She survived one of the most notorious camps of the Second World War, walked out the gates, and later learned her release was a clerical error, a form stamped incorrectly. One week after she left, every remaining woman in her age group at Ravensbrück was murdered. What does a person do with a life handed back by a typo? For Corrie ten Boom, the answer had been in preparation for decades. Born in Haarlem in 1892 above her father's watch shop, she became the first licensed female watchmaker in the Netherlands and spent twenty years building what this episode calls organized empathy: precision ledgers, micro-inventories, community networks, a mind engineered for systems.

When the occupation came, she applied those ledgers to a different currency. Her family's labyrinthine house, half a block from the police station, became a resistance hub wit ...