Aunt Diet: Berendina RoelofFina Hendrika (Diet) Eman (Erlich

• The Associated Press
  Feb 24, 2007 12:32 PM
  

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. - After nearly 46 years in the United States, a
member of the Dutch underground, who resisted Nazi occupation of the
Netherlands in World War II, is scheduled to be sworn in as a U.S.
citizen on Tuesday in Grand Rapids.

Diet Eman, 86, told The Grand Rapids Press that she felt like she had to
choose a nation she considered her own. The Netherlands does not allow
dual citizenship.

The Kentwood resident realized on a 2005 trip to the Netherlands that,
when she talked about America, she began many of her sentences with the
pronoun "we." She felt compelled to defend the country, to point out the
good things she believes America has done for the world.

"All of a sudden, it dawned on me that 'we' for me did not mean the
Netherlands any more, but America," Eman said. "I thought, when I came
back here, I better become an American. I feel very honored."

As a U.S. citizen, Eman looks forward to voting, a right she never has
had before. She plans to punch a ballot in the 2008 presidential
election.

"I don't know who their candidates may be. I hope they will say the
truth. I hate it when they vilify each other and attack each other."

Eman's involvement in the resistance began with a friendship with a man
named Herman, a Jew she helped to evade German capture. She and her
fiance, Hein Sietsma, soon were part of a network that hid Allied pilots
and Jews, and broke into German offices to steal food ration cards.

Sietsma was arrested in April 1944 and died less than a year later in
the Dachau concentration camp in Germany. Eman was arrested in August
1944 and spent four months in prison before she was let out, only to
join the resistance again.

Members of the Dutch resistance are credited with saving 10,000 Jewish
men, women and children from death, though historians estimate the
Germans killed more than 100,000 Jews from the Netherlands.

• My Aunt Diet spoke softly before an audience of over 150 people

But what she had to say hit people hard.

She chose her words carefully

Decorated by the Queen

Honored by Yad Vashem

Just became an American citizen

Your Torah sustained me

Robbed Nazis

Fiance killed

Hid Jews.

All had the desired impact.

Why we should remember.

People crowded around her afterward

As my father and I shared a knowing look.

“They wanted to touch greatness.”

He agreed.

They should only know.

That is just one part of her story.

And who she is shows up

In every part of her life.

She is more grateful than most

Having lost so much

But having gained at least as much

In faith.

She still fiercely fights for the underdog

Whether stranger or friend,

From the used car salesman who cheats

Mexicans and Haitians by

Selling them lemons and signing them up

For insurance they don’t need,

To dear friends who have been

Raped and murdered.

Guilty husbands, doctors, and judges

Cannot escape her peaceful, yet persistent protests.

She is as relentless as an ocean wave that keeps coming back

Until it hits pay dirt and reaches the warm sands of justice.

I’m so grateful for my touch of tenacity

And Gandhi greatness. 

Aunt Diet was also a tennis champion in Venezuela. She spoke at least three languages. After the war she worked for an exporting business and also volunteered for Doctors Without Borders and the Red Cross, traveling when there were natural disasters throughout the world, especially in Honduras an other places in South America. She was also a nurse, and would accompany doctors into the jungle to interpret for them. These were remote places where standard medical care was not available.

She was steadfast in her Christian Dutch Reformed Protestant faith and believed completely that that is what got her through everything. Her book, Things We Couldn't Say, explains her whole journey. She was also part of a movie called The Reckoning, chronicling the Dutch resistance during World War II.

Although her own two children with my mother's brother, Egon Erlich, were estranged from her, I felt she was there for me, taking care of me at 10 years old when my mother was in the hospital, bringing me tea in the morning when I stayed with her in Grand Rapids in my 20's, advising me not to stay mad forever when I was not speaking to my dad in my 40's when my mother died, and sending me a bible and walking with my dad and me in my 50's to decide whether to take my toxic husband back. She was present and there in a gentle way that my parents were not. She was my role model and inspiration.