The Diet Eman Story--Learning to listen

Diet and Hein

What did I know? Next to nothing really--next to nothing about what I was actually doing. I'd spoken to her on a whim that night in the auditorium and somehow, some time later, she'd asked me to help her; but I'd never done anything quite like this before, never tried. 

No matter. I told myself that I taught writing, for pity sake, and I was a writer--a few books to my credit, in fact.  I didn't need to tell myself I could write her story--I knew I could. 

And I was prepared. I'd thought about how I was going to do this, even figured out a great first question. "Your fiance', Hein--I need to know about him," I'd say. "With a bunch of friends, would he be the one to tell the stories, or to laugh the hardest, or to tell them only when everyone else is through?"

Brilliant question, I told myself, a way of getting at character. What I'd planned to write was another Hiding Place, a kind of historical novel that dressed richly her incredible true story of death-defying resistance work beneath the Nazi radar. I could do this--I never really questioned that. I could do it.

It was early evening when I plugged in the tape recorder, sat on the couch across from her, took a deep breath, and unearthed that so-very-thoughtful first question. "Well, tell me about Hein," I said. "In a party or something, would he be the one to tell the stories or maybe the guy to tell the best one. . ." A brilliantly plotted first question, I thought. She had to be impressed.

She looked at me, smiled, then giggled, as if what I'd asked was maybe just a bit silly. "You would like maybe to read his letters?" she asked.

I had no idea. "You have his letters?" I said. She'd said nothing about that.

"And mine too--my letters from during the war." She hunched her shoulders as if I somehow should have known. 

"You have letters you wrote to each other during all that time?" I said.

"And diaries." 

"Your own war-time diary?"

"Yes, and his too."

I had absolutely no idea. We were maybe three minutes into the interview and every thoughtful preparation I had made became entirely useless. Actual war-time letters and diaries wouldn't work with The Hiding Place. I couldn't embellish such wonderful primary materials, just wouldn't have. This was going to have to be a wholly different kind of book than the one I'd planned.

She told me she'd just been reading all those letters and diaries over--in preparation for my coming; in preparation for our going over her story, for the first time in years she'd taken out all of those things, unlocked a box of remembrances she could never open or toss, memories of a time she simply kept far out of the way of her consciousness. 

Back when the war ended, she had slowly gathered all of those things, received some from farmers and contacts where she and Hein had stayed during the time they dared not meet, put everything--letters and diaries--into a metal box, locked it with a key, and then, in 1947, stuck it out of sight and, as far as possible, out of mind.

She had started over by recredentializing her life, studying nursing, then becoming a nurse. She couldn't live in the Netherlands after the war--too painful. So she lived and worked and then fell in love in Venezuela, in a hospital created for Shell Oil workers. She'd done her best to scrub her mind and soul of a life she needed badly to put behind her. She'd married--and divorced, had two children, both grown. 

Through all that time, that metal box of war-time memories had stayed locked in various dark corners of her life, intentionally--at least--forgotten. 

That metal box she'd opened for the first time in preparation for my coming. She'd spent all day and all night reliving the events she'd always tried to forget--the intensity of their mutual fears, the madness of the suffering at the camp at Vught, the amazing thrill of liberation, the heft of finally discovering Hein would never return.  

I knew the outline of Diet Eman's life. I'd heard her tell it. It had every last earmark of an unforgettable saga--a courageous, unforgettable love story against the backdrop of the most dread villains of the 20th century, a story of love and war and death. 

I was a kid, really. I knew very little of what was before me, of the trauma of her heart and soul in all that dark and dreary fog. 

It took just a few minutes for me to determine that the only way to help her write her story was to listen. That little tape recorder whirled for hours on end that week, but just a few minutes into that story I began to understand I was going to have to listen in a way I couldn't have imagined. I was going to have to listen with my heart.