What was Corrie's father's overall importance to the story?

Corrie's father functions as an important background figure in the story she tells. He instilled in Corrie her religious beliefs and her love of God. He tried overall to provide Corrie with firm but loving guidance, never giving her more responsibility than she could handle. In this way, he meant to imitate God's loving care and so help his daughter trust in the divine.
Corrie's father never thought twice about giving aid to the Jews during World War II. He saw all people as children of God, fully worthy of love. Like her father, Corrie jumped wholeheartedly into helping Jews escape the Nazis. We could say it was her father's influence that led to her arrest and incarceration in a concentration camp. Like him, she was willing to take grave personal risks to assist others in surviving. In the camp, the religious faith her father had instilled in her helped sustain her, and she was able to spread it to people she met there through Bible studies.