South Africa: Escape Artists

• Share

While radios blared the descriptions of the fugitives, thousands of South African police manned roadblocks, searched white homes and black townships all over the country. Their elusive quarry, honored by the biggest reward ($5,600) ever posted in South Africa: four prisoners who had staged a 1 a.m. walk-away from Johannesburg's central police headquarters. The leader of the fugitives was Arthur Goldreich, at 33 one of the country's most successful artists, and as of last week one of its more successful escape artists as well.

Raid on Rivonia. Bespectacled and slightly stooped, with a black beard (when last seen), Goldreich won South Africa's 1955 Best Young Painter award for his Figures in Black and White, designed sets and costumes for King Kong, the famed South African musical. To Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd's regime, he was a key suspect in the clandestine operations of the anti-apartheid underground. Last month police descended on the artist's swank home in the Johannesburg suburb of Rivonia, arrested Goldreich, his wife Hazel, four other white men, and a dozen nonwhites.

Like Goldreich, the other arrested whites were also prominent in South Africa's intellectual community: Lawyer Robert Hepple; Dr. Hilliard Festen-stein, a noted medical researcher; Engineer Dennis Goldberg; Architect Lionel Bernstein. Among the nonwhites seized was Walter Sisulu, onetime Secretary-General of the banned African National Congress and one of the country's most wanted men.

Goldreich was jailed under a recent law by which police can hold a suspect for 90 days without charge. (When the 90-day term comes to an end, some prisoners are being dutifully released, allowed to walk 100 yards, then rearrested for another three-month stretch.) A month after his arrest, Goldreich apparently got hold of cell-block keys, possibly with inside help, and freed three fellow prisoners—two anti-apartheid Asians, and a Jewish lawyer, Harold Wolpe, longtime defender of imprisoned leftists.*

Dark Mutterings. The case called attention to the fact that among South African whites who oppose Verwoerd's apartheid, perhaps the most zealous are Jews. The bulk of South Africa's 116,000 Jews tacitly condone apartheid, the Jewish Board of Deputies has always been careful not to attack it, and some of the wealthiest Jews contribute to Verwoerd's National Party. But to thousands of others, especially the younger, university-educated group, apartheid smells too much like Nazism. In the 1961 general election, Jews voted massively against the National Party, and the lone anti-apartheid crusader in the 160-member Assembly today is the pert, irrepressible Jewish wife of a Johannesburg physician, Mrs. Helen Suzman.

Despite such opposition and Verwoerd's own pro-Nazi past, Jews have so far been unmolested by the regime. The Goldreich escape, however, touched off ominous rumblings. Last week when Criminal Investigation Chief Reinier J. van den Bergh mentioned the Rivonia raid in a speech, a voice from the audience cried: "Jews!" Van den Bergh allowed that foes of apartheid might be "instruments of Jews."