The lies of the righteous

Diet Eman and Hein Sietsma, 1930

One day Hein told me about a family in Nijkerk, a wonderful Christian family, who he thought would help us. We had two Jewish sisters. . .whom we needed to hide. So I went to this fine Christian family, and the father, a very prominent man and a pillar of the church, met me at the door. I identified myself. He knew the Sietsma family, and he knew that Hein was engaged to me. I told him that we were desperate to get a place for these two Jewish girls. We had to find them a place.
"No," he said. "I don't want anything to do with it."
So I started working on his status as a good Christian, and that this was part of his obligation to serve the Lord. I really pleaded with him. I begged.
Still he said no.
I was desperate. I came up with every argument I could, but he was adamant. He wouldn't budge. He wouldn't take any Jews, he said.
"Please, I beg you," I said.
"No," he said, and he shut the door of his house in my face.
When I left, I was ufrious with ths supposedly fine man, a well-known Christian, a man of God, who wouldn't help us. 

Terror, in Nazi-occupied Holland, was all around and ever present. If you did anything at all in resistance of the German occupiers, even if it wasn't for the Resistance itself, significant suffering was simply a given. The "fine Christian man" in this anecdote in Diet Eman's story of the Dutch Resistance knows full well that if he were to be caught hiding Jews, he would lose everything--his house, his property, his family, possibly even his life. Slamming the door in the face of Diet and those two Jewish girls is painfully understandable. He'd be putting his own loved ones at risk.

There's no real horror in this particular incident, only grief and rage and exhaustion. Diet will now have to take those children elsewhere--but where? 

That's a question she doesn't answer. What she wants us to feel is exactly what she felt when a "fine Christian man," a "pillar of the church" slams the door in her face--and in the faces of those two Jewish girls. Lots of good, good Christians hid Jews. Many more did not.

But there's more to her story.

After the war I found out that this man already had Jewish people in his home, people whom he must have taken in from some other group working to hide Jews. But he wasn't about too tell me that the reason he wouldn't take those two sisters into his house was that he already some Jews in hiding.

This fine Christian man stood flat-out lied, committed false witness, the 10 Commandments say, for all the right reasons--to protect himself and his family, but also to protect the Jews he was already hiding. He didn't know Diet. He couldn't be sure this woman with the girls wasn't planted by the Nazis to uncover hiding places. He acted as if he didn't care, lied to her face, slammed the door on her goodwill.

Still, there's more.

He also lied to protect Diet. Even the Resistance fighters didn't want to know things--names, places--because should any of them fall into the hands of the SS, they'd be interrogated, then tortured until they gave up information. They more they knew about operations, the more they'd likely spill. Even though she was furious when this fine Christian man slammed the door in her face, this pillar of the church was lying through his teeth to protect her.

I still have a little sticky note I scribbled on when I was editing this story in Diet's book. It says, "Things we couldn't say," the line that became the title of the book. 

Her story holds far greater horrors--torturous suffering, death, and profound grief. But this little story's labyrinth lies, its subterfuge, somehow captures the terror created by the Nazi occupation. The lies, many of them perfectly righteous, were everywhere, as they had to be. So much couldn't be said.