Diet Eman, 1920-2019

Diet Eman, U. S. Holocaust Museum

I find it amazing that it never dawned on me that I couldn't do it. 

I'd been so taken with the overwhelming force of the story she'd just told that, afterward, when the two of us ended up close to each other in line for some goodies, I dropped a question I hadn't really thought about at all. It was 1991, and the scene was an evening plenary session at a Dordt College conference titled "Suffering and Survival."

We had wanted to create a forum in which our students would listen to their own parents and grandparents about the suffering and the survival they themselves had gone through during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands during the Second World War. So many of our students had family members who'd worked in the Resistance, in the underground, hiding Jews and onderdykers (those who went into hiding, who "dived under," to avoid being arrested and sent to Germany to support the Nazi war effort). We wanted to create a place to tell so many stories that, for a variety of reasons, hadn't been fully told.

The Dutch government sent us the name of a member of the Dutch Resistance who lived in California, someone skilled at telling her story. When, without warning, she dropped out, I remembered someone who'd already spoken at the college, at the request of a local chicken farmer who'd met her when both of them were part of a relief team somewhere in Central America. This diminutive woman had told the whole work group her story at night. The local chicken farmer had been amazed--and moved--and brought her to Sioux Center to tell that story publicly.

I hadn't attended, but I'd read about her in the local paper. When our California Resistance fighter dropped out, I brought up her name--Diet Ehrlich back then--as a sub, a fill-in. Contacts were made, she had consented, and smooth as anything, that significant gap in our programming was covered.

Anyone who has ever heard Diet Eman Ehrlich speak knows the power her story generates. It is, first and foremost, a love story, even a love triangle: a girl, a guy, and a God who won't allow them to tolerate the innocent deaths of His people. The two of them, little more than kids, risk everything, even their own beloved future, for men and women and children, most of whom they didn't even know. They did it because, well, as Diet would say, "Who wouldn't have?"

The truth is, many wouldn't. Despite the fact that during the war the Dutch Resistance was significant and sizable, no occupied country in Europe suffered the loss of a greater percent of their Jewish community. Of 140,000 Dutch Jews in 1940, 100,000 never returned from the camps.

And who rescued the ones who did? The Dutch group most active in the Resistance was the communists. Just behind them as participants were those researchers call "orthodox Protestants," many of whom left the Netherlands after the war and started life anew in North America and elsewhere. Many of them had children and grandchildren who came to study at Dordt College.

Diet Eman was a fierce little woman, who told her story in a torrent of laughter and tears. Getting her to come and speak had been my idea, and through her entire story she'd kept the auditorium breathless, an incredible event. I may have been high on the sheer power of the whole thing, so there in line for finger food I asked her if she'd ever thought of getting someone to help her write her story.

She nodded, humbly. She said she'd been asked by six writers, but then she told me that four of the writers really weren't Christian believers. What's more, she said, she didn't want the kinds of things that happened to Corrie Ten Boom, after The Hiding Place, to happen to her. Even Corrie didn't, she said--you know, every word is like scripture itself to some people. 

When I left the B. J. Haan Auditorium that night, I was thinking about the conference's next-day activities, wondering how it all would go. I was still thrilled by the story, but I wasn't thinking of writing a book.

Six months later, she called me, late on a Sunday night. 

"You have there maybe a Psalter Hymnal?" she said after introducing herself. I've forgotten the number, but she told me to open it to page number-whatever and read the second verse, as I remember. The line directed parents to "tell their children." They'd sung that hymn that night in church, she said, and she considered it an act of God's own direction, telling her that she should, in fact, tell her story in a book, and was I interested?

Without hesitation, I said yes, even though I'd never done such a thing before. 

That book, Things We Couldn't Say, is still in print, a quarter century later.  You can read for yourself what readers think of her story by going to the book's site on Amazon. 

Yesterday, September 3, 2019, Diet Eman went to glory. She was just a few months shy of 100 years old. 

"Precious unto Jehovah is the deaths of his saints."