The New York Times - 12.09.2019

B12 N THE NEW YORK TIMES OBITUARIESTHURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2019

For 50 years after her fiancé
was seized by the Gestapo and she
became a fugitive, Diet Eman re-
mained largely silent about her
role in the Dutch Resistance dur-
ing World War II.
After the war she abandoned
Europe for the Americas to escape
the memories of friends and fam-
ilies lost, of unspeakable bar-
barism, of spineless collaboration,
of the moments her religious faith
was tested to its very limit.
“I wanted to forget,” she said —
“to start a new life in a country
where there were no memories
and never talk about that time
again.”
She became a nurse, learned
Spanish, worked for Shell Oil in
Venezuela, married an American
engineer named Egon Erlich, di-
vorced and moved to Michigan,
where she worked for an export
company.
Her heroism was not entirely
forgotten. After the war she was
occasionally asked to speak about
the Resistance. She privately re-
ceived congratulations from pub-
lic figures.
But it wasn’t until 1978, after she
heard a fellow Dutch Resistance
fighter, Corrie ten Boom, speak in
her Michigan hometown, that she
began to think that she had an ob-
ligation to reveal her story about
saving Jews, ferrying Allied pilots
to safety and escaping the Ge-
stapo.
A psychologist friend sug-
gested that recounting her experi-
ences would be therapeutic. Her
son also urged her to write.
Finally, in 1990, after she ap-
peared at a conference on suffer-
ing and survival held at Dordt Col-
lege (now Dordt University), a
Christian Reformed Church insti-
tution in Sioux Center, Iowa, a pro-
fessor there, James C. Schaap,
persuaded her to write a memoir
about what had gone unexpressed
for so long.
Titled “Things We Couldn’t
Say” and written with Professor
Schaap, it was published in 1994.
“When the war ended we all
said, ‘This can never happen
again,’ ” Ms. Eman wrote. “But
now polls show that 22 percent of
the U.S. population does not be-
lieve there was a Holocaust. The

story has to be retold so that his- tory does not repeat itself.” Diet Eman (pronounced deet EE-mahn) died on Sept. 3 at her home in Grand Rapids, Mich. She was 99. Her death was confirmed by John Evans, a family spokes- man, who directed the film “The Reckoning” (2007), which docu- mented her experience in the Dutch Resistance. She is survived by two children, Joy Coe and Mark Aryeh Erlich; and a granddaughter. In 1982, President Ronald Rea- gan hailed Ms. Eman in a letter for risking her safety “to adhere to a higher law of decency and moral- ity.” In 1998, Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel, granted her the title of Righteous Among the Na- tions, given to non-Jews for risking their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust; she was cited for her leadership in sheltering them. In 2015, King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands, during a stop in Grand Rapids on a promotional tour for Dutch businesses, lauded Ms. Eman as “one of our national heroes.” (She became a United States citizen in 2007.) Berendina Roelfina Hendrika Eman was born on April 30, 1920,

in The Hague to Gerrit and Jo- hanna Maria Eman. Her father was an interior decorator. The couple could afford to send only two of their children to college and chose their sons. Ms. Eman, at 20, was living with her parents and bicycling to work at the Twentsche Bank in The Hague when, in May 1940, the Germans, hours after Hitler had

vowed to respect Dutch neutrality, invaded the Netherlands. Her sis- ter’s fiancé was killed on the first of five days of fighting. (A brother died later in a Japanese prison camp.) Some of her neighbors, fellow churchgoers, argued that for whatever reason, God in his wis- dom must have willed the German invasion. But Ms. Eman — herself so deeply religious that she would

leave assassinations, sabotage and, for the most part, even lying to others — could find no justifica- tion for such evil. She and her boyfriend, Hein Seitsma, joined a Resistance group (coincidentally called HEIN, an acronym translated as “Help each other in need”). They began by spreading news re- ceived on clandestine radios from the British Broadcasting Corpora- tion, then smuggling downed Al- lied pilots to England, either by boat across the North Sea or more circuitously through Portugal. By 1942, Dutch boys and men were being conscripted to fill fac- tory jobs in Germany, and the har- assment of Dutch Jews escalated to outright persecution and trans- port to the Westerbork camp, in the northeast Netherlands, from which they were deported to death camps in Germany and German-occupied Poland. A plea for help by Herman van Zuidan, a Jewish co-worker of Ms. Eman’s at the bank, prompted her Resistance group to focus on stealing food and gas ration cards, forging identity papers and sheltering hundreds of fugitive Jews. She said of the German occupi- ers, “It was beyond their compre-

hension that we would risk so much for the Jews.” Ms. Eman delivered supplies and moral support to one apartment in The Hague that in late 1942 housed 27 Jews in hiding. The walls were paper thin. Crying ba- bies and even toilet flushing risked raising the suspicions of neighbors, who knew only that a woman had been living there alone. “ ‘You’re living on top of a vol- cano that’s ready to erupt,’ I told her,” Ms. Eman wrote of the woman. Each time some of the Jews there were smuggled out to iso- lated farms outside the city, Ms. Eman returned to find that the woman had taken in more refu- gees. Finally the Gestapo raided the apartment. A diary that contained her code name was discovered. She stopped in to see her boss at the bank. “I stuck my head in his door,” she recalled, “and all I said was, ‘I have to go. See you after the war.’ ” Ms. Eman remained a fugitive for months. She and Mr. Seitsma decided to marry and even set a wedding date, but then delayed it until after the war.

In May 1944, while carrying false identity papers on a train, Ms. Eman was stopped, arrested and imprisoned — but not before she managed to ditch an envelope filled with even more incriminat- ing evidence. She had hidden it under her blouse, but managed to toss it away while the arresting of- ficers were distracted. They were admiring a raincoat belonging to a fellow officer that was made of a new synthetic material called plastic. Ms. Eman was interned in the Vught concentration camp in the southern Netherlands, but after stubbornly insisting that she was simply a callow housemaid, she was released three months later, in August 1944. She immediately rejoined the Resistance and remained with it until May 1945, when she mounted a tank and directed Canadian liberators to die- hard German snipers only days before Germany surrendered. “Just like that, the Germans threw up their hands,” she recalled. “There I sat on the top of one of those tanks. It was my own private triumph: I felt at that mo- ment as if I’d actually won the war.” At Vught she had been assigned to wash the bloody uniforms of Dutch prisoners who had been ex- ecuted, shot in the stomach to en- sure a more excruciating death. She was in constant fear of recog- nizing her fiancé’s uniform, she recalled. She learned in June 1945 that Hein Sietsma had been captured a month before she was and tortured to death at Dachau in Ger- many, barely four months before it was liberated. By some miracle, a letter he had written on a single sheet of toilet paper and tossed from a train as he was being transported to the camp found its way to her. “Darling, don’t count on seeing each other again soon,” he wrote, she said. “Even if we won’t see each other on earth again, we will never be sorry for what we did, and that we took this stand.” He signed off with the Latin phrase that was engraved on the gold engagement ring that he had given her: “Omnia vincit amor.” Love conquers all.

Diet Eman, Who Risked Her Life to Rescue Dutch Jews, Is Dead at 99

EMILY ZOLADZ/THE GRAND RAPIDS PRESS, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

By SAM ROBERTS

Diet Eman, left, in 2007 after

becoming a U.S. citizen. Her

World War II memoir, “Things

We Couldn’t Say,” about shel-

tering Jews, rescuing Allied

pilots and escaping the Ge-

stapo, was published in 1994.

WILLIAM B. EERDMANS PUBLISHING COMPANY

It took 50 years for

her to write of her

exploits. ‘I wanted

to forget,’ she said.

Frederic Pryor, an American
graduate student who was jailed
in East Germany in 1961 on suspi-
cion of espionage but later freed
as part of the famous prisoner
trade between the United States
and Soviet Union dramatized in
Steven Spielberg’s film “Bridge of
Spies,” died on Sept. 2 at his home
in Newtown Square, Pa. He was
86.
His son, Dan, confirmed the
death.
By the summer of 1961, Mr. Pry-
or had been living in West Berlin
for two years. Despite worsening
Cold War tensions, he crossed reg-
ularly into East Berlin to inter-
view economists and government

officials for his doctoral thesis
about the Soviet bloc’s foreign
trade system.
While the Berlin Wall was being
built, Mr. Pryor drove into East
Berlin on Aug. 25, 1961. He tried to
visit an engineer who had helped
him on a research project, but
when he reached her apartment
she was gone.
The Stasi, East Germany’s se-
cret police, which had been stak-
ing out her home, arrested Mr.
Pryor for aiding in her escape to
the West. After they found a copy
of the thesis in his car, they
charged him with being a spy.
Mr. Pryor was confined to a cell
that he described as “six paces
long by two paces wide,” interro-
gated nearly every day for most of
his time in prison and informed on
by a cellmate, who had apparently
been planted by the Stasi.
“I wasn’t worried about being
brainwashed, and I didn’t think I
would be tortured,” he told Michi-
gan Today magazine in 2016,
“since whatever ‘crime’ they
thought I was guilty of wasn’t very
important. I accepted my situa-
tion and tried to make the best of
it.”
Still, the East German prosecu-

tor in charge of his case planned to put him on trial and declared that he would seek the death penalty. Mr. Pryor was unaware of a larger drama going on involving negotiations to trade prisoners al- ready known as Cold War proxies: Francis Gary Powers, the Air Force pilot shot down over the So- viet Union in 1960 on a U-2 recon- naissance mission for the C.I.A., and Rudolf Abel, a K.G.B. colonel, who was serving a 30-year prison sentence in a federal prison in At- lanta after a Brooklyn jury con- victed him in 1957 of spying. They were the key pieces in the exchange orchestrated by James Donovan, the lawyer played by Tom Hanks in “Bridge of Spies.” Although Mr. Pryor was not a spy, his release was a priority of Mr. Donovan’s. On Feb. 10, 1962, after nearly six months in jail, Mr. Pryor was driv- en to Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin and released. The Powers-for- Abel swap occurred at Glienicke Bridge, a border crossing between East and West Berlin. When he returned to the United States, Mr. Pryor was wearing the same suit he had been captured in. But now its buttons were gone and its fabric threadbare. At a news conference, he told reporters he would not criticize East Germany to score propaganda points. “After tomorrow,” he said, “forget me.” Frederic LeRoy Pryor was born on April 23, 1933, in Owosso, Mich., and grew up mainly in Mansfield, Ohio, where his father, Millard, was chairman of the Barnes Manufacturing Company; he later worked with the United States Agency for International Development. Mr. Pryor’s mother, Mary (Shapiro) Pryor, had been a journalist before becoming a homemaker. After graduating from Oberlin College in Ohio with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry — a subject he came to dislike after spending a summer working for Dow Chemi- cal — Mr. Pryor took a year off to travel, living on a commune in Paraguay and working on a freighter to Europe. The trips inspired his interest in economics, which he studied at Yale, where he earned a master’s degree and the Ph.D. he would re- ceive after leaving East Germany. Mr. Pryor wanted to work for

the government, but his arrest on an espionage charge made him unwanted. At General Motors, where he had been a consultant before his arrest, an official said he would not consider him be- cause of his prison record. “I said, ‘But it was the Com- mies!’ ” he recalled responding in a 2015 interview for the website of Swarthmore College, where he taught for many years. “They said, ‘Tough.’ ” Although he was reluctant to

teach, he found academia welcom- ing. Soon after his release from prison, the University of Michigan hired him to teach economics. He stayed until 1964, when he became a staff research economist at Yale. He left for Swarthmore in 1967. Mr. Pryor became known mostly for his research, whether he was comparing capitalism to socialism or examining the economics of agricultural and pri- mate societies. “The range of his curiosities and interests was wide, and he al- ways put a distinct spin on a de- bate,” Stephen O’Connell, chairman of Swarthmore’s economics department, said by phone. “He also dove into issues in public pol- icy with papers, like one about the geography of hate.” Mr. Pryor retired from Swarth- more in 1998 but kept an office there and continued his research. For decades he preferred to dis- cuss his latest paper rather than his role in a long-ago Cold War saga. But with the release of “Bridge of Spies” (he was played

by Will Rogers), Mr. Pryor began giving interviews, reflecting on his imprisonment and pointing out errors in the film — for exam- ple, its depiction of his being arrested while trying to help a woman and her father escape as the Berlin Wall was rising. “I enjoyed the movie,” he told Michigan Today. “But the person with my name in the film has nothing to do with me.” He added, “I re- sent the fact that Steven Spielberg never contacted me to find out what really happened.” In addition to his son, Mr. Pryor is survived by three grandchil- dren. His wife, Zora Prochazka, who was also an economist, died in 2008. All along, Mr. Pryor said he had not been a spy. Nothing in his dissertation — with its analyses of Soviet trade and charts on com- modity pricing — could have been construed as evidence of espionage. “The reader can judge the na- ture of my ‘spying’ for himself,” he wrote in the preface to the version

of his dissertation that was published as a book in 1963, “for this book is essentially the ‘spy docu- ment’ which was found in my car upon my arrest.” When he returned to a reunified Germany in the early 1990s, he found the Stasi’s 5,000-page file on him but no complete answers for his arrest. He felt queasy, however, he said, as he read about the collusion between his cellmate and the Stasi, and about an accusation that he had worked for the C.I.A., and about the interrogation strategies used against him. “I felt again what it was like in my cell and the efforts I took to maintain some mental equilib- rium — for instance, trying to re- member everyone in my third grade class,” he wrote in The Na- tional Interest magazine in 1995. “In that reading room," he added, “I began to have difficulties in maintaining my objectivity, and I had to remind myself that 31 years had passed since these events took place.”

Frederic Pryor, 86, Player

In ‘Bridge of Spies’ Case

Frederic Pryor, above, arriving in New York in 1962 from East Berlin, where he had been held pris-

oner and was later released as part of a prisoner exchange. Mr. Pryor, left in 2006, taught econom-

ics at Swarthmore College and, after retiring in 1998, kept an office and continued his research.

TED RUSSELL/THE LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION, VIA GETTY IMAGES

Once freed, he refused

to criticize East

Germany to score

propaganda points.

By RICHARD SANDOMIR

ELEFTHERIOS KOSTANS/SWARTHMORE COLLEGE

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