Holding the Fort. Toni Strasburg

      For my parents, Hilda and Rusty Bernstein, for their amazing legacy.

      Author’s Note

      After my mother, Hilda Bernstein, died, my sister and I were going through her papers, getting them ready to send to the archive. Among them were her journals. One was a diary she had started writing about the events during the tense days leading up to the State of Emergency that followed the Sharpeville shootings on 21 March 1960. Somehow, she managed to keep it up throughout her time in prison, supplementing it with sketches of prison life and poems that she wrote to amuse the other women or send to the children.

      What had started as a peaceful demonstration of about 5 000 people protesting the pass laws outside the police station in Sharpeville, south of Johannesburg, was turned into a massacre when police fired at the protestors, killing 69 men, women and children and injuring 108. No one had anticipated this brutal outcome.

      News of the shootings drew immediate international condemnation, and in the days following Sharpeville, marches and demonstrations took place across South Africa. The ANC and PAC called for a ‘stay-at-home’. The government responded by declaring a State of Emergency, banning all public gatherings, and banning the ANC and PAC, effectively forcing them underground. Thousands of arrests took place during those days, and many people went into exile to evade arrest. My parents were among them.

      This is a personal story of one family in the three months that followed.

      Prologue

      ‘Go back to bed … it’s all right,’ my dad said as I stood in the doorway in my pyjamas, curlers in my hair. I was halfway back to my room when I realised that it wasn’t all right and came straight out again.

      Car doors slamming, followed by insistent knocking and ringing of the doorbell at three in the morning had startled me from sleep. Then, two men in suits were in our living room, talking to my parents who had hastily flung on their dressing gowns.

      I knew who they were. Special Branch. They always came before dawn, certain that the people they were looking for would be at home, asleep.

      Mostly they came looking for illegal documents or banned books. In our house, with its hundreds of books and papers, this could take hours and hours. My father would sit there smoking, not saying a single word as they pulled book after book from the bookshelves, read the title and either tossed it onto a pile to confiscate or left it. He never offered tea or coffee, just sat watching them, silently. Usually they weren’t English speakers, and they struggled to read the titles and deal with the mounds of papers written by my parents.

      But this time they weren’t looking for banned material; they were looking to arrest my mom and dad.

      Documenting this in her journal, my mother wrote:

      3 am Friday, 8 April 1960

      ‘Rusty, they’re here, go, go, go,’ I whispered urgently. I thought there was still time for him to get out through the back door. He put on a dressing gown and went to the front door. In any case, it was no use. They were ringing the bell and pounding on the front door, and at the same time the banging started on our kitchen door, while the beams of powerful torches flashed around the house.

      Rusty demanded identification before opening the door. Toni came out of her room in her nightgown, with curlers in her hair, and stood listening.

      They had come for both of us. Rusty only heard ‘Mr Bernstein’ and went into the room to pack a case, but the man in charge, Visser, said, ‘Mr and Mrs Bernstein. What do you intend doing about the children?’ It was the same one who had arrested Rusty three years ago for High Treason, when I was in a nursing home with our new baby, Keith.

      ‘I want to make a phone call,’ I told him.

      ‘Just for that,’ he replied. I phoned the Lewittons. A man’s voice answered. ‘Archie, they’ve come for both of us.’

      ‘This is the CID1, madam,’ the voice replied, ‘you are not allowed to speak to anyone.’ The receiver was banged down. At that moment, I felt completely bewildered. But a few moments later Fuzzy phoned back. ‘They’re arresting Archie,’ she said. ‘As soon as he has gone, Andrew and I will get dressed and come over.’

      She needn’t have hurried. It was 3 o’ clock when they woke us, and 6 before we left the house.

      They began on our books again – before the Treason arrests, they had removed about 360 books and pamphlets from our home, including such treasonable literature as Crime and Punishment and Britain Rebuilds. And we had not had a single one returned.

      Now they painstakingly went through a long bookcase, taking all sorts of things: Wendell Willkie’s One World, Basil Davidson’s The African Awakening. Our copy of The [South African] Treason Trial by Forman and Sachs, with the signatures of all the Treason accused in the front.2

      There was only one thing I feared – that Keith would wake before we left. I could not bear to see him, or even go into his room.

      I stood by anxiously as mom spoke on the phone, then we sat on her bed while she gave me numbers of people to phone and things to do. ‘Take you winter coat,’ I said as I watched her pack.

      I was acutely aware of my role as the eldest of four children and knew I needed to take responsibility for my younger siblings. I’d had previous experience. I was cool, calm and level-headed in a crisis, but also anxious about what was going to happen. In some ways I’d had to grow up quickly. That night, while helping my mother pack and then watching as both my parents were taken away, I began to assume the role of an adult.

      Friday, 8 April continued

      They took our telephone pad with numbers of all our friends and the children’s friends. Visser allowed Toni to copy out some of the numbers.

      We were dressed and waiting, each with a small case with pyjamas and a few things. I felt in a daze, but Toni was the practical one who told me all the useful things to take. ‘Pack your hair curlers,’ she said, ‘you’ll need them.’ (I did and we all did!) And ‘Take your big coat.’