Who Betrayed Bram Fischer?
On 16 November 1964, a leader of the South African Communist Party (SACP) stood up in court and pointed out eight persons who he said were in the party with him. Petrus Arnoldus Bernhardus “Piet” Beyleveld, an acknowledged member of the party’s Central Committee, was the state’s first witness as the trial of 14 persons charged with being Communist party officers or members opened in a Johannesburg Regional Court.
The fourteen originally charged were: Abram Fischer, Q.C., leading defence lawyer in the Rivonia sabotage trial; Ivan Schermbrucker. former manager of the banned “New Age” and “Spark” newspapers; Eli Weinberg, for over thirty years a prominent trade union official until banned by the Nationalist Government, and later a professional photographer; Esther Barsel, former member of the Friends of the Soviet Union and the Congress of Democrats; Dr Costa Garides, former member of the Congress of Democrats; Lewis Baker, a well-known Benoni attorney and secretary of the East Rand Branch of the Communist Party until it was banned in 1950.
They also included Paul Trewhela, a journalist and former member of the Congress of Democrats; Norman Levy, a teacher and former national executive member of the Congress of Democrats; Molly Doyle, a former member of the Congress of Democrats; Sylvia Neame, a student and former member of the Liberal Party and later the Congress of Democrats; Anne Nicholson, art student and former member of t
