‘To Be Willing is the Most Important’
Nurse Reflects on Life with Corrie ten Boom

Ellen de Kroon Stamps could have been “just a nurse” all her life.

But for nine years, she led an exciting life tramping around the world as secretary, nurse and general troubleshooter for renowned missionary Corrie ten Boom, author of “The Hiding Place” and “Tramp for the Lord.”

“If I just sit and look back at Corrie’s life, it’s a gift Corrie gave me: working in prison, working with children, traveling and speaking,” Stamps said as she sat in the living room of the South Richmond home she shares with her husband of 32 years, Robert, a retired United Methodist minister.

Like ten Boom, Stamps was born in the Netherlands and was a member of the Dutch Reformed Church. Stamps received her nursing education at the Academic Hospital of Utrecht in the Netherlands.

Corrie ten Boom was the first woman in Holland to be licensed as a watchmaker, but she’s best known as a leader in the Dutch underground during World War II. She and her family hid hundreds of Jews from the Nazis before being arrested in 1944. The family spent the remaining war years in jails and concentration camps.
Ten Boom died in 1983 on her 91st birthday and is buried in Orange County, Calif., where she lived the last six years of her life.

The Journey Starts
In 1968, ten Boom needed nursing care and Stamps was the nurse who answered the call.
“Corrie said: ‘I am so thankful that God is giving you to me.’ I said: ‘I cannot help you [on a regular basis]. I don’t drive. I don’t speak English. I don’t type.’” Ten Boom wouldn’t take no for an answer, and three months later Stamps was working for her, a job that would continue for nine years.

“I learned to type, but I didn’t like sitting and typing long letters. I learned English. I had to learn it on the road,” she said. “I learned to drive in three months in the Netherlands. That was a miracle because you don’t learn to drive in the Netherlands in three months.”
“I traveled always with a typewriter. In hotels, the bathroom was my office,” said Stamps, who chronicled her years with ten Boom in “My Years with Corrie,” published in 1978.

Touching the Holocaust
Before meeting ten Boom, Stamps knew the “horrible tragedy of the Jewish people” only through books, stories and other people.

“Through Corrie, I learned the greater story: People in Holland had given their lives to help as many Jews as they could,” Stamps said. “To touch a person who had lost family and friends makes a story a reality. Working together in Yad Vashem [Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem], Corrie introduced me to the numbers of people who died. My heart broke. Only through the birds who flew into the building and made the most joyous sound, I knew I had become a part of a great mission to be a person to help Corrie ten Boom tell her story.
“Maybe this is a help and a part of the healing today: Seeing Corrie forgive is a sign of God’s love in this world.”

The nurse learned much from her charge.

“When Corrie was 50, she was in a cattle car on her way to Ravensbruck,” a concentration camp in Germany. “Corrie said: ‘Life does not end when things get difficult,’ Stamps recalled. “I learned that to be willing is the most important thing. She didn’t always look for her own strength. She lived close to God. If God called her to go to Vietnam, she went. Corrie thought that with God there were no limitations.”

Darkness to Light
Ten Boom turned every worry and every burden into prayer, Stamps added. Ten Boom’s family perished during the Holocaust. “It’s like God took away everything that she could easily trust in. I think that is where her incredible turning over to God came from. Corrie was always saying: ‘In the darkest times, the light of God is always stronger.’”

Life was never boring with ten Boom.

“I cannot remember getting tired. It was such an exciting time in my life. I was in my 30s. It was wonderful,” Stamps said.

Getting older allows a person to be bold, she added. “I would say: ‘Corrie, you can’t say that.’ She would say: ‘You can when you get old.’ She had an incredible way with people. Very uncomplicated.”

Now that Stamps and her husband are retired, they have a new set of tires. “Corrie called retirement getting new tires,” Stamps said laughing. “There is no retirement for God’s children.”

The Stamps recently worked in a week-long mission program for children in Richmond’s Church Hill area. The couple also volunteers at the Richmond Jail. Robert takes communion to the inmates, and Ellen leads a weekly Bible study and works with women in solitary confinement.

“Corrie has given me a tremendous love for people in prison,” said Ellen Stamps as she held up a handful of notes written by inmates.

Alberta Lindsey spent 42 years as a newspaper reporter. Now a freelance writer in Richmond, she enjoys reading mysteries, traveling and photography.

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