until 1960. Betsie had pictured such a place before she died.
Q 23Which unlikely group did Corrie ten Boom's post-war home in the Netherlands shelter alongside camp survivors?
A museum now fills the house, where three generations of the family lived from 1837 to 1945. Visitors can look into the secret room itself.
Q 14At 85, Corrie ten Boom left the Netherlands for which American state, where she spent her final years?
California
California became her home in 1977, when she settled in the town of Placentia after some thirty years of almost constant travel as a speaker.
Q 15Corrie ten Boom's family church, where her brother Willem was a minister, followed which reformer's teaching?
John Calvin
John Calvin's teaching shaped the Dutch Reformed Church, and the ten Booms took from their faith that the Jews were precious to God and all people equal. They shared food, money and shelter.
Q 16In which German city did Corrie ten Boom shake the hand of a former camp guard after a 1947 talk on forgiveness?
Munich
Munich was where the man came up to her in a church basement and asked to be forgiven. She wrote that she could not feel it, and simply made herself lift her hand.
Q 17How was Corrie ten Boom held for her first months in a Dutch prison after the 1944 raid on her home?
In solitary confinement
In solitary confinement she waited three months for her first hearing. Betsie was being held in another cell of the same prison.
Q 18Which Jerusalem institution named Corrie ten Boom Righteous Among the Nations in December 1967?
Yad Vashem
Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, honoured Corrie first and added her father Casper and sister Betsie decades later. The title goes to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews.
Q 19What silenced Corrie ten Boom in 1978, ending three decades of public speaking around the world?
A stroke
A stroke took her speech in 1978 and a second left her paralysed. She lived five more years, cared for at home by a companion who later wrote a book about that quiet time.
Q 20Honoured in Jerusalem in 1967 for saving Jews, what did Corrie ten Boom do in the Garden of the Righteous?
Planted a tree
Corrie planted a tree in the garden as part of the ceremony, fourteen years after a visa first took her to Israel. Her father and sister received the same honour decades later.
Dutch collaborators
Dutch collaborators, left jobless after the liberation, were taken in at the rehabilitation home she set up. The idea came from her late sister Betsie.
Q 24Which Dutch prison near The Hague, nicknamed the Oranjehotel, first held Corrie ten Boom after her arrest?
Scheveningen
Scheveningen earned its wartime nickname because so many of its prisoners were loyal to the House of Orange. Corrie's father Casper died ten days after being brought in.
Q 25At the Vught camp in the Netherlands, Corrie ten Boom was put to work in a factory making what?
Aircraft radios
Aircraft radios were assembled by prisoners at Vught, and Corrie found the work light under a kindly prisoner-foreman. Betsie, already ailing, was set to sewing prison uniforms.
Q 26Corrie ten Boom's brother Willem earned a doctorate at Leipzig in 1928 with a thesis on which rising danger?
Racial antisemitism
Racial antisemitism was already spreading in Germany and France when Willem studied it. He later ran a nursing home in Hilversum that took in Jews fleeing Nazi Germany.
Q 27Corrie ten Boom's nephew Kik, a resistance worker, died in which Nazi camp where Anne Frank also perished?
Bergen-Belsen
Bergen-Belsen claimed Kik, whose real name was Christiaan, after his arrest for underground work. The family did not learn what had become of him until 1953.
Q 28What did Corrie ten Boom's grandfather begin in 1844 that her family kept up in the same house for a century?
Prayers for the Jews
Prayers for the Jews and for the peace of Jerusalem began as a small group, an unusual idea among Christians of the day. Three generations of the family kept it going.
Q 29Corrie ten Boom's memoir The Hiding Place opens with a crowded party celebrating which family milestone?
The shop's centenary
The shop's centenary brought half the town to the house in 1937. Among the guests was a Jewish man just escaped from Germany, whose beard had been burned off by thugs.
Q 30In The Hiding Place, how did Corrie ten Boom's romance with Karel, the only man she loved, end?
He married a rich woman
He married a rich woman, and Corrie never wed. She and her elder sister Betsie stayed on in the family home with their father for the rest of his life.