Albie Sachs on the handshake that shook him

Justice Albie Sachs felt a real sense of liberation after encountering the man who orchestrated the car bombing in which he lost an arm and the sight in one eye.

Sachs told the Temple Israel Passover Freedom online event last week that his “heart [was] beating very, very fast” when apartheid soldier Henry van der Westhuizen asked to see him for the first time.

At the time, in 1996, Sachs was serving as a judge at the Constitutional Court, and the man called at reception, Sachs told the audience of the Hillbrow-based shul’s talk.

“I open the security gate, and there is this man, tall and thin like me, although younger. He is looking at me, and I’m looking at him. In his eyes, I can see [reflecting] this is the man I tried to kill and, in my eyes, you can see [reflecting] this is the man who tried to kill me. We didn’t know each other; we hadn’t fought [personally]. He was just on that side, I was on this side, and he tried to kill me.”

The men spoke extensively during a meeting in his chambers, with Van der Westhuizen boasting about his own educational success and then rise in the ranks of the army “as if he wanted a pat on the back for that”.

At the end of the meeting, Sachs told Van der Westhuizen, “Henry, normally, when I say goodbye to somebody. I shake that person’s hand, but I can’t shake your hand. Go to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and tell them what you know. Maybe we’ll meet one day.”

Although Van der Westhuizen jauntily strode in, he “shuffled” out.

Sachs said he forgot about the incident until sometime later when he was attending a party in Johannesburg. He heard someone calling his name, and it was Van der Westhuizen. Again, he asked to speak to Sachs.

“We went into a corner so I could hear him over the music, and he said, ‘I spoke to the TRC and I told them everything I know’. I put out my hand, and I shook his. I almost fainted. He went away beaming.

“I heard afterwards that he suddenly left the party and he went home and cried for two weeks. I don’t know if it’s true. I want to leave it as a possibility.

“For me it was more important that this former killer … can now cry because of what he did. It was liberating.

“I wanted him to enter into the new South Africa and accept [new] norms and standards. The door would be open for him now to tell the truth and become a more dignified human being, and he walked through that door.”

Sachs went on to speak about the plight of refugees, speaking of his own experience in exile in England. He described how he was first “a psychological wreck” when he went there after being tortured in prison, and then after the car bombing, he was there as a “physical wreck”.

From the British nurses who cared for him, literally picking the shrapnel out his chest, he learnt that refugees need more help than just safety and survival. “The nurses, washing my body, that laying on of hands, gave me a sense of connection with England I never had before. It was a kind of organised love.”

Sachs said this is what we as South Africans need to offer those seeking solace in fleeing their homes.

He told the audience that he had been reflecting recently on his Jewish identity and what it meant to be “a good Jew”.

Two events made him contemplate the topic.

First, he always remembered how the late Chief Rabbi Cyril Harris had spoken at former anti-apartheid activist Joe Slovo’s funeral. “At the funeral, he said Joe was a good Jew. Now that surprised me: the head of the Orthodox rabbinate is calling Joe a good Jew. It was on ethical grounds.”

The second incident was when he was visiting England at a time when there was a legal challenge to a Jewish school that had excluded the child of a converted woman. The court was asked to establish if this was in contravention of race-discrimination laws.

Then chief justice of England, Nick Phillips, asserted that he suddenly found himself in the position of having to “decide who is a Jew”.

Sachs remembers a member of the country’s Jewish Board of Deputies being called as a witness, and asserting that there were three criteria to being Jewish: to have a mezuzah; to contribute to Jewish charities; and to go to shul for at least the high holy days.

“Joe didn’t do these things – and I’ll be exactly the same. So I don’t know.”

Sachs said what was very pronounced for him was a “horror of antisemitism”.

He recalled visiting Bulgaria on holiday in 1968, and coming across two synagogues which had been hoarded by Nazis with looted memorabilia from other synagogues all over Europe as part of Hitler’s plans to build a monument to an extinct race.

“I went back to the apartment, and wept,” he said.

Others questioned why he was overwrought, saying, everyone found it horrific. “I wept and said it was a decimation of my family, my aunties and uncles whom I had never known. It’s something, in that sense, visceral for me, and very profound.”

He said his connection was in terms of Jewish experience, rather than doctrine. “It might be something to do with our grandparents living in the shtetls. The only book they would have had would be the Torah; the only school would be the cheder. [It showed] that ideas mattered.

“For those of us who were activists, ideas mattered, not just compassion, but ideas and a kind of rationality connected with justice. If that’s part of the Jewish experience, then I’m imbued with that aspect.

“I’m a proud Jew and I’m proudly secular. I don’t know what the connection is. It’s between opposites.”

He has always been certain about one thing: “My auntie Rosie’s taiglach that she made every Rosh Hashanah in a big round tin. She made the best taiglach in Cape Town!”