My Story of Diet's Story -- ii

 

In typical Dutch fashion, here they are, on bikes--Diet Eman and Hein Sietsma. They were little more than kids when Hitler decided, the day after he said he wouldn't, to run over the Netherlands, blitzkrieg the entire country and simply take it for his own. 

"I was furious," she told me, time and time again, because there was no cause, no reason for those Nazi jackboots to flatten Rotterdam and march through the streets of every city in the country, including Den Haag, where she worked in a bank. What right had those Germans to to take over the lives of the Dutch? No right whatsoever.

And when the Queen left for England, she was furious again. "Why would 'our mother' just leave us behind?" she told me. She couldn't help wondering why she'd abandoned them. Many wondered.

But all of that came out in her reminiscence only after that first thoughtfully considered and oh-so-professional question I'd asked her, a question meant not only to reveal character but also to try to establish my credentials as being "a writer," a title I'd hardly earned at that time in my life. I'd brought up the idea of my helping her in the afterglow of a story that had thrilled my heart and soul and mind. I'd asked her almost as if without thinking. I'd never done a book like this could be before. Never. What did I know? Really, nothing.

"What kind of guy is he?" I asked her, then offered some true-to-life options.

"Well," she said, "why don't you just read for yourself?" Matter-of-factly, she said it, as if the question was rhetorical.  "I've got his letters."

I had no idea. "You have his letters to you, letters he wrote?" I said, perfectly slack-jawed.

"And many of mine to him," she told me.

"You're serious?"

"And I have some of his diaries and all of my diaries too."

"You're not kidding?"

She looked at me as if I'd become a stranger. "No," she said, as if wondering why on earth I would doubt her.

Then the story came, the story that became the readers theater presentation. 

After she'd discovered that Hein would never return, after learning he'd died in January of 1945, just months from liberation, she'd taken all those precious notes and letters and locked them up in a metal box because, she told me, she had come to realize that it would be impossible to go on if she didn't try to become another person altogether. 

So she'd locked them in a cold, metal box because she had to stop seeing them. She had to keep them out of her memory, had to quit reliving what had happened, pull herself away from a time that would never, ever return. She couldn't burn them, but neither could she leave them around. She locked them up.

That was 1946. She'd changed professions, went to nursing school, then determined to take a job that would take her out of the Netherlands altogether. Her painful past had to be abandoned. 

By the end of the 1940s she was working at a nurse in Venezuela at a Shell Oil compound full of European workers. She'd left behind everything that had happened to her during the war, all that adventure and intrigue and grief. She did what she could to clear her life of reference to a past she had to forget but never could.

Years passed. She was fluent in Spanish and went on countless medical mission teams into faraway locales around the world, where she acted as a translator for those who came in for help to makeshift clinics created by North American doctors. Sometimes at night, in jungle compounds lit only by a fire, she and other team members would tell stories. Slowly, she started to share what had happened to her--to them, to her and Hein--during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Slowly, the story was told, in bits and pieces.

Eventually, she was asked to tell the story before hundreds of people in a place called Sioux Center, Iowa. Then again, in 1991, at a college conference, same place, before hundreds more, where a man she didn't know asked her if she'd like someone to help her write that story, put it all in a book. She told him she'd thought about it, but she told that man  that he wasn't the first to ask. But she said also that she'd always considered it somehow vainglorious or something to talk much about what she and her fiance did in the war because she was no hero. She didn't do anything that hundreds didn't. They'd done what they did because the Lord commanded it, didn't he? 

And wasn't it almost a little presumptuous to have your story out there like that, like Corrie? She knew Corrie Ten Boom, even worked for her relief organization, helping children who lost their parents during the war. Everything Corrie Ten Boom said had become scripture after The Hiding Place. Corrie was sainted. That kind of adulation was improper because hundreds--literally, hundreds--had done what Corrie did--and more. And whatever Corrie says now gets almost to be like scripture? Is that right?

But the question I asked her stuck with her, and one night after church she called me.

"I've got his letters and my letters and my journals and even his," she told me that first night I visited. I'd just then started my tape recorder. First five minutes of conversation.

I was astonished because I had absolutely no idea there were letters and journals.

"And yesterday for the first time, I opened that box and read through them again," she told me. For more than forty years those memories had been locked up in a metal box she'd just opened for the first time the day before I arrived. 

For the next week, she talked and I listened. Memories rushed up from her beaten soul as if her mind's scrapbook had no back cover, and I listened, as did my little tape recorder. I tried to shape things, to keep her memories clear and chronological. I handed her Kleenex when she cried, which she did, often. I laughed when she did--just as often. I wheedled when she seemed reluctant, when I thought there was more she wasn't telling. Not everything came out easily.

For an entire week her story came tumbling out. Some days, just for a break, we'd take walks out in the open field behind her house. But she never really stopped talking, ran through flaming emotions that made the telling an almost constant storm. And I listened.

Her story became a book, Things We Couldn't Say, and my story of her story became a readers theater presentation performed dozens and dozens of times a quarter-century ago, a 90-minute version of her incredible tale done in such a bare bones fashion that any church group could do it--that's what I wanted to create. I wanted to find a way to let this story be told a thousand times to the glory of God.

Mostly, it's been in mothballs now for a couple of decades, but Janie Van Dyke, at Unity Christian High, decided to pull it out once more and have a run at it. 

It's been a joy to hear it again, to go back to an experience unlike anything else in my writing life. I was there the night after Diet Eman opened up that box of letters and notes for the first time since the end of the war. I was there when the whole story came out for the first time since she'd learned the painful news that her Hein, her lover, would never return from Dachau. I was there when she told the whole story.

That's my story of her story, and it will be staged at the Knight Center in Orange City this weekend, where it's being done by gifted ordinary people who find it a privilege, just as I have, to tell her marvelous story. 

Saturday night, September 12, at 7:30. Tickets are five dollars at the door.