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OUTLINE Katrien, the Anarchist "I criss-crossed the entire inner city. Inside I was sobbing 'where are all those women?'" When, on May 10, 1940 the German army attacked Holland, Katrien Boll immediately took a train to Amsterdam to join the demonstration. A couple of months before there had been a huge demonstration by women, but this time she was the only one. Later on she would join the underground. Katrien didn't join the opposition the moment that the second WW broke out, just as she didn't stop when the war was over. Opposition is and has always been a necessary part of her life. It is a red thread. 'I always used to tell my father and mother: "You only talk socialism, you don't do anything. You are very bad parents. You don't live socialistic, you just act like it for appearance sake." For instance, they never went to the Institute of Workers Education to learn something or to get more insight. They just walked stupidly behind the flags." Katrien looks back on her youth in Gouda with bitterness. The place where she, together with her five younger brothers and sisters grew up in a poor blue-collar neighborhood. Her German mother had difficulties adjusting to the Dutch customs. She was the boss in her family. Katrien often got a beating from her. Her father, a barrelmaker by profession, beat her too. If he refused to beat her, his wife wouldn't speak to him for months at the time and she would not have sex with him. "I think that my mother let out a lot of frustrations on me." At that time her father was one of the few people who would join in a strike or demonstration. Nevertheless, Katrien missed in him and her mother the will to grow intellectually, the zeal and combativeness to fight the inequities that she later would find with her anarchist and anti-military friends. Katrien felt very unhappy in this choking atmosphere at home. Once she tried to hang herself and she ran away from home regularly, which was a difficult thing to do at the time. The police would always find her and bring her back home. She was a good student and was in line for a scholarship to a higher school of learning. Her parent refused the scholarship because they wanted her to get a job at the tender age of twelve, to pay for her keep. Here she showed some of her stubborn character. That's where she was threatened with dismissal when she had the nerve not to work on the first of May and instead, spoke at the demonstration calling for an eight hour workday. The next day they asked her to come back to work. At another May Day when she didn't appear at work, she was criticized by the Central Youth Workers Board, where she was treasurer, for her social stance. The board thought that at work she should not deal too much in socialism. In order to get away from home at night and on Sundays and also to learn something, Katrien became a member of the Central Youth Workers and she attended courses at the Workers Education Institute. There she learned to recite poetry, declame, took part in meetings, and took music and folkdance lessons. While at the meetings of the Institute, which had been founded by the Social Democrats, she met anarchists like Anton Constandse and many anti-military people. The Central Youth group didn't like her being involved with the Anti-military groups and didn't think she should go door to door with the Pamphlet called Weapons Down. "Those were anarchists and you were not supposed to deal with them". This became a conflict for Katrien that eventually led to a break with her group. She had loved the youth group so much, but now they began to complain about the fact that she was such a loose cannon, that she was doing other things outside of the youth group. They talked to her about that, but when the Social Democrats decided from one day to another not to be for anti-militarism any more, by fiat they became for militarism. ‘We received papers about it from the group; that the antimilitary view was finished and should not be discussed any longer. We should just agree and go along. I was the only one who protested against that. I said: "I won't do that. How can that be? We have been peace activists all this time. You bought coupons for the people refusing to bear arms. And now all of a sudden we must bear arms? How can that be?" We also wrote letters to the refuseniks in prison and all of a sudden we should not do this any longer? No, I didn't accept that.’ The group then tried to dissuade Katrien to change her mind, but she held firm and got into a verbal fight with the "reserve-lieutenant" as he called himself. The end result was that they suspended her for 3 weeks and it hurt her very much not to see her friends for 3 weeks. She was all of 15 years old and she was too proud to wait at the door for the meetings to finish.
Approximate Word count = 3467
Approximate Pages = 13.9
(250 words per page double spaced)
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