On September 3, Diet Eman, a Dutch resistance worker during World War II, passed away at the age of 99.
Diet spent several years dedicated to the dangerous work of hiding Jews and resisting the Nazi occupation of her home country, and she did so at great personal cost. Of the sixteen original members of her resistance group, eight died in prison, by execution or in concentration camps. Diet herself was imprisoned in the Vught concentration camp for a number of months in 1944, managed to convince the Germans to release her, and then immediately went back to resistance work.
In 2015, Diet Eman became the ninth recipient of the Faith and Freedom Award from the Acton Institute, which was presented to her at our 25th anniversary Annual Dinner that fall. Upon receiving the award, she had this to say:
I want to say, you think it’s something special. But when your country is taken … you would have done the same there, when you had friends who were Jewish and they were in danger. So, I don’t think it’s anything special. But I appreciate it very, very much.
When dark times came and her conscience compelled her to take a stand, Eman used the gifts God had given her – her strength, her intelligence, her very life – and put them to work, sacrificially defending those who could not defend themselves.
Learn more about Acton’s Faith and Freedom Award on acton.org and watch Eman’s full acceptance speech below.
