Books like Things We Couldn't Say

I decided to read a couple of first-hand accounts by women of their experiences during WW2 in different countries. Next up is the journal of Helene Berr, a young French woman. These though are the memoirs of Diet Eman, a young Dutch woman who worked for the Resistance in and around the Hague. Much of her work was hiding Jewish families. At the end of the war it was discovered every single one of the Jews she had helped survived. This has a very chatty style, often incorporating letters and diary entries. At the beginning of the war Diet falls in love and her boyfriend too works for the resistance. Both are devout Christians. I continually marvelled at how much strain she was under and how brave she was. There’s one instance when she’s accompanying a Rabbi and his wife on a train – the Rabbi couldn’t look more Jewish, what’s more he isn’t particularly nice (though wealthy he refuses to pay a minimal sum towards the welfare of a Jewish orphan, a very young boy Diet and her group are trying to keep safe). A Gestapo check seems inevitable and yet she keeps her nerve. She risks her own life for a man who quite frankly doesn’t deserve her generosity. The same man will cause her more problems later in the war – this time he refuses to live in a house where a couple are engaged in extra-marital sex and again she has to risk her life for him by moving him. Eventually both Diet and her boyfriend Hein are arrested and the narrative begins to acquire the tension of a thriller. An incredibly brave but self-effacing woman. Now I’m off to vote Labour!