Jonathan Schlapobersky
When They Came for Me: The Hidden Diary of an Apartheid Prisoner
Judge Dennis Davis and John Schlapobersky - ‘When They Came for Me: The Hidden Diary of an Apartheid Prisoner’
- Hi, John.
Hello.
Hi, Hi. Welcome Dennis. Welcome back. Today, we are very, very fortunate. Thank you. We are very fortunate to have John Schlapobersky, who will be talking about his book, “When They Came For Me, The Hidden Diary of an Apartheid Prisoner”. John Schlapobersky is a group analyst at the Bloomsbury Psychotherapy Practise in London, which was founded in 2009. He was a founding trustee of the Medical Foundation for Victims of Torture. And both there and at the Traumatic Stress Clinic in London, he was a consultant psychotherapist over many years. He has been a teacher and supervisor in psychotherapy at the Institute of Group Analysis in London, and he teaches internationally.
He has many publications, including “From the Couch to the Circle, Group Analytic Psychotherapy in Practise”, which won the Alonzo Award from the American Group Psychotherapy Association, and “When They Came For Me, The Hidden Diary of an Apartheid Prisoner”. John, such a great pleasure to have you with us today. You and I go back many, many years, back to our early childhood in Swaziland. I remember with such fond memories, those that we used to have together, those Pesa services with you and your siblings, the Surat, the Herrs, really the Jewish community in Swaziland. And when you reached out to me, now, I honestly, I had this warmth just flooded over me with the memory of our childhood. So I just want to say a very, very, very warm welcome and I’m so thrilled to have you in conversation with Dennis, our very good friend, Dennis Davis, who’s, you know, who’s such an outstanding person. Welcome and we’re really looking forward to hearing about you and about the book and how are your siblings.
Wendy, thank you for such a fulsome introduction. We’ve been watching you with Lockdown University and charting your extraordinary progress, helping us educate ourselves in isolation. It’s a huge achievement. We feel a kind of investment in it as a girl, homegirl made good in the wider world. My brother Colin and my other brother David and my sister Marion all send you their warm regards and fond memories too. You shared with me a memory, you told me of playing hopscotch with my sister Marion, who’s exactly your age, on the dusty streets of Manzini. But you know, we regarded you folk living in Manzini, as the sophisticated urbanites ‘cause we came from a farm about 15 miles away, at the far end of a dirt road and it was another life, another time and here we are.
That’s so true. I remember sleeping over one night, I remember that. And how the early mornings were so different.
Yes.
Yeah. Getting up so early in the morning to go out into the fields and it’s just such a pleasure to have you again. I’m so thrilled to have Marion and David and Carlo and I just send you our warmest love and good wishes. from my siblings too and the family.
Thank you.
So now before I’m going to hand over to Dennis to talk to you. We could all be chatting just the three of us. I forgot there’s a whole group of participants. I do apologise everybody out there. Okay, over to you two. Thank you.
Thank you. Sorry for interrupting. John, firstly, let me say I’m absolutely delighted to do this. A full disclosure, we had an interview with you for The Daily Maverick, which I found extraordinary and I’d like to expand on some of those ideas for this audience. When I heard that interview with you about your book, and let me just again give the title, “When They Came for Me, The Hidden Diary of an Apartheid Prisoner” by John R. Schlapobersky. And I’m quite sure you can get it on Amazon, it’s published by Jonathan Ball. And when I spoke earlier about going to school and getting perhaps on the book, if you don’t want to do anything theological, buy this book and read it over Yom Kippur. It will give you as much meaning for Yom Kippur as you possibly can. But there we are. John, I want to just start again in the same way as I think I did last time.
This is quite a unique book because, not because others, as you rightly and very generously record in your book, many have written about their experiences. And I want to come to somebody who clearly you have a very extraordinary relationship with because of his comparable experiences. And that, of course, is Minister Justice Albie Sachs, who wrote a very eloquent forward to your book. But why this is interesting is because you have become, you know, a world renowned group psychotherapist. And here you are writing about events 50 years earlier. And I suppose what’s, there were two questions that emerged from this is why do it? And then the second question that follows is, it clearly was something which allowed you to unburden yourself because you speak later in the book about how you could now engage with things that was difficult even whilst you were doing the book. And you speak about not getting to a computer and the struggle to do it and then your sense of relief when it was all over. So I’m intrigued, both by why do it and just how much of this book unlocked history that you had repressed? And I’m asking this in this extraordinary insider-outsider basis because not only am I talking to somebody who’s the author of his own experience, but you’re also a therapist of great distinction. So hence my question in a double-barreled way.
- Well it’s an important, pertinent question and it’s especially weighty coming from somebody like yourself, who living inside South Africa during the big battles of the last days of the struggle against Apartheid in the 1980s and early '90s, you documented torture yourself and published very important material about state torture. And we felt deeply reassured by the probing and the fearlessness with which you addressed the subject. So why do it, why now? The quickest answer and the best route to the detail is to explain that the beginning of the book describes how I was in Houston, Texas in 2018, the week of my 70th birthday. And I was vetted at a conference that I’d gone to present at for the sake of the first book I’ve written, that is “From the Couch to the Circle”, and I went there to present the book to a big audience. The book was very warmly received. But during a break I took half a day off to go and visit the NASA Space Centre in Houston. And they have a very fine visitors programme. And I sat on a train with a whole lot of other visitors, mostly American, but people from all over the world. We were taken around different features of the NASA Space Centre. The thing that moved me most was going to the building that housed what they call historical ground control from where they managed the Apollo landings. We all filed in.
There was a guide, he explained to us, look through the glass, he said, and you’ll see historical mission control. And you see that little speaker, he pointed to a little brown speaker on one side of a computer. He said, that’s where Neil Armstrong’s voice came from when he said, “We’ve landed.” And then later when he said, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Now everybody else was very moved and thoughtful. When they filed out, I stayed there by myself and was overwhelmed with emotion. Some of it even comes back as I’m speaking to you now. And the emotion had to do with the fact that that very day I was in prison, I knew nothing about it. And the next day the guard who took me out for my exercise said, “You know, they were on the moon last night.” And when I went back to my cell at the end of that day, I’d been taken out for further interrogation. I tried to look for the moon. I hadn’t appreciated though that it was a half moon, it was on the other side of the prison, I couldn’t see it. And as I listened to the condemned men in the cells, the execution cells on death row, singing to see the people appointed for execution the next day, singing to see them through the night, which they did every weeknight, I thought that, like them, I would never see the moon. And I came away from that appreciation having to take account of the fact that my experience of being there was different to all the other visitors. I was once again in touch with a period of horror in my own life that set me apart from everybody else. And I thought, I’ve got to write about this whilst I still can. So that was the catalyst. But the intention had a different motive. I survived 55 days. I was going to call this book 55 Winter Days, but changed the title along the way. I wasn’t directly involved in the armed struggle against Apartheid.
I was arrested in the winter of 1969 and the underground movements had been crushed by all the brutality and sophisticated intelligence of the Apartheid system. But there were pockets of resistance and pockets of organisation, one of which, for example, was the organisation that protected Bram Fischer. When he was put on trial, it was discovered that he was the most significant figure in what survived of the South African Communist Party. You know, he was, he had been a senior advocate. You probably knew him in the law or maybe it was before your time. But his role in the Rivonia Trial was charged with intelligence and sophistication and helped shape things to safeguard against the death penalty. What the authorities didn’t know was that although he was in court as a barrister with his Afrikaans pedigree protecting him, he was also one of the leaders of the South African Communist Party. And when they discovered who he really was, they put him on trial. During the course of his trial, he disappeared and he sent his lawyer into court with a letter from him to the president, the head of the court to say, I haven’t left the country. I’m here and I’m here to stand for the freedom of the people. And it was a statement of defiance against Apartheid. They eventually caught up with him. I’m telling you the story in some detail because the man in charge of my interrogation, Jurness Yakobitz Swanepoel, the man they called Yurires, I don’t know why they called him, The Red Russian.
He had very ginger hair, he had a very florid face, and he had a terrible body odour. And I know this kind of detail about it because I was in front of him for five days and six nights nonstop. And during interludes of my interrogation, I mean most of that time I was standing on a brick under a bright light and not allowed to sleep. But when these interrogation officers wanted something of a break, they would chat to each other. And one of the chats, he was telling one of his other colleagues, or several of his colleagues, including one or two junior police officers who’d been brought in to meet this great major, the great interrogator for Vorster, and he was telling them about his role in apprehending Bram Fischer. And he would speak to them in Afrikaans. They didn’t think I understood Afrikaans. And because I’d grown up in Swaziland with, you know, very close to Wendy and the Kosh family, we were on a farm. I’d been able to say to the police when they started interrogating me in Afrikaans, I don’t understand a word you’re saying. Please question me in English. Now this was misleading because I understood exactly what was going on and I understood the Afrikaans fluently. But I pretended I didn’t and they spoke quite freely about me in my presence, which was a sort of safeguard. It allowed me to monitor what was happening. It was my only protective device really. And I heard Swanepoel talking to his, bragging to his colleagues about Vorster saying to him, in Afrikaans, Bram Fischer. Why aren’t you getting on with it? When are you going to catch him? And then they caught him and he was telling them all about the prowess this brought him in the police force and he was part of the team that did the work. So that’s the context in which I was interrogated.
But can I just say this to you? What is interesting to me is you opened the book and the prologue was what I found to be a very moving little poem. 'Cause you wrote poetry-
I did, yeah.
In fact, we’ll come to that in a moment. But where you say three men flew to the moon last night and a little child died without ever having seen it. An enteritis killed her, they will say. Just 100 of their billion dollar mile trip would’ve let her see the moon. An enteritis killed her, they all say. You wrote that in January '69.
[John] Yeah.
That was about four, five months before you were arrested. Am I right?
That’s the Apollo mission that didn’t land on the moon. It went round the moon and they came back again.
That’s the thing. Your point about the moon is a kind of synergy here because later they were successful and yet you’d written that some months before.
Indeed.
Which indicates to me something about you at that time. You were clearly somebody who was very aware, more than aware, committed to a form of social justice, of which the Apartheid regime was the very antithesis. But when you get caught, I mean you could never have expected that you were going to be hauled in by an interrogator, by people like Yuri Swanepoel and stood on a brick for, I mean a number of days. I mean you were on that brick for a number of days before you then landed up in solitary.
[John] That’s correct, right.
Which just a complete set of break in an ordinary person’s life but what, I mean, this is your life. It changed your life forever.
It certainly did. It certainly did. They came for me at the university on a Friday morning. The 13th of June.
Yeah.
They must have had a certain amount of intelligence about me. But you know, during my interrogation, not so much Swanepoel, who was above communicating with somebody like me. He treated me more like a nasty insect. You know, only one step above the even nastier insects, who were the Blacks he was busy disparaging. But his companion in crime was Major Johann Coetzee, who went on to become the Chief Commissioner of the Security Police. And when he, after managing the failed hate policy for many years, he then became the overall commissioner of police in the last years of Apartheid. Now Coetzee did a secondary interrogation with me towards the end of my stay in prison, going over all the interrogation notes. And he was a man who liked conversation, he was like a school teacher. And he would question me and lead me on and debate with me. And at one point he bragged to me, 'cause they were dragging me through a series of questions.
And I said, look, I’m just nothing in this story. You know, you can mess with me. I’m just a 21-year-old student. You can wipe me out here, but you’re not going to stop history. And he said, he was a very sarcastic man. He said, “Mr. Schlapobersky, don’t you think that anybody except us are in command here. We have influx control, we have the Basque Laws, we have all the intelligences we need. We learned from our time studying the French colonial war against your friends, the communists in Algeria. We learned from them. This is not the Casbah, in which people can disappear into the darkness after throwing bombs. We know everything.” Now this bragging, first of all, it was completely not true. But secondly, they’d made a terrible mistake by arresting me in the first place 'cause I had nothing to give them. And yet they had to cover up their mistake. And I think they had two options. The one was to kill me in prison, which they did with many other such people. The other was to find a way of releasing me, but without saying, sorry.
I want to come to that. I want to come to that aspect, if I may. Sorry to interrupt you. I want to come to the release aspect. Before I get there, I want to just ask you about the killing part, if I may.
[John] Yeah.
Before I do that, because what is interesting, you, yourself document that Coetzee was believed to have devised and managed the assassinations and quoted in your book and bombings that killed Ruth First, Jeannette Schoon, Neil Curtis and her daughter Katrine, and maimed Albie Sachs. And then he had the chutzpah to ask for amnesty. We’ll get to that. But when, I mean they put you on this brick and you were to stand on that brick for an interminable amount of time. So there are two questions from that. Number one is, did you not, at that point, think they are going to finally bump me off? Did you actually have feelings because you were utterly in their power at that point in time? At that point you hadn’t even seen your parents yet, or anybody, for that matter.
There were two really critical points when I thought I would perish. It wasn’t so much the period on the brick because by the time they had me on the brick, I had some measure of what was going on. And one of the things that was engaged inside me was fury. I was so enraged with him and the rage brought me to a state of defiance. And I was going to bloody well stand on this bit brick for as long as I had to. And I would sing to the brick. You know, I would sing a Simon and Garfunkel-
You had an engagement with the brick. I found that, please carry on then.
Yeah, so I would call it my old friend. And then Simon and Garfunkel sung, hello darkness, my old friend. You know, they would let me off the brick to sit down and have a meal or to go to the toilet and then I had to get back up on the brick, as if I was climbing up onto something 20 feet tall, but it was just three inches above the ground. And they would beat me if I got off the brick, you know, I had to stand on the brick. So during that period on the brick, the threat to my life wasn’t so acute. It was at its most acute as they brought me into their interrogation centre, when I first encountered Swanepoel. All the things they’d seized from my home, books, documents, diary, notes, poetry, they seized a whole lot of stuff and brought it into their interrogation centre. And as I was brought in there between two police officers, I kept on insisting, I want to see a lawyer, I want to see a lawyer.
They said, we’ll show you a lawyer, you’ll come to see a lawyer. And then I came into this big room and there was Swanepoel and his mates all going through my stuff. And they all turned to me and started shouting in Afrikaans, terrible swear words, the most terrible about me being a Jew. And they would swear at me, you fucking Jewish communist. What are you doing to this country? And they were abusive, contemptuous and threatening. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Then it was all in Afrikaans and I said to Swanepoel, excuse me sir, but if you want me to answer your questions, please would you speak to me in English because I don’t understand what you’re saying. And he tore into me for being a stranger to DeTar. You think you can live here in what should be your country without speaking our language? How dare you? And he was very, very gross. And then I said, please, could I say see a lawyer? And he treated this with even more contempt. And then he saw my anger in reply and he said, “Ah, so you’re an angry one, are you? Well I like them when they’re angry, it makes the story more interesting.” And he got his team to herd me into a little interrogation room. There were about five or six of them, it was a tiny room. And they forced me back against the wall, they slammed a steel door on the window shut, it was a bright light above my head, and there were five or six people all screaming at me. And behind them came some more and they were all screaming. And at that moment, I thought I would die. And that’s how they worked. Well, I had in my mind, at that moment, my girlfriend Janet and my family and I withdrew into my memories of the people I love and who love me and that was a kind of safeguard.
One month later, in solitary confinement, I didn’t have a place to withdraw to because what was going on was I’d established the routine of survival through solitary. They would take me out twice each day. Once to walk around the exercise courtyard for half an hour and once for a shower for half an hour. And usually it was the same warders. But at a certain point the warders changed. By then I’d seen my parents once and they’d been authorised to send some, a couple of books for me, some food, cigarettes, and especially a toothbrush and toothpaste and soap and a razor 'cause I’d been there weeks and weeks and weeks with nothing like this and I looked like a wild man. But when they, when the prison warders gave me all this stuff, they’d taken the blade out of the razor. When they took me down to the bathroom for the shower, they gave me a razor blade. I’d put it in the razor, shave, and they took the blade away. And so it went for the first week after I’d received my things. But during the second week when the warder’s routines changed, when I went into the bathroom, there was a razor blade on the basin side plastered onto the side of the basin.
And I pointed that out to the warder. Oh, he said, we were talking Afrikaans then. Oh, he said, you know, that was a mistake. Somebody left it there, we’ll put it away. The next day was there again and the next day and the next. And then I realised that if they wanted me dead and I wasn’t going to kill myself, they wouldn’t wait, they would kill me and dress it up to look like suicide. And over that period of time, I lost control of my inner security. I thought I was facing death every day. And all I had to fall back on were the stories of my grandparents’ siblings facing the Nazis at the site of the execution pit in Lithuania. I had one great-uncle, we were very proud of him. His name was Sodic Schlapobersky from the town of Kitan. And I felt it’s my duty really to name him as one of the heroic people amongst the many, the 6 million who perished. And when they brought, he was the leader of the Jewish Town Council at that time, Lithuania in 1941 when the Nazis were doing all this killing. And when they brought him to the site of the pit and they told him to take his coat off. They wanted his coat before they shot him.
Sure.
He wouldn’t. And when the SS general came to take his coat off, my uncle pulled this man’s revolver out of his holster and turned it on him. But he couldn’t work the safety catch. He got desperate and he grabbed him and jumped with him into the pit and tore his throat out with his teeth. It’s a terrible story. Two Lithuanians jumped in after him. He killed one of them and the other killed him with a knife. And the story was, this event was witnessed by the only survivor of this massacre who was hidden in the log cabin watching what was going on through the slats of the cabin. He passed this story on, and it’s recorded in the annals of the Lithuanian Holocaust. And night after night thinking they would come for me at night to kill me, to hold me down and cut my wrists, I used to have this restorative memory of my great-uncle facing his end with courage. And that’s something that saw me through.
Now, before I get onto how you got out of this, after a total 50 odd days… Well, let me deal with that first and then I’ll come back to one or two points. Well, no, no, let me ask you this. One of the things that comes out in this book, which must have been utterly traumatic, was the fact that you could hear the singing on death row.
[John] Yeah.
They executed people. And of course we forget that South Africa, I mean, I was, you’re right, I was the Honorary National Director of the Society of the Abolition of the Death Penalty before it finally was abolished and very happy to be one of the advocates in the constitutional court in which Albie, of course, was one of the judges in which the whole thing was set aside, death penalty. But you describe a number of aspects about this. One of the aspects which intrigued me, if I could ask you to comment, is if I could just get my page here, where you talk about, you talk about the hangman. And you actually talk about the fact that, you know, how does he kind of, here it is, I think. You say, “Voices from the condemned cells had first been a solace before I knew what they were. But they were now a reminder of what an appalling place this was. So the hangman was having a weekend off. What did he do on his weekend? Where did he live and where did he go for his timeout? Hartbeespoort Dam was near Victoria. We used to go there to swim and to fish. Perhaps he went fishing there. Did he have a name? Would those have had their fishing lines in the water nearby realise they were fishing behind the hangman? If he met someone new and they talked about their careers, would he introduce himself by his occupation? Oh, I hang people by their necks until they’re dead”, et cetera, et cetera. Now when I combine that observation, which is an extraordinarily interesting one for all sorts of reasons, I suppose it’s the same question I have about Swanepoel and Coetzee. I mean, they would’ve gone to church on Sundays.
Unbelievable.
So how did you, I mean, what do you make of them?
Well.
The one thing I just wanted to add there, which I found intriguing when I reread the book in preparation for this interview, you’ve noted things in a second version, is Albie makes the point that neither you nor he, you were both coy about talking about the fact that Swanepoel is an extraordinarily ugly man.
Yeah.
And it’s interesting, I mean, Albie makes it an interesting point and I just, I’m combining all of that to ask you, you know, when you reflect back what produces people like this, the hangman, Coetzee, Swanepoel?
Well, there’s a historical answer and there’s a psychological one.
Give me both.
Okay, so the historical answer, is that evil, which is exemplified by these people, in my view, is not an intrinsic part of the human condition, it’s created. And what created such capacity for evil amongst the Afrikaners was the evil of British colonial policy. The horror of the Boer War is masked. You know, we’ve just had in London on last night, it was the last night of the proms, it’s a grand concert, it’s a very festive occasion. The Royal Albert Hall is full of 5000 people. And at the end of this last night of the biggest classical music concert in the world, they all sing “Rule Britannia”.
Britannia, yeah.
1901 it was composed, the height of the British Empire. They had just defeated the Boers. Why did they defeat the Boers? Well, they wanted the gold and diamonds. And what did they do to the Boers to defeat them? Well, they committed a form of genocide. And from what I can make out, all the senior figures in the hate policy were Afrikaans. And I think it’s very likely that they all have antecedents who were called . Those people from, senior figures of the Afrikaans society of their time in 1901 who wouldn’t sign the Peace Treaty at Vereeniging. And they went on fighting the Boer War in their heads for the generations that followed. And out of that embitteredness and the deaths by the thousand of civilians, women, children, the elderly in British concentration camps came people who harboured hate.
Now, of course, there are earlier features to the violence of South Africa to do with the Boers and their wars with Hausas before they left the Cape and then in their settlement of the interior through the Great Trek. There was so much violence in South Africa’s history. But I have been actually deeply moved and very impressed by restorative and reparative statements and reactions to this book by some of my own Afrikaans-speaking friends. And I don’t believe that people like Coetzee and Swanepoel represent the people they claim to have been protecting. They were an extremity and something like the Nazis, who were not representative of their own people. But then we come to the psychological detail of the particular. And you ask what makes a man like this? How do they come to be? And what should we do about them? I don’t think any of them deserved amnesty. The man responsible for Flodplus, his name won’t come into my head now.
You’re talking about de Kock?
De Kock. I mean he was called prime evil during-
[Dennis] Prime evil, yes.
You may have been involved in those proceedings.
No, I had others. So I know exactly what you’re talking about ‘cause I was a judge in a couple of review applications from the people. I under understand exactly, but the audience doesn’t so please carry on.
So here’s a question. Whilst Coetzee was the head of the policy, Flodplus was created as a centre for suppression and control. And it was a kind of murder farm just outside Pretoria. And the people who managed it under de Kock were, as a team, as a body corporate, a whole entourage of mass murderers. Now only de Kock got 450 years on his life imprisonment. The others got much less severe penalties. The people in charge of them, like Coetzee, got amnesty.
Yeah.
How does this work? Why was there not something equivalent to Nuremberg to put the arch perpetrators, the prime architects of the Apartheid machinery on trial to be investigated, not only for their conduct, but for their personality and makeup? Because we’ve learned a lot from the psychological work done on Nazi perpetrators. The same with, I’m sure you are more familiar than me with this, with the International Criminal Court, where people like Slobodan Milosevic and Ratko Mladic, the leaders of the Serb atrocities in the much more recent past were scrutinised, explored, deconstructed, their antecedents histories and personalities were much better understood. This has been left unattended in South Africa’s history.
Can I put something to you? Now, I’m well aware that you, very properly, in your book locate the fact that although, and Albie does too, that although you guys had an unbelievably torrid time, there were people even who had a worst time cause they died. And so what, but I haven’t got them in front of me. I’ve got you and so I want to ask you this. If I put to you that the answer to that was that that was the price we had to pay to get to 1994, that we couldn’t have Nuremberg trials because no one really won. As it were there, the Coetzee of this world were still lurking around and had huge fire power and that we had to do some transitional mechanism to get to democracy, which meant that we escaped, they escaped, Nuremberg trials. How does that make you feel and what’s your reaction?
Well, when, I get quite emotional at this point. And the emotions have to do-
Understandably. I understand that, yeah.
The emotions have to do with the fact that when Mandela took his oath of office, I wasn’t there. I wasn’t with you all in that moment of relief and jubilation. I was here and wasn’t so touched by the sense of it’s over. We can start again now. We were all profoundly affected by the events that took place in April of 1994 with Mandela’s appointment. I mean, even from far removed, watching from television here in London. One of the things that touched me most deeply, which I’ve written into the book in the afterward, was being a witness to the way in which when Mandela took his oath of office, he took it in English. And when Beckett took his oath of office, he took it in English. And when de Klerk, as the newly appointed deputy president to run alongside Beckett took his oath of office, he took it Afrikaans. And he put his hand on the Bible and he wept his heart out as he took his oath. Now, until that moment, I couldn’t stand hearing in Afrikaans spoken. It was the language of my torturers, it was the language of the police I’d seen brutalising Blacks in South Africa all through my childhood. I couldn’t bare to hear it spoken. But the paradox is that it was my mother’s first language. She had grown up as an Afrikaan on a farm in a very Afrikaans-speaking part of the Magaliesberg Western transfer. And we had idioms, jokes, swear words, and endearing expressions in our family in Afrikaans. Idiom was part of our upbringing. And actually I love it, it’s very touching. And in recent months, putting together the book launch event, which some people may have been able to log on and see, but it’s generally available. And I’ll ask you if Lockdown University can make the launch event-
Yeah, I’m sure. I’m sure we can arrange that.
Yes. Well, I put together a catalogue of South African music for the book launch. It’s the music of the freedom struggle. And these are songs like “Zan Zania” and “Nkosi Sikelel’”. And I know their words. And I grew up speaking siSwati on our farm. It’s very close to Zulu. I mean, I’m no longer fluent, but I can speak and listen and understand. And these songs mean a great deal to me. But whilst I was looking for the recordings to put onto my launch, I discovered at Stellenbosch University, the most beautiful conductor, Andre van der Merwe, conducting Stellenbosch University choir. And they have a song that he put together for the pandemic. It’s a lockdown song with each of its, of the or of the chorus 120, 150 members singing from their own home computer in front of the camera.
And he’s put this together in a composite. And these are all young people and they are Black, white, coloured, Indian, and Asian, such a mixed range. And young men and women. And they have the future in their voices. And they sing in the most beautiful, eloquent Afrikaans. And listening to them sing one particular song called “Die Donker”, which fundamentally is put together out of two earlier Afrikaans contemporary folk songs. It’s a song, a childhood song about On my uncle’s farm without electricity, it was through a barn that “Die Donker” . I was so frightened that the darkness would catch me. Now, of course, the darkness is the peril of human folly and cruelty. It’s got idiomatic consequence in this song. And hearing again Afrikaan-speaking people singing it in a search for innocence. When I associated the language with evil. It was like and undoing for me and I keep listen to the song even now.
I understand that, but I’m still interested in your reaction to the fact that you thought there’d be Nuremberg trials, but we didn’t have them. Are you, therefore, telling me in this onset of yours that in effect, perhaps the country has the possibility of going beyond that because the younger generation are going to see things differently?
Well, I think they already do.
Some.
Some. One of my friends in London, he’s a psychoanalyst. A man about 20 years younger than me so he’s just a little bit older than my children. He’s an Afrikaan speaking man from the free state and he lives and practises here in London as a psychoanalyst and a psychotherapist. And he was my first Afrikaans translator for the manuscript. I asked him to check my Afrikaans, go through it and correct it. And he did this very scrupulously and I’ve acknowledged his vital contribution. His name is Francois Lo. And I like to name the people I feel indebted to and grateful for. And when he met up after he’d gone through the manuscript closely, he said, “You’re a master storyteller. It’s a terrible story. And for me, the most terrible thing is what was done by my own people in the name of Christianity.” It was the section on the death penalty he found most unbearable to read about. Now here’s a voice of true conscience speaking and I think he’s quite representative of many such people.
I accept that. Can I move on though, just to ask you this? I interrupted you at a point and I want to come back to it. When we spoke about the fact that they were either going to kill you or let you go, they did let you go but through the most extraordinary mechanism of the intermediary of Itzhak Unna, the then Consul General, we didn’t have an ambassador, Israeli Ambassador to South Africa. And I wonder whether you would just briefly explain what happened there. Because I’m interested in that.
Yes, it is an extraordinary story.
[Dennis] It is, yeah.
Yeah, the way it unfolds has essentially to do with my parents because had it not been for their chutzpah and my mother’s tenacity as a fighter for what she believed in, none of that would’ve happened and I suspect I would’ve perished in one way or another. I might not have been killed, but I don’t think I would’ve come out of this whole thing intact. You know, the people they arrested through the winter of 1969, they arrested many hundreds of people that winter. They weren’t on the trail of anything because there was no effective underground at work that had agency. It had already been crushed. But the effective underground was outside the country. And they were doing this business really to intimidate the population and declared that was everywhere. the communists and the blacks were-
The black threat, yes, for those who don’t speak Afrikaans. Carry on.
They conducted this whole show trial business. They arrested many hundreds people. Of the many hundreds they arrested, there were only two whites, myself and an English guy called William Golding, who I never knew, but I think he was in a cell near mine. And I only thought that because on one occasion I was taken past a cell and its door had been inadvertently left open, and it was a cell with a bed in it. I was sleeping on the floor like most of the other black prisoners. And he was in that cell from the time they arrested him a month earlier than me in May and he was there until the first trial was concluded in December. And he gave state evidence in the first trial and they let him go back to Britain. Now, I can’t imagine what kind of remorse he would’ve been left with at having given state evidence.
I mean, what a terrible thing to have been forced to do. And what a terrible thing for the people he gave evidence against. Watching a young man who they’d worked with in some political capacity or other, tell the court what he thought the police wanted to hear. Now, your friend Sogart cross-examined him. I wasn’t there. You know, I was in Israel at that time. And he cross-examined him very cleverly by saying to him, he was shaking in court on the account I’ve been given by the young lawyers who were as a team acting as witnesses on behalf of an international judicial body. And the account I was given is that he came into the witness box trembling. He gave a certain amount of evidence and then when he was ready for cross examination, Sogart came up to him and you very gently said, “Were you hurt under the interrogation?” And he acknowledged that he had been severely hurt. And he said, “Are there any of those people responsible for hurting you here in court?”
And they identified Swanepoel and Coetzee. And then he said, “So we’ve heard your evidence. Can you tell us what your plans are when this trial is over?” And he said, “Well, those policemen have said that after I’ve given evidence, I can go home. Home is London.” And then he became kind of broken down and Sogart then said to the judge, we have no further questions. I mean, there was the manipulative use of torture revealed for its horror really.
But the judges continued to accept it for years, but that’s another story, be that as it may.
Well, at that stage, these judges would not-
In your case, that didn’t, in your case, Unna arrived.
Well, in my case, what happened was that my parents cut across on the advice of their own lawyer, who you may have known, Raymond Tucker.
Wonderful, wonderful man.
So he was a junior partner with Jack Brows in a Johannesburg firm and Jack Brows was a friend of my parents. So when I was arrested, they went straight to Jack Brows who got Raymond involved in the case. And Raymond together with Raymond Lowe, from the Rand Daily Mail, and Benjamin Pogrund worked out a policy and a strategy. And at a certain point, they said to my parents, there’s nothing the law can do to help you. The law makes it quite clear that Johnny’s outside our reach. The Terrorist Act insulates him from any judicial intervention or legal process. All you can hope to do is appeal to these people as parents. And they encourage my mother to go to the headquarters of the Bureau of State Security. Now the name’s jumped out of my head now of the man who was in charge. You’ll remember it, I’m sure.
van den Bergh, yeah.
van den Bergh, yeah, van den Bergh. They said, go to van den Bergh’s office, this is where you’ll find it, and say that you’ve come to talk to him because you want to see your son. Now they’d given my parents one brief visit with me after I’d been in prison for two weeks. Then there was a month when they had no access to me, which is the month in which I thought they were trying to kill me. And my mother went and she wouldn’t leave. She went to a place called DiVates, which was the headquarters of BOSS and she wouldn’t leave until she saw this man. He was a very big, tall man.
Yeah, he’s a, yeah, yeah.
That’s how she described him. And she went in and she had a hysterical breakdown and she said, if you don’t let me see my son, I’m getting on a plane and I’m going to denounce you at the United Nations. Now you have to have some measure of chutzpah to threaten the head of BOSS, but she did. And that day he phoned up Swanepoel and he said, my mother was listening. They didn’t realise she spoke Afrikaans fluently, it was all in Afrikaans. And van den Bergh said, “So how is this man . They called me the little Jew, little Jew boy. How is he getting on in prison? She couldn’t hear what he was informed. And then van den Bergh said to Swanepoel, we want you to let this mother come and see him. She’s having a fit in my office and we don’t want her to create more fuss than is necessary. The next day she was allowed to see me. She found I couldn’t speak, I’d lost the capacity for diction. I was in an advanced state of what we call complex post-traumatic stress disorder.
I was in a terrible state. And on several subsequent occasions, I was allowed to see her. She was allowed to bring my girlfriend to see me. And then they went to Itzhak Unna and said, "Please, can you intervene?” We know that you have worked with the South African Security Police for Ben Gurian’s visit in 1963, ‘64. We believe you may have access to, this was also on the advice of Raymond Tucker. And Unna said to her, look, your son is in a South African prison on a British passport. I’m not a British diplomat, I’m an Israeli diplomat, I can’t intervene. But these police know how to find me and if they speak to me, I will do what I can. So then my parents went back to Swanepoel and Coetzee and said, we think Major Unna, he was still using his title from the Israeli Defence Force, he was called Major Itzhak Unna. They went back to Unna and they asked him to get in touch. He did. They went back to the police and asked them to contact Unna, which they did, and they arranged my release. Now there’s an extended amount of detail about how this was negotiated and what took place and that’s in the book. It’s in a section called Signing the Statement and Negotiating the Release. And on a certain Monday, I was taken to meet the Israeli Consul General in Swanepoel’s office. He wanted to see who I was. He showed me a level of concern that I’d had from nobody except my parents. He documents in his own account that he knew Swanepoel was a murderer and was gravely concerned for what he might yet do to me. And he let the police know that if they released me, then he would put me on a plane for Israel. And the discussion I had with him was a discussion in which he said, “We’re not in a position to oversee an illegal deportation. But if the South African police released you at the airport, then I can take charge of you and put you on a plane for Israel.” And that’s how it was arranged.
Now, at that time, the police thought that I had no resources left with which to threaten them. They thought I was in such a mess that I would disappear. What I didn’t know was that because of my British passport, they put a seal against my ever returning to the country at the time I departed, left. They thought they’d got rid of me. But as soon as I could, I left Israel, came to London, got in touch with people in the liberation movements, including Albie Sachs, and put an account of my own interrogation and imprisonment into The Observer. It was arranged by Colin Legion through the intervention of Rika Hodgson, who was one of the key workers at the International Defence and Aid Fund. And that account of my own interrogation came out during the second trial of the 22.
Yeah.
And helped corroborate the deposition that was given by their solicitor that all the evidence against them had been procured under torture.
How long were you in Israel for?
[John] Six months.
And you never thought of staying there?
I still think about going there. I found myself more at home there on arrival than I felt anywhere, except on our farm in Swaziland. But I couldn’t live there under the conditions in which I saw Palestinians being subjected to the same scrutiny and coercive control that I saw being managed against Blacks in South Africa.
Even in '69?
You know, it was just after the Six Day War.
Yes.
In that period, the conduct of Israelis was of a victorious army that had vanquished a dangerous foe. That sense of aggression in the victory was everywhere.
Yeah. Can I ask you, I mean we, you know, I’m running out of time because we could debate this and I’m sorry I’ve gone onto this all night, but I did want to ask one final question to you 'cause I notice we’re coming up to the hour. And that is, we’ve touched a lot about Coetzee and Swanepoel, et cetera. And as we were at the time of sort of, you know, not just repentance, but the question of asking for forgiveness, et cetera. How do you respond to that? I mean, do we forgive, do we forget? How do we deal with this kind of, I mean, how do you deal with this kind of history? If you met, I mean, Albie Sachs talks about the soft power of vengeance.
Yeah.
I’m interested in your, you know, your response as to how you respond to this history. Because there’s no question, John, your life changed extraordinarily on that day in June, whenever it was when they arrested you.
My life.
Sure.
My parents and the life of both my brothers and my sister.
Oh, the whole family, yes, yes.
We were profoundly traumatised.
Yes.
And you know, when I had my book launch, I was interviewed by Gillian Slovo and we were talking about, you know, what had happened to her mother and how she was blown up in Maputo by a bomb planted under Kutzia’s oversight. And we were talking about, well, what do we do with our feelings about these perpetrators? What do we do? And in a moment, in a lapse maybe of weakness, maybe not, I spoke very honestly and I said, “Well, my own sense of grievance is unresolved. And if they were here in front of me now, I would shoot them both.” Now when we then put the recording out online, I thought better than to leave that in. I had one communication from a very dear friend of mine, a Turkish human rights worker who had worked with me in establishing the main agency in London for the rehabilitation of torture survivors. He’d been in prison in Turkey under one of their terrible regimes and terribly tortured. And he wrote to me and he said, “John, why did you say that? What you should have said was, we need to put these people into therapy rather than shoot them.” But I think there is a categorical difference between the arch perpetrators and the foot soldiers. And when you see remorse and humanity, even in perpetrators, like de Klerk weeping when he took his oath of office, then my heart responds too. And they are the people for whom soft vengeance is appropriate and we can make a reparative exchange. I find this, especially amongst the next generation of German people.
I mean, Germany is a country that’s turned itself inside out in the aftermath of World War II. And the de-Nazification programme of Germany is one of the most successful social experiments that’s ever written in the annals of human history. That a nation capable of such horror and atrocity should now be the centre of conscience for the whole of Western Europe. When Angela Merkel declared that Germany would take a million refugees from Syria, she had most of the country behind her. And they have assimilated them, many of them, most of them. And they’ve brought most of the German people with them, although there are strong ultra-right elements coming forward now too. So history doesn’t have to be left in the hands of black and white. We’ve got leverage. And I think we need to work with those we can work with and isolate those we can’t. And they should be beyond the pale. They should be outside the range of normal human conduct.
See, I want to just ask one question about my last question. I promise, as much as I think we could carry on for hours. I’m interested in what you said about de Klerk, and I’ll tell you why I’m interested. Because I think you’re right. I’ve just given a lecture earlier this evening about the fact that within our tradition, the Jewish tradition, you have to start off with an acknowledgement of what you’ve done, of the evil that you’ve done. And I think you’re saying the same thing about the Germans. When it comes to de Klerk, I did an interview for my television programme, a few months ago, in which I interviewed, amongst others, a man called Lacao Calata. His father was Fort Calata, one of the four Cradock Four who were brutally murdered by the security. And he has been seeking justice ever since and he feels de Klerk is part of that. And de Klerk wrote a letter and we invited him to come on to put his side of the story and said, you know, he’s got better things to do basically. And Calata said, you know, there’s a special place in hell reserved for people like de Klerk 'cause he’s never acknowledged that which he was responsible for. So what I’m saying is, there are very, there is that sense with people like de Klerk that unless you actually make a full and final and comprehensive disclosure, I’m not sure that you ever get the forgiveness which allows the society to move on.
Well, there’s more than one story about de Klerk and what I didn’t know at the time that I wept with him, watching him take his oath.
Yes, yes.
Was that he was managing a whole lot of hidden forces. A whole catalogue of third force agencies. I mean, the thing I discovered about Coetzee, this is all linking up, it’s not distracting, during my interrogation, there were people in the interrogation system, security police brought up from Durban, they called them De Durban Manna, the blokes from Durban, who spoke Zulu as fluently as the Zulu. And I could follow it because I could follow Zulu. They were white policemen who’d grown up in Zulu communities and Coetzee had a particular interest in these guys. And I believe he was one of the architects of the use made by the security forces to propagate rage and violence amongst the people who followed, now the names keep popping out of my head, I’m so sorry.
That’s all right, that’s all right.
But the way the Zulu nation was manipulated and used to stand against the ANC during critical periods and the violence in the hostels fomented by the police to counteract the potency of the UDF policies. I mean this, de Klerk was in overall charge of all of this, and Mandela knew it, he made it very clear. So I have my own mixed feelings about this. I don’t know what we should be doing. But it seems to me very clear not enough has been done about the key figures within those services. And what I wonder is whether we can reach their responsibility and culpability through their children. You know, the most extraordinary things have happened. I’m on the trail now of the offspring in Germany of a man called Font Stalecca. He was an SS general in command of an agency called the , the Special Action Commandos, who wiped out the Jews of Lithuania, Balo-Russia, and many of the Jews of Odessa. They were people who went in with machine guns and rifles, they lined people up, they got them to dig pits, they killed them into these pits. They killed my grandparents’ siblings.
So why are you on his trail?
Well, he was assassinated sometime between 1942, you know, the year after my family were killed, and 1943. So he was one of the people involved in the construction of the Wannsee Conference.
Okay, we’ve spoken a lot about that in the Lockdown University, yeah.
So he was one of those who appealed for the Nazi system to use more efficient means of killing than his soldiers. He didn’t want his soldiers exposed to so much civilian casualty because he said it rendered them unfit for battle against the Russians, so he was assassinated. And I’d like to think, somewhere in my mind, that there was a small group of such courageous, young, organised partisans, maybe even relatives of mine, who killed this man, Font Stalecca.
Okay?
He was already in his 50s, he had children. They must have grandchildren. Who are they? What do they do with their knowledge of their forebear’s history? How can we relate to them? Now I have befriended many such German people and I’ve discovered their humanity as they reach out to me. And I think we are obliged to find ways of crossing these divides.
Couldn’t agree more. John, I want to just see if there are any questions because we’ve come to an end. And I’ll thank you because it’s been a fabulous conversation. Just Anthony tells us that “Rule Britannia” was written correctly, I was right by James Thompson in 1740, set to music by Thomas Arne. I always learns things from this audience. And it may have a lot to do with the latter evolution of British Imperialism. At the time it had a different resonance. I’m not sure that’s correct, but be that as it may, ‘cause I was always played by the Army and the Navy. So there we are. Monty says, if evil can be created, is goodness innate or is it also created?
That’s a good question. That’s a good question. I think, the kind of answer we could come forward with is to look in scrutinising detail at the context of family life. When I think about my children and grandchildren and I think about myself and my siblings, I can see patterns of conflict and contestation, what’s often referred to as sibling rivalry, out of which I think harm is propagated if it’s not dealt with through the love of benevolent parents. And I think the most basic aspects of human life, if mismanaged, propagate what can then get compounded into evil. Just like the most basic aspects of human life, if fostered with love and tenderness, generate goodness. And I think we have to go back to basics to understand where evil comes from. I don’t myself work with psychopaths in serving prison sentences. Because of my own background and history in prison, I don’t find it comfortable going to prisons. But I train many people, you know, I’m a teacher in the field. And many of my most inspiring proteges and former students are working in forensics now and reclaiming lost lives from histories of culpability in homicide and terrible transgressions.
Rosa says, I was the beneficiary of the brilliant teachings of Arthur Goldwright while I was an undergraduate student in Mexico City and he came as a visiting professor. Even though it was a brief one, he told me he got to live in Israel after escaping his native South Africa 'cause of his involvement against Apartheid. I praise your fortitude and humanism after going through so much duress. The world is better because the people like you. Well, that’s a lovely compliment to you from Rosa.
Thank you very much. Rosa might like to know that our families are in some complicated way connected. So the Goldwright family used to spend time on my grandfather’s farm.
You’re talking about the Goldwrights now or Rosa?
[John] Yeah.
Then David says, did you ever find out what caused you to be arrested?
I never did, but I was very hopeful I would. And then had a whole period with the really very, very helpful intervention of Albie Sachs through the South African Historical Archive. We went in search of records and we discovered they had been wiped out. Jacob Lamini has published a wonderful historical narrative.
[Dennis] Yeah, he has, yeah.
Called “The Terrorist Handbook”. And in this an account of the record portfolio, during the last years of Apartheid. He documents how they destroyed hundreds of tonnes of data, documentation, and detail in industrial furnaces throughout the closing years. It must have been 1993 and '94. So it’s gone, wiped out. All I’ve been able to get hold of is the fact that I was arrested. I even found my arrest warrant in a part of the archive. Now, I’d never seen the warrant at the time I was arrested. But there he is, signed by Brigadier Hauss, the head of the police force. But there’s nothing else.
And there’s just one final question 'cause the rest of it, thank you very much, people who’ve complimented you, John, and you totally deserve it. There’s just Josie, but I think you’ve answered this 'cause she’s referring to former Minister of Police Flock visit the family of the Cradock Four, while the parents of the murdered man listened to Flock, a teenager, perhaps the younger son of the deceased, came in and dropped a large vase on Flock’s head. What about coming generations and their feelings towards reconciliation and forgiveness? But I think in some ways you have answered that. That that is where it’s all central, as I understand it. But if there’s something else you want to say about that, please do before we end.
Yes, what I’d like to respond with are the voices of these young people in the Stellenbosch Choir singing. I think they carry the future for us. Now it’s not everybody who gets to university and it’s not everybody who goes to Stellenbosch. But we all, those of us who have the good fortune to have children and grandchildren, can see they carry the future for us. And we need to keep the world as safe as we can until the next generations come forward, without hatred.
Thanks John. I want to thank you enormously. This is the second time I’ve interviewed you. I find both conversations, both contributions that you’ve made, the answers, both incredibly insightful and extraordinarily moving. I’m sorry to the audience that I didn’t get on, just we are way beyond the normal time, to actually talk about something else I wanted to. But I hope everybody will buy the book, “When They Came for Me, The Hidden Diary of an Apartheid Prisoner”, because in the epilogue, which is what I wanted to talk about, are six stories of healing and recovery. Each moving, each insightful, and each well worth a read. And if you want to read something over Yom Kippur, even if you just read the epilogue, it seems to me it would enrich your day in the most extraordinary fashion. John Schlapobersky, thank you very, very much for the privilege of interviewing you. And thank you for writing this book, which I think carves out part of our history in an important way that we should not forget. And perhaps we should forgive, but we should certainly not forget and this book makes a significant contribution to that. Thank you very much.
Dennis, thank you for this interview and for the previous one. And thank you, Wendy.
[Dennis] Over to you, Wendy.
Thank you to the whole team at Lockdown University.
Well, thank you very much. And I would like to echo Dennis’ words. Here is the book. And please, I’d like to urge you all to go onto Amazon and to buy the book and to read it. And I also would like to say, John, thank you very much for a most outstanding presentation. And to you too, Dennis. Maybe it was fortuitous that you didn’t get to the epilogue and maybe we could invite you, John, please, to come back.
Thank you.
And we could have another conversation with you. We’d be honoured to have you back. And what an extraordinary journey. Honestly, it was just, you know, very, very moving to hear what you’ve been through. And of course, I knew that from our childhood. But what I also just found so touching, was that there you are in London, we are from Swaziland. There is Dennis in Cape Town how many years later, 50 years later. We’re all sitting together and just, you know, sharing and coming together as a community. So thank you, thank you John. Pleasure to have you with us.
Thank you.
To you, to your family, to your siblings, to Colin and David and to Marion I wish you a very easy fast. To you Dennis too.
Thanks very much. Take care everybody.
Exactly. On Lockdown University, to all our participants, thank you for joining us today. Thank you.