Corrie ten Boom

Two years after the Nazis took over the Netherlands in 1940, Corrie ten Boom and her family began taking in Jews and Dutch resistance fighters who needed to hide. At the time, ten Boom was an unmarried fifty-one-year-old watchmaker. Hardly the type of stuff heroes are typically made of. But she made her decisions one situation at a time and her family co-signed all of them.

It's impossible to guess how many people they saved, but one thing we know is that ten Boom's father and sister Betsie both died after the family was finally taken into custody in 1944. Ten months after ten Boom herself landed in Ravensbruck Concentration Camp in Germany and one week before all the women in her age group were sent to the gas chambers, she was released -- because of a clerical error!

When the war ended a few months later, ten Boom immediately kicked into high gear, first helping to set up refuge houses in the Netherlands for other returning concentration camp victims. Then, she took her in-your-face woman self right back to Germany to begin re-building her emotional and psychological psyche.

For the next thirty-seven years, ten Boom traveled the world (visiting sixty different countries) and wrote more than two dozen books, the most famous of which -- the story of her adventures during the war -- was published in 1971 under the title The Hiding Place. After fearlessly and boldly resisting Nazi authority, surviving the horrors of Ravensbruck, and suffering the loss of her beloved father and sister, of all the messages she could have chosen to give to those who flocked to hear her speak, the one she always gave was: "There is no pit so deep that God is not deeper still."