A woman who speaks her mind
By Catrien Spijkerman
Amidst the hell of the concentration camp, resistance fighter Clara finds hope for the future. She develops a political vision of radical change. But when the war is over, many Dutch people just want peace and quiet and to restore the old order.
Clara is the sixth speaker and the only woman to take the floor. On this summery day in June 1946, thousands of people from all corners of the Netherlands have gathered in the woods near Zeist. During the war, all of them had been involved in the resistance. This national gathering is meant to commemorate and reflect on the good work the resistance did. But Clara is there to shake things up. For months to come, the words of Clara in her floral dress will echo. A newspaper writes about her speech: ‘She breathed new life into Vondel’s words: “One woman is more than a match for a thousand men.”’
‘Clara’ is the resistance alias of Joukje Grandia-Smits. During the war, she is one of the first and few women to serve as a courier for the resistance. She smuggles ration cards and forged identity papers for people in hiding. ‘That’s all well and good’, she says matter-of-factly when one day she is asked to transport weapons as well, ‘but then you’ll have to teach me how to use them first.’ The other resistance members aren’t exactly thrilled about giving a woman shooting lessons, but Clara stands her ground. She learns to shoot – and she is good at it.
Enter the camp singing
Clara is not afraid of anything, not even the devil himself. ‘What must be done, must be done’, that’s the motto she lives by. She refuses to be discouraged, not even when, through betrayal, she ends up in a concentration camp. From Camp Vught, she is taken to Camp Ravensbrück, where she and other Dutch women march into the camp singing. The Dutch women who were already inside would later say: ‘You were all so fierce, we were so proud of you.’
Life in Ravensbrück is hard. It is freezing cold and all kinds of diseases are rampant. But Clara draws hope from her fellow prisoners: she feels a deep connection with the other women. Together, they have the guts to show resistance even in the concentration camp. ‘There was a group of women, and I am proud to have been one of them, who never wanted to work for the Germans’, she says about it later. Together with the others, she tries to sabotage the work as much as possible by working extra slowly or as meticulously as possible. Or by peeing in the oil meant to lubricate the machines.
‘All were one’
In her notorious post-war speech, Clara talks about those experiences in the concentration camp. For strangely enough, it was there, in the very midst of hell, that she found hope for the future.
‘We came out of the camps, out of the prisons with beating hearts; we had prayed to be allowed to survive’, she tells the masses in the forest in Zeist. ‘We came with the message of unity in struggle, of unity in suffering. We had fought together in a superhuman position and in an alliance that surpassed denominations. (…) Baronesses, domestic servants, nurses, intellectuals and illiterate people, all were completely one.’
Clara had seen it herself. The Netherlands were extremely compartmentalised at the time – Catholics, Protestants and socialists lived strictly separated from each other – and it would have been unthinkable for those groups to join forces and collaborate, but in the concentration camp they did. Clara has a political vision, and the camp was her source of inspiration.
Careerists
But now she is furious, and she lets it show. Full of passion, she asks the audience what is left of all that idealism after the liberation. According to her, the country is full of ‘vultures’ and ‘saboteurs of the reconstruction’: people who pretend they were quite something in the resistance, hoping it will give them a better position. All solidarity and collaboration between religions, social pillars and classes seemed to have evaporated already. Old power dynamics are returning, and the common man, who did the real resistance work, is forgotten. About the people who were in charge before the war, she says: ‘Those captains hid in the crew’s quarters and left the sailors alone in the storm. And these guilty individuals are back in office now, comfortably in their plush seats, acting as if nothing happened. They drink, smoke their white or black cigars, drive their cars, and mock the fools of the resistance.’
Clara gets a standing ovation. ‘Oh Claartje, you stole our hearts’, the paper of the resistance organization initially writes. But her words soon spark a heated debate. She might want change, but many people actually crave peace and quiet and the restoration of the old order. In a time of instability and fear of chaos, an overly activist plea is seen as ‘dangerous’. People feel Clara is moving too fast.
Or, as someone who was in the audience later remarks in the same resistance paper: ‘Yes gentlemen, just tune your radio set again, because after all, that jazz is still easier to tolerate than some random resistance woman, showing you reality for a moment.’
