“Things We Couldn’t Say” – Book Review

REV. J.W. Deenick. Trowel & Sword. May 1995.

Preamble: It’s bizarre that today, eighty years after the horrors of WW2, the word “Nazi” is thrown around so casually, often as an accusation against someone we may disagree with. But the holocaust was no casual affair. Despite his obvious reluctance to again bring it to the fore, Bill Deenick obviously felt compelled to bring to our attention the heroism of those who opposed Nazism and risked, and often lost their lives in their efforts to rescue the victims of this evil regime as told by Diet Eman, one of the many who fought to rescue Dutch Jews. Although he doesn’t mention it, Bill was himself also deeply involved in the fight to save Jews in the Netherlands so one can only imagine the emotions he went through as he read this book. It is little wonder that he recommended it so highly.

“Things We Couldn’t Say“

Many T&S  readers, will have seen the film based on Thomas Keneally’s book, Schindler’s Ark. I saw it somewhere in Melbourne. It is both an important and a deeply moving film. Important, because it documents in an historically responsible manner the atrocities committed by the Third Reich; and deeply moving, because it portrays one man’s heroic efforts to save from the gas chambers as many Jewish men, women, and children as he was able. 

Yet, for most of us there is a saturation point where we begin to say: now I have heard and seen enough of the Second World War, the Nazis, and the holocaust.

Therefore, when in my Beacon Hill Books Catalogue I saw a notice that someone had written another book about the Nazi persecution of Dutch Jews, I might not have been as keenly interested as I should have been, had it not been for one name I recognised. It said that was all about a young woman, Diet (pronounced Deet) Eman, and about her fiance’, Hein Sietsma. And I happen to know a solicitor in Sydney of that name, a brother of the other Sietsmas, well known to many readers of this paper in NSW and Vic.

When I further discovered, that this Hein Sietsma was indeed a cousin of the Australian Sietsmas, and that like his uncle, Dr Kornelis Sietsma, this young man was apprehended by the Nazis and transported to the death camp of Dachau, I wanted to know more about that book.

Now that I have read it, I want to tell the readers of T&S more about it, because it is a very wonderful book; and it deserves place of honour on the book shelves of those who have come to love and serve the Lord Jesus in the Reformed tradition.

It is the story of two young people, in their early twenties, who became instruments in God’s hands for the hiding of hundreds of Jewish people on Dutch farms, mostly in the province of Gelderland, round the towns of Nykerk, Barneveld, Putten, Zwartebroek, and Terschuur.

At the start of WW II, Diet Eman, who lived with her parents on the Malakka Straat, in The Hague, was eighteen years old and worked as clerk at the Twentse Bank in the city centre. Already before the beginning of the war, she had come to know a young fellow from Holk, near Nykerk, where his father was headmaster of the Christian school. At the time, he too lived in The Hague and had his further training at Shell Oil Company. These two young people came to love each other very deeply.

When the German armies had occupied most of Western Europe, including Holland, and the Nazis began to make life difficult for Jews, people of the Reformed faith had to make some very fundamental decisions. Should the German authorities be accepted as the de facto government and as such be obeyed; or, should they be resisted both openly and underground? Should the German occupation be seen as an instrument in God’s hand for the punishment of the Western nations and be submitted to for that reason? Could Christians in the resistance movement live under false names with all the lying and deceit that would follow from that? How could Jews be hidden without creating a smokescreen of evasion and lies?

Diet Eman and Hein Sietsma were directly confronted with these dilemmas when a Jewish friend, Herman, with his Jewish girl friend, Ada, had to make the life or death decision: shall we do as the Nazis tell us to do? Shall we let ourselves be rounded up, together with all other Jews, in one designated section of the city of Amsterdam, or shall we hide? And whom can we ask to hide us? That was, writes Diet, how it started.

She writes: “This was how our (resistance) group was formed: we simply got together and talked about what the Germans were doing to the Jews”. They decided to seek a hiding place for Herman and Ada; and for Ada’s mother. But soon, Herman’s uncle came and said: “Can you help this one and that one too… and I have more.” Rosa, Herman’s sister, also needed a place. “The whole thing grew so fast that within two or three weeks we had over sixty people who wanted places out in the country, in the Veluwe. And that was just the beginning. Hein went out on his own to Holk, trying to find places; and he placed many Jews on farms round that little town. But the list kept growing.”

At first they did not realise what all of that would involve with regard to transport, identification cards (IDs), ration cards, correspondence, and finance. The one step had to lead to the other. They had to become better organised. In order to get ration cards and IDs, they sought the help of a gang that was active round Rotterdam and Zwyndrecht, raiding local council offices. Their own group, which they called HEIN (Help Each other In Need), was not involved in that; nor did they join the National Organisation of resistance groups, the LO. And the violent activities of some groups which were prepared to execute high-ranking German officers and traitors, they condemned.

When they became aware that the Secret Police was looking for them, Diet and Hein began to live under false names with forged ID cards, hiding at many different places, Hein mostly working in Friesland and Diet in Gelderland. They had never set out to do anything heroic, but they did believe that the Lord God had made them responsible for the Jewish people. They could not run away from that. In the process, they suffered enormous anxiety and loss. Although they were deeply in love, they had great trouble organising a day or a weekend for themselves. And always there was the threat of the Secret Police.

Diet mainly functioned as “postman”, on foot or on push-bike, from farm to farm all over that part of the country, passing on ration cards, messages, correspondence, money, and heaps of illegal material, constantly being in danger of being apprehended by the SS or the Gestapo. 

In April 1944, Hein, who travelled disguised as a Reformed pastor, was searched on the train in Friesland and, loaded with incriminating stuff, was apprehended and taken to the Leeuwarden prison. From there he was transported to the concentration camps of Amersfoort, Neuengamme, Ladelund, and Dachau.

Less than a month later, the same happened to Diet, who was taken to the infamous prison at Scheveningen, and later to Vught in Brabant, where she was briefly detained with Corrie ten Boom in the same barrack. Because she managed to make the Secret Police believe her fantastic story of innocence, she was released from Vught in August, 1944.

After the war, Diet Eman suffered deep distress and sorrow, because of the loss of the boy she loved. Why could she not have died also? For many, many years she refused to tell her story. She fled away from it all, to Venezuela, to the USA.

Finally, after she had heard Corrie ten Boom tell about her experiences and about God’s faithfulness, her conscience began to trouble her. Her children too insisted that she write a book. But she could not. Then finally, when Dr James Schaap, professor in English at Dordt College, Sioux Centre, Iowa, offered to write it with her, she gave in. And, praise God, she did.

This is a great book, for a good many reasons. First of all, because it is a truly honest book and a deeply religious one. It is written in the first person singular, and based on the diaries of both Diet and Hein and on their correspondence. There is no embellishment about it. It tells how two ordinary young people of the Reformed faith wrote things down, and talked to each other about what they believed to be their calling from God under these extremely taxing circumstances.

That the Lord God used them wonderfully is evident from the fact that all Jews they had hidden with Christian farm families made it; every single one. Yet, of their own group of underground workers, eight young men died at the hands of the Nazis. As followers of Jesus, they gave their lives in defence of their Jewish neighbours.

There is no doubt that they were indeed Reformed young people. On December 11, 1939, the then eighteen year old Diet Eman wrote in her diary: “Again, a conversation with the doctor. We always come back to the same point: ‘The church may not mix in politics’ he says. And I tell him that when you are a Christian and profess that God is almighty, there is no single area of life from which you can eliminate God.” If ever I have felt that I should wholeheartedly recommend a book, it is this one. Young people especially will love reading it. It will help them to understand, and to identify with, what so many of their (grand)parents went through at that time.

For New Zealand readers this final note. The author mentions as one of their co- workers, Adrian Schouten from Zwijndrecht. From what she tells about him, I would not be at all surprised if he was the same Adrian Schouten whom we later came to know as a member of the Hamilton church. And more importantly, the young Albert, the Jewish boy who on the farm where he found a hiding place came to know Jesus, whom he later confessed as the Messiah, and who eventually married a minister’s daughter, could he be Albert Van Gelder, one of Christchurch’s leading elders at the institution of the Reformed Church there?

J.W. Deenick 

“Things We Couldn’t Say” has been published by Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Mich

Footnote: “Things We Couldn’t Say” is still available from Koorong books for $39.99. Second hand books are also available from various suppliers. Enter the title in your search engine.

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