Diet Eman died last week in Grand Rapids, Michigan at the age of ninety-nine. Born in The Hague, Eman left Europe after World War II and lived in the U.S. for many years before becoming a citizen in 2007. It was only in 1990 that she began to speak publicly about her wartime experiences, which Sam Roberts describes in an obituary:

[W]hen, in May 1940, the Germans, hours after Hitler had vowed to respect Dutch neutrality, invaded the Netherlands, . . . some of [Eman’s] neighbors, fellow churchgoers, argued that for whatever reason, God in his wisdom must have willed the German invasion. But Eman—herself so deeply religious that she would leave assassinations, sabotage, and, for the most part, even lying to others—could find no justification for such evil.

She and her then-boyfriend, Hein Seitsma, joined a Resistance group. They began by spreading news received on clandestine radios from the British Broadcasting Corporation, then smuggling downed Allied pilots to England, either by boat across the North Sea or more circuitously through Portugal. [In 1942], a plea for help by Herman van Zuidan, a Jewish co-worker of Eman’s, prompted her Resistance group to focus on stealing food- and gas-ration cards, forging identity papers, and sheltering hundreds of fugitive Jews. . . .

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 babies and even flushing a toilet risked raising the suspicions of neighbors. [Yet] each time some of the Jews there were smuggled out to isolated farms outside the city, Eman returned to find that the woman had taken in more refugees. . . .

Eman was [eventually caught and] 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.

Seitsma was not so lucky: he was caught and taken by the Gestapo to the Dachau concentration camp, where he was tortured and killed.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.