That afternoon it seemed to be a quiet train ride in the Sprinter from Hilversum to Amsterdam, until a few meters behind me a woman’s voice started to scream: “Don’t touch me, don’t touch me!”
I turned to see the conductor who had just checked my ticket standing in the aisle facing an irate young woman. I couldn’t feel any touch. The woman held out a passport to the conductor, but she was not interested; she wanted to see a train ticket, and nothing else. The woman insisted more and more stridently that her passport was sufficient. “Then you have to get off at the next station,” decided the conductor, who remained admirably calm.
Out? There was no question of that, the young woman replied. She was dressed summery in tight brown pants and a white top. Her Dutch was good, but had a slight, hard-to-detect accent. The conductor picked up her walkie-talkie and announced aloud that the train could not continue after the next stop until a non-paying passenger had disembarked.
There was unrest among the nearby travelers. How long was this going to take? And all because of a passenger who didn’t want to pay? A well-built man came running up. He positioned himself next to the young woman in a position that still did not seem to exclude contact. “That’s not how we do it in the Netherlands,” he said.
Meanwhile the train had stopped in front of a platform and the doors were open. “I’m not going out!” screamed the woman. “You must get out,” said the conductor. I already feared that the young woman would be grabbed by the head and ass by the man and thrown from the train, but the conductor had a better idea. She stooped, took the woman’s backpack from the bench and flung it onto the platform with a powerful swing.
Swearing, the woman jumped after her backpack. She picked it up and spat at the conductor several times from the platform as the doors closed. When the train started to move, she tried to film the conductor through the windows with her mobile phone, but she had already turned embarrassed to another passenger.
My God, I thought, it must be your profession: every day that threat of some half or whole psychopath flying at your throat. Why didn’t we do this in the Netherlands? How did the figures go with the aggression against railway employees? I looked it up at home. The number of times NS staff were beaten, spat on and threatened last year rose from 774 to almost a thousand times, and 220 employees were injured. “Leave my colleagues alone,” NS president Wouter Koolmees rightly asked.
What I’m describing here happened a few days after I got in NRC had written a column about a fatal, violent incident on the New York subway. There a strong man strangled a troublesome traveler. The well-built man on my train to Amsterdam could also have committed such an accident.
What would we as bystanders have done about it? The Kees, the boy in me, hopes for a peaceful, yet decisive intervention on my part, which preferably commands worldwide respect, plus a grateful hug from the conductor. But I also realize that the boy of Theo Thijssen was not called Kees for nothing – and not Frits.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of May 26, 2023.