LTRP Note: The following is an excerpt from Diet Eman’s book Things We Couldn’t Say. Diet was a young woman in the Christian resistance movement in Holland during WWII. Today, at 90, Diet continues telling groups about her experience.
Watergoor, 1944 (chapter 10)
by Diet Eman
In February of 1944, under the name Willie van Daalen–“Willie” was short for Wilhelmina, the name of our queen–I moved my base of operations to the home of Aalt and Alie Lozeman, a beautiful small farm just west of Nijkerk, Gelderland, on a quiet two-lane road that led to Bunschoten and Spakenburg. The farm itself we called “Watergoor.” It had a very long sandy driveway; tall trees stood a short distance away from the house, and there was a beautiful hedge of bushes alongside. It was a wonderful place, not fancy at all but always loving–a place that became not only a base of operations but a home for me.
With the generosity of the Lozemans, that house was open to anyone–shot-down pilots or onderduikers or Jews–anyone needing a place to hide. During that time, Aalt and Alie risked their lives continuously because the Germans had said that anyone aiding enemy flyers would be shot on the spot. But Aalt and Alie always told me, “Whoever you bring here–if you vouch for them–those people may sleep here.”
Aalt and Alie taught their two young children how to talk about all visitors: they never mentioned names of people in the house to those young kids. Farmers call their neighbors the buurvrouw, the neighbor woman, and the buurman, the neighbor man; when they use those terms, there is no need for names. So those little children, Frits and Rietje, two and three years old, always spoke of Uncle Ben and his wife Marie, for example, as the buurman and buurvrouw. That way, if they were ever with others who didn’t know that Aalt and Alie were hiding people on the farm, no one would suspect anything: the children were merely speaking of the neighbors.
Aiding downed pilots was especially dangerous, but we believed that if Allied pilots were risking their lives for us by flying bombing missions, the least we could do would be to see that they didn’t fall into the hands of the enemy when their planes were shot down. After all, those pilots could have been sitting at home safely on the other side of the ocean. But they were trying to help us.
Those downed pilots would often hide in haystacks or barns unbeknownst to the farmer; once morning came, they would gamble on communicating with the farmer who came out to do his chores. Most of the people in that area would certainly know some member of the Resistance and knew how to contact a member of our group. We gave those pilots civilian clothing and hid them; then we handed them over to another Resistance group, who could get them to Portugal (a neutral country), where another group would help them on their journey back to England or Allied territory. Once we had delivered them, our part was finished. We had no idea what would happen to them; but we hoped, of course, that they would escape successfully.
One night, when Hein was at Watergoor and we were hiding some pilots, Hein’s brother Henk happened to stop by. Hein had already told those pilots that his name was Pete (you never gave your real name). So when Henk came in, those pilots took one look at his face and couldn’t believe their eyes. “If this is ‘Pete,'” one of them said, pointing at Hein, “then this guy is ‘Repeat.'”
Aalt and Alie kept a radio, which we listened to almost every night. The BBC always carried the news we wanted to hear, but in addition it often relayed messages to the Underground. In the middle of the broadcast we’d hear some odd phrase such as “the apples are green,” a message meant for specific listeners somewhere in occupied Europe. Three or four weeks after those pilots had laughed about Henk’s resemblance to Hein, we were listening to the BBC broadcast one night, when suddenly we heard, “Regards to Pete and Repeat.” We immediately thanked the Lord that those men had made it back to England safely.
People were coming and going all the time at the Lozemans’ farm. But in addition to those who stayed for just a little while, Aalt and Alie were hiding Uncle Ben and his wife, the Jewish couple who had simply walked away from their own deportation more than a year earlier. All of the time Uncle Ben was in hiding at Aalt and Alie’s, he kept working at falsifying the documents we would bring him. His wife learned to spin and knit; and she peeled potatoes and worked on the pears during canning time. Everyone helped out at Aalt and Alie’s, and there were always people in hiding, sneaking in and sneaking out again.
Uncle Ben and Tante Marie had lots of work to do in that house, which was good, but they sometimes got on each other’s nerves. Of course, most couples in that kind of cramped situation for two or three years–never seeing other people, locked up in a little room–would almost strangle each other in the end.
One day, while Uncle Ben was working hard at all of those documents and Marie was knitting and peeling, I brought him more things to do, and I found him very desperate. Click to continue …
