“Millions of Jews Died in That War… It Was a Bad Time”: The Holocaust in Adventures in Odyssey’s Escape to the Hiding Place

Brittingham Brittingham

doi:10.3390/genealogy3040063

Abstract

In 2012, the Christian evangelical organization Focus on the Family published Escape to the Hiding Place, the ninth book in Adventures in Odyssey’s Imagination Station book series. This short children’s book is a creative reimagining of Corrie ten Boom’s Holocaust memoir The Hiding Place (1971). Corrie was a Christian who lived in Haarlem during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Corrie and her family helped hide Jews and non-Jews from arrest and deportation at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators. Corrie’s story has played a significant role in the evangelical Christian encounter with the Holocaust. Like every Imagination Station story, Escape to the Hiding Place features two cousins, Patrick and Beth, from the fictional town of Odyssey. They travel back in time to help Jews escape the Nazis, all so they can learn a lesson about their ability to aid others in need. A harrowing adventure ensues. This paper does not criticize the valuable rescue work undertaken by Christians during the Holocaust, nor does it criticize the contemporary evangelical desire to draw meaning from Christian rescue work. Rather, the fictional narrative under consideration skews toward an overly simplistic representation of the Christian response to the murder of Jews during World War Two, contains a flat reading of Dutch society during the war, and fails to address antisemitism or racism. This paper situates Escape to the Hiding Place within a wider evangelical popular culture that has struggled with the history of the Holocaust apart from redemptive Christian biographies.

Highlights

Corrie ten Boom is well-known among American evangelicals (Ariel 1991, 2001)
This paper situates Escape to the Hiding Place within a wider evangelical popular culture that has struggled with the history of the Holocaust apart from redemptive Christian biographies
While Jews appear to be especially targeted by the Nazis in Escape to the Hiding Place, antisemitism and racism are never mentioned in the story, providing no historically based reason for why the Nazis sought to capture, deport, and murder Jews

Summary

Introduction

Corrie ten Boom is well-known among American evangelicals (Ariel 1991, 2001). From her family home in Haarlem during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, Corrie and her family, members of the Dutch Reformed Church, hid Jews and non-Jews from arrest and deportation. As new generations of children grow up in American evangelical households, it is unclear just how young people will engage Corrie’s story, but publishing houses and writers are still producing adaptations, indicating that Christians recognize its ongoing relevance for young people (Benge and Benge 1999; Meloche and Pollard 2002; Wilber and Hering 2003; MacKenzie 2011; Wellman 2012; ten Boom et al 2015; Sullivan and Wines 2016). Escape to the Hiding Place (Hering and Younger 2012) is not a usual adaptation of Corrie’s memoir, since it does not directly follow Corrie’s life It is a fictional story involving two time traveling cousins who end up in the Netherlands during the Nazi occupation. I consider its relationship to Corrie’s The Hiding Place and the publishing trends in which Escape to the Hiding Place is embedded

Considerations and Scholarship

Escape to the Hiding Place

Considering Characters and Representations

On Christian Heroes

Complicating Dutch Resistance and Postwar Narratives

Conclusions