Hain Ad & Wal

Values, Duty, Sacrifice in Apartheid South Africa
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-84954-706-2
Verlag: Biteback Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 384 Seiten

Most of us like to think we'd stand up to fight against evil, and yet the vast majority of white South Africans either stood by and said nothing or actively participated in the oppression and carnage during apartheid. Ad & Wal is the story of two modest people who became notorious, two survivors who did what they thought was right, two parents who rebelled against the apartheid regime knowing they were putting themselves and their family in grave danger. Ad & Wal is the story of an ordinary couple who did extraordinary things despite the odds. How did they come to their decision? What exactly did they do? What can we learn from them?

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hain, Peter

Leseproben

Prologue
If the end was bitter, at the start they could not believe their good fortune. It was morning on 21 October 1944 when two army radio operators, Walter Hain aged nineteen and Lanky Brasler aged eighteen, moved to Point 806 high on Monte Pezza in the Apennines. Among some trees they stumbled across a ‘slittie’ (slit trench) wide enough to take both of them. It was the only one like that they’d ever discovered. Normally a slittie was a one-man trench, long and deep enough to protect a soldier lying in it from shell shrapnel and flying bullets. Sometimes they had to toil away in the hard, unyielding soil to dig out a suitable slittie. They delightedly occupied this one. To make it more secure from overhead shell bursts, they gave it a roof of tree branches topped with a layer of soil, and a gap at one end for access. As Walter’s meticulous diary recorded, they ‘felt as safe as a house’. Both were soldiers of the 6th South African Armoured Division, part of the British 8th Army which, with the American 5th Army, was driving the German forces occupying Italy northwards out of the country. One of its infantry battalions was the Royal Natal Carbineers (RNC), and they were in C Company. That morning their C Company took over a frontline position from B Company and they were able to move straight into existing slitties. Although around ten o’clock German shells started coming over a hill to their left, Walter and Lanky ‘felt very safe and were trying to sleep’. But, two hours later, when shells began bursting nearby and shrapnel flying, they found the din ‘terrifying’. The two were suddenly trapped in their ‘safe as houses trench’, the Germans pounding their lines. Then – shockingly – their worst fear: shrapnel tore through the access opening in the trench roof near their feet. It hit the top of Walter’s right thigh in the groin. ‘I quickly put my hand down to make sure the family jewels were intact – they were. Lanky shouted: “I’ve been hit, I’ve been hit.”’ ‘So have I,’ Walter shouted and Lanky jumped out the opening of the slittie to call for help. ‘Then another shell arrived and Lanky grabbed his back and screamed “Oh Mama, Mama, Mama.”’ Pandemonium. Horror. Walter pulled a moaning Lanky back into the slittie and tried to prop him up; Lanky was badly hurt – very badly. The company medical orderly, Dutch, soon arrived and gave Lanky morphine; it seemed not to make any difference. Despite Walter’s desperate reassurances, Lanky ‘was sure he wasn’t going to make it’ and asked Walter to see his sister. ‘But I told him he’d be alright and the stretcher-bearers would soon be coming.’ Ignoring incoming fire, Coloured‡ stretcher-bearers soon rushed in to carry Lanky away to the regimental aid post nearby, in a large house, Casa Ruzzone. Limping to it later himself, in shock and in some pain from his injured thigh, Walter came across the stretcher-bearers having a breather. Lanky, they told him matter-of-fact, was dead. Surely not. He was stunned, with a dreadful sense of guilt that it was when Lanky had jumped out, calling for help for them both, that the second shell had killed him. Walter had been through some scrapes earlier since arriving in Italy, and counted himself lucky. But now he was overcome by a dulling, deadening despair. Forty-one years later, in 1985, retracing his steps through the Apennines aided by his old wartime diary and with family members, he rounded a corner in the tiny village of Castiglione dei Pepoli. There, quite unexpectedly, was a Commonwealth War Graves cemetery for South African soldiers, set in a beautiful glade, a kaleidoscope of green shades with a sprinkling of brightly coloured flowers, Both curious and eager, Walter’s hopes rose and the family stopped. In a small stone building they found a metal-encased ledger, and in it – yes – the location of Lanky’s grave. Elation but also deep melancholy: his emotions swirled as he walked down through rows and rows of white-grey headstones, stark, sombre and dignified. Finding Lanky’s, he knelt down on his knees to photograph it, conjuring an inescapable image of fate: had their positions in that slittie been reversed, it could well have been Lanky and his family visiting Walter’s gravestone. Instead, through friendships made in action in the Second World War, he lived to meet the love of his life. Adelaine Hain was frantic. Somehow, anyhow, she had to save the life of a close friend and political comrade, John Harris. For five months after John was sentenced to death by hanging, the shadow of the noose hovered as she was involved in frenzied efforts to save him. As a member of the African Resistance Movement (ARM), Harris had confessed to placing a bomb on the main railway concourse at Johannesburg station in 1964. With Nelson Mandela in prison along with many other anti-apartheid activists, and internal resistance all but suppressed, Harris, along with his close colleague, fellow ARM and Liberal Party member John Lloyd, planned the bomb as a spectacular protest against apartheid. Police testimony in court confirmed that he had indeed telephoned a warning to the railway police and urged them to clear the concourse, in order to avoid injuring anyone. But the authorities deliberately ignored that and an old lady tragically died, her twelve-year-old granddaughter maimed for life, others injured and burnt. This would have carried a life sentence for manslaughter had John Lloyd not turned from co-conspirator to state witness and damningly insisted – against all other evidence – that the act was pre-meditated murder. The judge accepted Lloyd’s version with fatal consequences for Harris. When his legal appeal on 1 March 1965 failed – because no additional evidence was forthcoming – Adelaine rushed about Pretoria helping organise clemency appeals. Repeated pleas to Lloyd, safe in England, to retract the damning part of his evidence were refused. John’s wife Ann and his father flew down to Cape Town to appeal to the Minister of Justice, John Vorster. But he was hostile and intransigent and, even worse, asked her questions seeking to entrap and implicate her in the bomb. Petitions from a range of public figures were presented and the matter was even raised in the British Parliament. But the state would not budge and a grim sense of foreboding enveloped them all while John Harris was being held on death row. Then: a slim gleam of hope. John managed to convey a message to Ann that he had been approached by a warder who wanted to help him escape. At great personal risk, and from the outset highly suspicious of a set-up designed to trap them, Adelaine decided to help Ann, with Walter’s support. There were weeks of tense and contorted dealings with the warder. Then he was posted over 1,000 rand to pay for a car and expenses for the escape, Adelaine insisting that Ann had Elastoplasts stuck discreetly over her fingertips to cover her prints. Beside themselves with worry, they waited for the elaborate arrangements the warder specified were needed to spring John. On the nominated day, two weeks before he was due to hang, he was to be sneaked out of his cell, and climb a rope over a wall. Nevertheless, as Adelaine had feared all along, it had been a security police trap from the beginning. As John waited in his cell wearing a civilian suit given him by the warder, the door opened as arranged at 2 a.m. But instead of the expected warder it was apartheid’s chief spymaster, General H. J. van den Bergh, mocking him. (Together with John Vorster, ‘HJ’ was a former member of the paramilitary Ossewabrandwag, which conducted sabotage operations against the Allies in the Second World War; both were interned for pro-Nazi activities.) HJ tried to pressure Harris to reveal the identity of his co-conspirators outside. Despite being promised his life would be spared, Harris refused. It was just as well that Adelaine was obsessive both about secrecy and ensuring any evidence of her (criminal) collaboration was concealed. But she remained distraught at being unable to save him. At 5 a.m. on 1 April 1965 John Harris ascended the fifty-two concrete steps to the pre-execution room next to the gallows at Pretoria Central Prison. Each step was six feet or so wide in a square spiral configuration; there were four landings with metal bars on a side wall all the way up. A Catholic priest, Father McGuinness, walked up the steps talking with him. (John had originally agreed to see a priest because it got him an extra visitor and they became good friends, though John’s firm atheism never wavered.) Inside the execution chamber, which had barred frosted glass windows along the top, the hangman waited. So did a medical doctor to certify his death, and a policeman to take a set of fingerprints and check his face against a photograph to confirm his identity. The death warrant was read to him and he was given the opportunity to say his last words. Ready, he was now led forward by a warder into the large and brightly lit execution room, some forty feet long with white-painted walls, the gallows beam running its length. (Seven black prisoners could be – and often were – hanged simultaneously on this gallows.) It had a low ceiling with barred windows in the top of the wall. In the corner there was a table with a phone on it, in case a last-minute clemency was ever granted. There is no recorded instance of the phone ever having rung – and it certainly did not ring for John. In the middle was the...