This book was a New Year ‘s gift from one of my foreign friends, and it is one of her favorite books of all time. After reading this, I came to realize that why this can be her favorite one.
This story is a true story happened during the Nazi madness swept across Europe, and the author survived at last and told her story to the world through this book.
A Dutch watchmaker’s family in Holland was prompted by their love of Jesus to risk everything for the sake of others. Despite the danger and threat of discovery, they offered shelter to persecuted Jews. Then a trap led to the family’s arrest. After the whole family was sent to prison, their father died and then some of the relatives were discharged luckily during the process except the author and her sister Betsie were sent to other concentration camps. During those dark, hopeless and tough days, they had their Bible around them pretty much the whole trip and prayed and worshiped God, and let Him guide their way and gave them hope and courage to live along. Unfortunately, Betsie died because of her health issue just before the release came. The author went back to her home town alone after she was released and continued helping those people who needed help, especially those people who suffered from the war and needed emotional help. At the same time, she addressed speeches from place to place to encourage people and helped people to realize that at some point, you need to forgive your enemy and most importantly, you should learn to forgive yourself and learn to let go. Just like Betsie quoted : “ if people can be taught to hate, then can be taught to love!”
So as you can see, this is a sort of religious novel. It took me a whole month to go through the whole book, because the words are a little bit difficult to understand and I don’t know that much about this religion, so I was taking my steps very slowly. During the reading process, I was impressed by the descriptions of some details about people’s inner feelings or people’s talking. Let’s take one part as an example: Young and old, poor and rich, scholarly gentlemen and illiterate servant girls--- only to Father did it seem that they were all alike. That was Father’s secret! Not that he overlooked the differences in people; that he didn’t know they were there. This is a description about author’s father, and I kept thinking about the capitalized Father whether it has a symbolic meaning. We can tell that her father is a true believer for God and he is doing exactly what God dose. There is no doubt that every man is equal in front of God in the Christian culture or religion. God loves His people, no matter he is colored or not; no matter he is rich or not; no matter he is guilty or not, He embraces all his children. This is my understanding about God so far. Meanwhile, recently I’ve been watching Young Sheldon and Sheldon’s mom is a believer. I saw how Christianity influences people’s day to day life in this series and that’s why there are a lot screen shots from the play in my writing.
But in my humble opinion, no matter how almighty God is, He is invisible. Therefore, I was thinking maybe at some point, under those intense circumstances, the author’s father was an existence as a God, I mean he played a role as a “God” to give his daughters hope and comfort and in addition, he guided them closer to God. However, my foreign friend doesn’t think so. She is a believer and I guess that was Becca of there is only one true God in her mind, so after listening to my ideas she disagreed with it and said maybe the author called her father “Father” as his name.
That makes sense though.
As for me, I ain’t no believer, but I do respect all kinds of religion and belief. Even though people have various kinds of belief, I believe their core is to teach people how to be a descent human being or do no harm. That is why I respect them really.
Here is a small story about my foreign friend and I , we met each other on an activity and switched our wechat numbers. at that time, she’s been to China only three weeks. At the very weekend, she invited me to her apartment to visit her and her husband. To be honest, I was shocked at that time. Wasn’t it too early to visit each other’s house? I told my friends and they warned me to be careful. But somehow there was a strong feeling rose inside my body that kinda telling me I can trust them 100percent and they won’t do anything bad. So I went alone and we had a wonderful talk and incredible memory. She told me the other day that I was her first officially-made friend when she came to China.
I remember that in The Mysterious Stanger, Mark Twain insisted that man drop his religious illusion and depend upon himself, not providence, to make a better world. On the one hand, I do agree with Twain, because some people just misunderstood the true meaning of some religion and do bad things in the name of God or other religion. At this point, people shouldn’t have belief. One the other hand, if people ever have belief and that helps them to become a better person and makes them happy, that couldn’t be better. It reminds me of a sentence: Do the right thing, especially when nobody’s watching. So I guess people’s belief is the thing that pushes them to do the right thing no matter when, just like what the author’s family did.
Reading is really an amazing stuff that takes you to different people’s different world and different story. This was an incredible adventure with Betsie and Corrie, and seems like it is a treasure and experience of my life already.
