The Watchmaker’s Daughter sets out to tell what The Hiding Place left out, and it succeeds. Loftis intersperses accounts familiar to The Hiding Place readers with details of Allied and Nazi military tactics and espionage attempts as well as wartime experiences of Anne Frank and Audrey Hepburn, who both lived in the Netherlands at the time. Loftis includes Corrie’s post-war travel, as she told her family’s story in more than 60 countries, and a final section that tells what happened to several people during or after the war.
Millions of people have read the Ten Boom family story of courage and faithfulness during World War II as shared in the 1971 bestseller The Hiding Place. Corrie ten Boom, along with her father and sister, coordinated underground work during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, hiding Jews and other underground workers in their home. Larry Loftis’ The Watchmaker’s Daughter (William Morrow 2023) pulls together information from letters, journals, and books written by Ten Boom family members or their friends to tell about their underground activities and their faith even after Nazis arrested them.
The Watchmaker’s Daughter sets out to tell what The Hiding Place left out, and it succeeds.