Political Autobiography 4

/ 4

printing shop, relatives and everything. We did not succumb to the the
threat. But I lugged around for weeks an iron bar in my handbag, you bet!

Other less pleasant but harrowing experiences were the stories, that Greek
men and women escaped from Greece told about their jail time. They often
stayed with us and I will never forget, how Natasha Zirka in the time after
the anti-NATO congress (from 20 to 22 November 1969 in the RAI in Amsterdam)
was with us and how she in bed at night often screamed. I slipped to her,
and then, with all the gruesome details, she told me how the torturers of
the security police on the roof of their building in Bouboulina Street
thrashed her unborn child out of her body. She was not the only one with
this kind of stories.

When I finally look once more at the list of the „elected“, commented in ‘VN’
dated Dec 3 ’83 (about whose possible merits I don’t want to argue here),
then two things attract my attention:

- They are all men, although the Greece movement in Netherlands from the
beginning to the end was carried emotionally as well as operational by
women. By Hennie Lodewijks with her bilingual ‘Griekenland-Bulletin’, issued
in the first year of the junta, by the greek guest worker Dimitra Sideris,
who invested from the beginning to the end all her time and emotionality
in supporting the Greek resistance, and finally, by the undersigned, who
stepped in early 1969. When early 1974 cancer and a brain thrombosis had
made working impossible for me for a couple of years, it was continued by
the Greece Working Group Nijmegen and in particular by Jannie Moors, Leida
Rasing and Tinus Heymans.
- Secondly: the Greek medal was for carrier men from parliamentary, juri-
dical and journalistic circles, who - with a few exceptions - mainly just
did their job.

It was women, and also some (not decorated) men who spent all their time,
intelligence, power and imagination in support of the Greek resistance.
But we did not make career with it. On the contrary.

Why now this letter?

Of course it hurts to note that work on the command posts of the public
opinion has been understood so poorly that after ten years already it seems
to be forgotten. Or is it also in this case once more a fact, that the dis-
tance between Nijmegen and Amsterdam in reality is more than on the map?
But there is still such a thing as a historical reality, and as far as it
concerns my own past, I will ensure that it will be described correctly.
1983-12-31 - E: 2014-03-07