A Dutch woman celebrated for her fearless acts of resistance during World War II, including saving dozens of Jews from Nazi persecution, has died at age 99 in Michigan.
Diet Eman grew up in The Hague on the western coast of the Netherlands where she worked in a bank and enjoyed outdoor activities like climbing trees. “Wherever I went, my hair was always a mess,” Eman said in her 1994 memoir, Things We Couldn’t Say. “My brother Albert and I and our friends used to pedal our bikes outside The Hague to little villages and farms, out to where we found pastures with sloten, those little brooks and moats that are still there today.”
Germany invaded the Netherlands in 1940 and successfully took control of the country by May of that year. Eman was 22 in 1942 when Germany began the deportation of the nearly 140,000 Dutch Jewish citizens.
Eman offered to help her Jewish colleague at the bank, Herman, who was also a violinist. She and her fiance Hein Sietsma, who founded Dutch resistance network Group Hein with his brother Henk, were able to find farmers on the outskirts of The Hague that were willing to shield Herman. Eventually, Eman and Sietsma also hid Herman’s fiancee, his mother, and 60 other Jews avoiding their fate at the hands of the Nazis.
Sietsma was arrested by the Gestapo in April of 1944 and deported to Dachau, a notorious concentration camp. Eman was captured just one month later but was able to avoid execution by using an opportune moment to dump fake IDs she’d been smuggling beneath her skirt. She was sent to a prison where she was forced to wash the bloodied clothes of prisoners who had been killed by Nazi guards. “I was absolutely heartbroken,” Eman wrote in her memoir. “And I was heartbroken for another reason: I suspected that any one of those men being taken out and shot in the stomach and left to die could be my Hein.”
Eventually, a note that Sietsma had written to Eman on a piece of toilet paper he smuggled out of Dachau made its way to her. “Even if we won’t see each other on earth again,” the letter said, “we will never be sorry for what we did, and that we took this stand.”
Eman was eventually released from prison after convincing the Nazis that she was just a maid named Willie Laarman and not the woman suspected of being part of Group Hein. She immediately returned to her work with the resistance.
She learned of her fiance’s death at Dachau around the time of the Netherlands’ liberation from the Nazis in 1945. Noting that about half of her resistance group had died during the war, Eman credited divine intervention for saving her. “My survival,” Eman said, “was a miracle from God.”
Eman, Hein, Henk, and over 27,000 people from all over the world have been honored by Yad Vashem as being “Righteous Among the Nations,” a designation that recognizes non-Jewish individuals for the work they did to save Jews during World War II.
Diet Eman died on Sept. 3 at age 99 in Michigan after spending her later life volunteering at health facilities for the uninsured and working on mission trips to South America as a translator.
