This post initially went onto the website a couple of weeks ago, but due to technical issues it wasn’t sent out to subscribers, so am posting it again with a slightly changed title.

John R. Schlapobersky is a group analyst and psychotherapist – someone who is accustomed to ‘hearing thunder, getting close to people who have suffered nightmares at other’s hands,’ and who has had his own therapy. He’s also a writer, and in 2021 published a memoir of his traumatic arrest and torture for opposing apartheid in South Africa. This detention took place in 1969 when he was a student.

Schlapobersky writes how we can be ambushed by our history in ‘an unguarded moment from the past’ – a particularly powerful flashback took place for him at a visit to the Apollo centre in Housten, Texas, fifty years after the trauma. At the visitor’s centre, memorable statements from Apollo 11 and the moon landing transported him immediately back to his time in prison. He writes that 20 July 1969 – the date of the moon landing also marked the turning point in his imprisonment towards survival. Taken aback by the depth of his emotion decades later, Schlapobersky decided to write and bring ‘light to a dark chapter that still casts shadows’. Apartheid ‘had its own coordinates of time and place but threats to human rights are perennial … even the rule of law was used as a vehicle for tyranny’.

Picked up at the university just before the start of a lecture, the police took him back to his apartment to search it:

‘Everything was numbered and catalogued, and when it came to diaries and address books they took everything they could find. I understood from all this they must have thought me a key figure in an underground intrigue, so I could not wait to get to Pretoria where – they assured me- I would be able to see a lawyer. Then I would be able to tell them the truth and come home again. I convinced myself that I would be away for only a few hours …

When one of them found my old high school Bible on my bookshelf, he took it down and put it into my hand. He need never have bothered, and at the time I wondered why he was giving it to me, but it proved to be a life-saving gift, an unexpected act of improbable kindness. In response to my puzzlement, he said simply and quietly, “Where you’re going, you may need something to read. Keep it close to you and look after it.”

That Bible became not only a source of reading and a calendar, but also where he made entries of significant Bible passages [the Bible is now on permanent loan to the Jewish Museum in London].

Taken in for interrogation Schlapobersky passed a street where he’d been on a peaceful student demonstration to protest against the termination of teaching contracts for black staff. Driving by he noted how ordinary it all looked, realising that no one outside knew what was happening to him. At the interrogation centre he was shouted at, threatened, and beaten and mocked for being Jewish:

‘… there were fists in my face, and they tore at my beard and long hair. To this day I am reluctant to allow anyone to touch my face. There were so many of them. The violence was at its most intense as they drove me onto the brick at my feet … and so I stood on it. What a strange thing I thought, balancing on this brick in front of a raging mob of Special branch. … The brick I was standing on was a red South African face-brick 81/2 inches long, 4 inches wide and 3 inches deep.’

Punished for falling off the brick – the torture began.