Glenn Frankel
- 1998
Fellowship Title:
- White Activists in the Struggle against Apartheid and their Legacy
Fellowship Year:
- 1998
Bram Fischer’s Journey
As Nelson Mandela and his comrades were convicted of sabotage and sentenced to life imprisonment in June 1964, the underground freedom movement in South Africa was unraveling. Many black activists were imprisoned, while many of their white comrades fled the country. One of the few who remained behind was Bram Fischer, a respected Afrikaner lawyer who had defended Mandela even while serving as secret leader of the outlawed Communist Party. He was charged later that year with party membership and was in the midst of his own trial when he decided the time had come to go underground. JOHANESBURG– On a Friday night in late January 1965, Bram Fischer’s Volkswagen pulled out of the driveway on Beaumont Street. His daughter Ilse was behind the wheel, his friend Pat Davidson in the passenger seat, and wedged on the floor behind was Bram himself. Ilse drove around aimlessly for a while to lose anyone tailing them, then made her way to nearby Killarney, where a young man met the car. Bram popped out and the young man
Messages from Underground
We had just finished our first cup of tea, when Hilda Bernstein rose and left the kitchen. Several minutes passed. Hilda was eighty-one years old and had acquired an artificial hip not long ago, and she negotiated the staircase of the small townhouse outside Oxford, England, with wisdom rather than haste. She came back with a white manila envelope whose contents she dumped onto the table. Out came strips of white fabric, cut in the shape of shirt collars, each one covered in minute handwriting. They contained letters – messages from underground, really – written in 1963 by her husband Rusty, smuggled out to Hilda in dirty laundry from an isolation cell deep in the bowels of Pretoria Local prison in South Africa. Rusty had spent eighty-eight days in solitary confinement there before being charged with sabotage and put on trial for his life alongside Nelson Mandela and nine other anti-apartheid activists. Lionel “Rusty” Bernstein, as shown in a police mug shot taken in the evening of his arrest during the Rovinia raid. Photo courtesy