Leaving the past behind

Sidney Bloch is an internationally recognised professor of psychiatry, loving father, keen chorister and author of several books on mental health and medical ethics. To all intents and purposes, he appeared a balanced, productive and fulfilled person, but gnawing away, year after year, was a deeply troubled conscience, one that demanded and has now, after four decades, been confronted and unravelled.

Emeritus Professor Bloch grew up in apartheid South Africa, abhorred the system, but did virtually nothing to oppose it. In his medical school at the University of Cape Town, 12 of the 100 students in his class were classified as ‘Non-White’ and were subject to many restrictions – they couldn’t examine white patients, dissect white corpses, attend post-mortems on white bodies, or socialise equally. By contrast, Sidney and his white colleagues were not discriminated against in any way, enjoying all the privileges accorded to white university students, but they barely registered this gross inequality and did nothing about it

So how does a man who lost 14 members of his extended family in the Nazi Holocaust become complicit with a racist system?

He understands it in this way.

“I habituated to apartheid during my youth out of a sense of futility that the system could ever change,” Professor Bloch says.

“The Nationalist Party had been entrenched in governing the country with its repugnant racist ideology from the time I was a young child and seemed an immovable monolith. I gradually drifted into the role of a moral bystander and remained one until I left the country the moment I graduated as a doctor.”

But the geographical move did not release him from a troubled conscience. On the contrary, he felt ashamed and guilty that he had been a beneficiary of a system in which millions suffered horribly. The pending 40th anniversary reunion of his medical class made him think all the more of what he had failed to do.

“I felt that to face my past in the context of the reunion and to seek forgiveness from the 12 students of colour who were treated so despicably could be salutary for all of us and a way of shedding light on the evil of racism for my teenager son Aaron and his generation,” Professor Bloch says.

“I was also eager that the journey might result in a resource that could be used in educational programs on all forms of discrimination, hence my suggestion to Rod Freedman, a fellow South African émigré and film maker, to record the journey.’

Aaron sensed his father’s inner turmoil, and agreed to participate in the journey.

The result is a moving and thought-provoking new documentary film Wrong Side of the Bus which captures a father and son’s reflections as they meet a wide range of people in Cape Town who were the dramatis personae of the apartheid saga, especially its victims and those who courageously resisted it at great peril.

“We had no idea of what to expect but very soon into our sojourn came to sense how meaningful the journey was for both of us. I found myself confronting my inglorious past while Aaron helped me to explore my unease and then challenged me to deal with it head on,” he says.

Sidney arranged a reconciliation event at the medical school reunion despite warnings from local experts that he could be taking his colleagues to where they might prefer not to go. Some of them questioned his motives.

But Professor Bloch was determined to proceed. When he and Irwin Combrinck, one of his former classmates of colour, reflected on their disparate experiences, he found Irwin’s frankness confronting but his generosity of spirit inspiring. Irwin referred to the “dismal past” but agreed that an attempt to reconcile even 40 years later was worthwhile.

Flummoxed by the equal generosity of the many black South Africans Sidney encountered who intimated that while they could never forget their suffering, they had come to forgive their apartheid tormentors, he himself was still unable to forgive the Afrikaaners as a group.

He had always regarded them as the enemy, akin to the Nazis. He seemed unable to accept that apartheid had ended and people had moved on. In an unexpected encounter, he came face to face with his own prejudice. During a workshop on ‘Facing the Past’ at the Cape Town Holocaust Centre, Sidney Bloch felt for the first time a sense of genuine belonging and was overwhelmed with emotion.

“I realised that I had harboured the same blind prejudice that I had accused the Afrikaaners of maintaining,” he sighs.

Yet he still felt stuck in his role of guilty bystander. Could he have acted differently? What choices had he had? Was there anyone to forgive him on the current journey?

In his quest to understand these profound questions, Professor Bloch sought out victims of apartheid, former colleagues who stayed to make a difference, and political activists such as Judge Albie Sachs (who plays a prominent role in the documentary), measuring his own stand against theirs.

Throughout their time in Cape Town Aaron critically observed his father’s dilemma, both supporting and challenging him.

“On the last day of the shoot, we visited Robben Island to get a sense of the ordeal of Nelson Mandela and his comrades as well as the ruthlessness of the regime. I was amazingly fortunate to meet, quite by chance, a former political prisoner, Modise Phekonyane, who showed us the cell where he had been imprisoned for six years from the age of 17, ironically the same period that I had been a beneficiary of the system as a medical student. As he handed the key of the cell to me Modise uttered the following words, “With this key you can leave your past behind, move into the future and renew yourself. You have shown by coming back that you are prepared to face your demons and you are entitled to forgive yourself for not acting in the past. You are now acting to make amends and you can do much in the future – there is indeed plenty of work to be done in the new South Africa.”

“I was lost for words but our warm embrace of each other said it all. It was an awesome moment that I shall never forget,” he says.

And the film’s title? A 15 year-old Sidney Bloch did sit on the wrong side of the bus – in the area designated “Non-White”– on the day apartheid was introduced on Cape Town buses.

Wrong Side of the Bus will be broadcast on Sunday evening 21 March on Compass, ABC 1. Secondary school teachers who wish to show the film to their students can order it from
www.Roninfilms.com.au
A free study guide is available from
www.wrongsideofthebus.com.au