Franz Auerbach

"Some people feel a passionate loyalty to a single cause, and look upon themselves as belonging to a single human group to the exclusion of all others. I am not one of those…. No, I don’t have a single loyalty, or a single ‘group’ identity. All these strands are in me: together they make up a single human being who, I hope, has a harmonious personality perhaps best defined as ‘a human male named Franz Auerbach, born 1923’. I mention my year of birth because like everyone else I am also a ‘child of my time’, with experiences and perceptions somewhat different from those of earlier and later generations."

The great humanitarian and educationist, Dr. Franz Auerbach, once lived in my street.

When I made the documentary film, ‘The Other Voices’, under the auspices of the South African Chapter of the World Conference on Religion and Peace (WCRP), Franz was the Secretary of the WCRP and a co-signatory on all financial claims related to the film, so I would meet him regularly in his small study in the flat at North Hill Mansions in Yeoville, which is where he lived before he died in 2006.  

He was working on his autobiography at the time and sometimes he would talk about his experiences as a young man in Bez Valley. Thinking back, I  consider these conversations a great privilege.  

Franz was a boy of 13 when he and his parents came to South Africa as refugees from Nazi Germany. The family moved into a bachelor flat in Huntley Hall in Wolmarans Street in September 1937. The flat consisted of a bed-sitting room, bathroom and kitchen. Franz slept on a couch in the kitchen. Some years later, towards the end of 1940, the family bought a house in Eighth Avenue, Bez Valley, at a cost of R2, 400.

In his autobiography, No Single Loyalty: Many Strands One Design, A South African Teacher’s Life, published in 2002, Franz writes: “We were very happy to move into a five-roomed house with a large kitchen and a separate pantry, as well as a front garden – which my mother took under her care – a back yard with a plum tree, a shed, a servant’s room and a lean-to-shed where we would have parked our car if we had one. That didn’t come till 1953. There was a good tram service from Bez Valley to the centre of town, and the stop was just behind the house at the back of us, on the main road, Kitchener Avenue’.

1953 was the year in which Franz, now married with children, bought his first car in South Africa, a black Hillman Minx. It was also the year that the family moved from Bez Valley to Risidale.

I went looking for 70, Eighth Avenue, Bez Valley, motivated by Franz's autobiography, which I have recently re-read. The house is not numbered. A group of five or six young men were drinking castle lager from a few shared bottles on a verandah opposite the house, passing the bottles around from one to the other. I asked if they knew whether number 70 was the house on the corner with yellow walls, explaining in reply to their curiosity that somebody I had known used to live there. 

It was the right house. From the outside it appeared to be in very good condition. I walked around the walls, peering through the gate until a particularly vicious alsation made it impossible.  

'There’s only Congo people there now,' one of the young men shouted in a tone of voice implying that this would inevitably put an end to my interest.