At a Glance
Johannesburg, the Jewish Left, and the Path to Political Commitment
Arthur Goldreich grew up in the particular social world of Johannesburg's Jewish community in the 1930s and 1940s — a world shaped by the relatively recent immigration of families fleeing anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe, by the specific position that Jewish South Africans occupied in the apartheid racial hierarchy (classified as white, benefiting from white privilege, but subject to a social anti-Semitism that made their acceptance in the dominant Afrikaner nationalist culture conditional and uncomfortable), and by the political tradition that many families had brought from the left-wing movements of Eastern Europe. The South African Communist Party drew disproportionately from this community, not because Jews were inherently sympathetic to communism but because the specific historical experience of persecution that many families carried gave them a different relationship to racial classification and to the politics of exclusion than the English-speaking and Afrikaner communities whose families had been in South Africa for generations.
Goldreich studied art in South Africa and then traveled — to London, to Paris, to the broader world of post-war European culture — before returning to Johannesburg in the early 1950s as a practising artist and designer with both professional ambitions and political commitments. His art was serious and his commitment to it genuine: he worked in graphic design, in theatre, and in fine art, and his work had a distinctive quality that reflected the visual intelligence of a man who thought seriously about form and meaning. But the South Africa to which he returned was in the process of constructing the full apparatus of apartheid, and the combination of his political formation and his direct daily observation of what apartheid was doing made purely aesthetic commitment insufficient.
Between his time in South Africa and his departure, he had spent time in what was then Palestine and then Israel during the period of the 1948 war — fighting with the Palmach in the armed conflict that accompanied Israeli independence. This experience — of armed struggle in a context he understood as a liberation struggle, regardless of how that characterisation has been disputed in subsequent decades — gave him a practical knowledge of military organisation and clandestine operation that was rare in the ANC's white communist circles, and it contributed directly to the value he brought to MK when the organisation was established.
The Congress Alliance, MK, and the Decision to Acquire Liliesleaf
Goldreich joined the South African Communist Party and became part of the Congress Alliance network that connected the SACP with the ANC, the South African Indian Congress, and the other organisations of the liberation movement's coalition. His role in these networks was shaped partly by his political commitments and partly by the practical value of his specific position: as a white professional with legitimate business activities, he could acquire property, open bank accounts, move freely across the country, and interact with the financial and commercial systems that Black South Africans were largely excluded from. The ANC needed people who could do these things, and Goldreich was willing to use his white privilege in the service of the movement that was trying to abolish it.
The acquisition of Liliesleaf Farm in Rivonia was the most significant single act of this kind. The farm — a property outside the main urban area, with enough space to meet without attracting the immediate attention that meetings in Soweto or central Johannesburg would have drawn — was purchased in Goldreich's name as a cover for the ANC's operational needs. He and his wife Hazel moved in as the ostensible farmer and resident, living in the farmhouse with their children while the thatched outbuildings and studio spaces on the property were used by the ANC's underground leadership for meetings, document production, and strategic planning.
Nelson Mandela lived at Liliesleaf while underground in 1961 and 1962 — disguised as a caretaker named David Motsamai — and used the farm as the base from which he directed MK's organisation and from which he traveled abroad to seek support and training for MK guerrillas. The farm was the physical centre of the ANC's internal command structure during the most intense period of MK's organisation, and its security depended on the cover that Goldreich's legitimate residence provided. For nearly two years, the arrangement worked.
The Rivonia Raid, Arrest, and the Marshall Square Escape
The police raid on Liliesleaf Farm on 11 July 1963 was a catastrophe for the ANC. The security police arrived in a laundry van, disguised as delivery workers, and found at the farm a meeting of the ANC and MK's internal leadership that included Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Raymond Mhlaba, Ahmed Kathrada, Elias Motsoaledi, Andrew Mlangeni, Lionel Bernstein, Goldreich, and others. More critically, the raid yielded an extraordinary collection of documents — including the text of Operation Mayibuye, the ANC's plan for a guerrilla war — that gave the prosecution everything it needed to construct the Rivonia Trial case.
Goldreich was arrested and held at Marshall Square police station in central Johannesburg, along with Harold Wolpe — a lawyer who had been involved in the ANC's underground work. Both men were held while the prosecution assembled its case, and both men understood that the documents seized at Liliesleaf made conviction and likely life imprisonment — or execution — a near certainty if they remained in South Africa to face trial.
The escape, executed on the night of 11 August 1963, was one of the most audacious acts in the history of the anti-apartheid movement and one of the most operationally simple. Goldreich and Wolpe identified a young police guard, assessed his susceptibility to bribery, and offered him four hundred rand — a significant sum in 1963 — to look the other way while they walked out. He accepted. They walked out of Marshall Square police station in the middle of the night and made their way to the house of a sympathiser, from where a network of ANC and SACP contacts moved them across South Africa to the Swazi border. They crossed into Swaziland, traveled to Bechuanaland, and were flown out by light aircraft — piloted by a contact — to Tanganyika and then on to the United Kingdom. The escape was complete; the bribed guard was arrested and tried; Goldreich and Wolpe were beyond the apartheid state's reach.
Exile, Israel, and the Second Life
From Britain, Goldreich eventually made his way to Israel — a destination that made sense given his personal history, his Palmach service, and the political relationships he had built during his time in what had by then become the State of Israel. He settled there, built a new life, and constructed a distinguished second career as an artist and designer that drew on the full range of his creative abilities in a context where he was not simultaneously required to be a clandestine revolutionary operative. He taught at the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem, worked on architectural design projects, exhibited his fine art, and became one of the more significant figures in Israeli design culture — a contribution that existed entirely separately from his South African liberation movement history and that demonstrated the range of what the apartheid state had cost South Africa by driving people like him into exile.
His relationship to his South African past was complex and continuing. He maintained connections to the ANC in exile and to the broader anti-apartheid movement, returned to South Africa after the unbanning of the ANC in 1990, and engaged with the post-apartheid society that the struggle he had participated in had helped create. Liliesleaf Farm was preserved and eventually developed as a museum, and Goldreich's role in its history was acknowledged and celebrated — though the complexities of his position, as a white man who had benefited from apartheid's racial classifications even while working against the system, gave his legacy a nuance that straightforward commemoration tends to flatten.
Legacy
Arthur Goldreich's legacy raises questions that the history of the South African liberation struggle has not fully resolved about the role of white South Africans — and specifically white Jewish South Africans — in the movement against apartheid. The contribution was real and significant: people like Goldreich, Bram Fischer, Joe Slovo, Ruth First, Rusty Bernstein, and others provided the movement with skills, resources, legal expertise, and international connections that it would have been much harder to develop otherwise. The South African Communist Party's multi-racial character made it the primary vehicle through which white South Africans could participate in the liberation movement on terms of genuine political equality, and its networks were essential to the Congress Alliance's operational capacity.
Liliesleaf Farm — now a museum on Constitution Hill in what was once Rivonia — is the most concrete memorial to what Goldreich did, and the farm's significance in the history of the liberation struggle ensures that his name will remain attached to one of the movement's most important sites. His escape from Marshall Square is the moment that liberation movement mythology tends to remember him by: the audacity of bribing a guard and walking out, the nerve required to execute the plan, the resourcefulness of the network that got him and Wolpe out of the country. But the escape was only possible because of the years of committed, unglamorous organisational work that preceded it — and it was that work, not the escape, that was his real contribution to the struggle.