Newspaper Article

LIVES OF NOTE

2006

Overview

Hilda Bernstein, 91, was one of the last surviving leaders of apartheid resistance in South Africa in the 1950s and 1960s. As the newly elected Afrikaner nationalist government formalised racial segregation and flexed its muscles, opposition leaders were either jailed or, like Bernstein and her husband, forced into exile. Bernstein was born Hilda Schwarz in London in 1915 to Russian immigrants. Her father, a Bolshevik, left the family to return to his homeland when she was 10 and when she was 18, she emigrated to South Africa and worked in advertising, publishing and journalism. Shocked by the rise of fascism in Europe, she joined the South African Labour Party. However, its attitude to the oppression of blacks was, at best, ambiguous and by 1940, she had joined the non- racial Communist Party. In 1941 she married a party colleague, Lionel \"Rusty\" Bernstein, a quietly spoken architect five years her junior. Two years later, she was elected to the Johannesburg City Council, its only communist member. During the 1950s, the Communist Party was banned but its members, including Bernstein's husband, reorganised underground. The government banned her from being a member of 26 organisations and from attending meetings but she found enough ways around the restrictions to help to set up the Federation of South African Women and was an organiser of the massed Women's March to Pretoria in 1956. Meanwhile, Rusty spent four years from 1956 in and out of court as one of the 150 accused in the mammoth Treason Trial, at the end of which all were acquitted. In 1961, Hilda was arrested and held for five months without trial during the state of emergency after the Sharpeville killings. In 1963, it put on trial 10 of the most senior activists, including Rusty Bernstein. This was known as the Rivonia trial.

• Publisher: Stuff Limited
• Subject: Bernstein, Hilda / Bernstein, Rusty / Wareham, Bill / Wareham, Jack / Wareham, Joseph