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One of the advantages of an audiobook is that your eyes can’t skim text – you hear the narrator read every word.  Therefore, even if you have read the book before, you hear details that you may have missed when you listen to the audio version.

The Hiding Place is like that.  I read it many years ago, probably more than once, but I missed so much.  Our family listened to this entire book a few days ago while on a trip, and it has been a long time since a book moved me so much.

In a wonderful, “grandmotherly” tone, the narrator reads Corrie Ten Boom’s classic story of suffering and imprisonment at the hands of the Nazis.  This rendition will bring tears to your eyes even if the story is not new to you.

A very poignant moment in the story is one in which Corrie is standing before the chief of the Harlem police, whom Corrie learns is working with the resistance to the Nazi occupation.  He tells Corrie that there is an informer working for the Nazis that must be eliminated.  Could Corrie make connections with her underground friends to have him killed?

Her answer (not the exact words) is so typical of her life’s mission.  “Sir, I believe I am called to save life, not destroy it.”  Corrie’s sacrificial love for the Jews suffering under the Third Reich was only one part of the story of her lifelong love for her fellow man, including the handicapped, those scarred by imprisonment in concentration camps, and even the Germans in the postwar period.

This audiobook is not only worthwhile, but potentially life-changing.  Highly recommended as being among the best christianaudio.com has to offer.

If you want to learn facts and figures about the Rwandan genocide, read the encyclopedia.

If you want to learn what it is like to see hundreds of thousands of your own people slaughtered like animals in only a few short days, and to survive yourself only by a seeming accident of chance; if you want to learn how bewildering and worthless life can seem to be; if you want to grasp the struggle to believe in God and to forgive, then listen to this story.

It is unfathomable what human beings will do to one another.  The depths of hatred and of brutality make life seem not worth living.  How could one experience genocide and have faith in God and hope that life is worth living?

Eric Irivuzumugabe lived through the Rwandan genocide and came to believe in God.  Through Christ he gained a hope for himself and for his people as well.  This book is the story of his struggle to survive physically, and of his spiritual birth.  The book ends with him on a mission to reach out to his fellow Rwandans, particularly the orphans of the genocide.

This book is read very well by the narrator in a soft and gentle style.

This review was written for christianaudio.com, where you can purchase this book.