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Content
A listing of transcripts of the dialogue and narrative of this section.
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Structure
The list provides the transcript, info about the text, and links to references contained in the text.
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Special Report
Transcripts for Section 2 of Episode 21
| Time | Summary | | | 01:33 | Mr. Chairman and members of the Commission. You have heard many stories of astonishing things. You have heard stories of people who hurt others without batting an eyelid. You have crept into the hearts of wounded and sometimes damaged people. My story and that of my children is small in comparison with so many others for whom our hearts bleed. Our pain is just a drop in South Africa’s ocean. | Full Transcript and References | | 02:18 | It began in November 1978, a warm summer’s day that began like any other for Susan and Jaap van der Merwe on their farm Swartklip at Thabazimbi near the Botswana border. Susan left for a teaching job and Jaap went to a nearby farm to shoot a buck. He left a note saying he might be late, but he never came back. // On Thursday afternoon my sister-in-law phoned me she said: Susan where is Jaap? And I said. But Jaap is at Wag-‘n-bietjiesdraai. She said but he is definitely not here. And I said but then there is a big problem. The security police at that stage started realizing that people were coming in from Botswana. They came to me and said they suspect that something had happened to him. My one son refused to go back to school. He was seventeen years old. He said he was not going back to school until they found his father. He got hold of a horse from one of the farm people and he helped with the search. // They searched for weeks. The police, the commando, farmers, and farm workers ...more | Full Transcript and References | | 06:32 | For Susan van der Merwe knowing how her husband died has not answered the question of why he had to die. // If it was a military operation, for instance if my son who was in the army, if they had told me he had lost his life it would have been different. Because he was a trained soldier fighting against people who are also trained soldiers. That is an incredibly big difference. | Full Transcript | | 07:09 | And like so many others who have come to the Truth Commission with the stories of their loved one’s disappearance Susan van der Merwe’s one wish is to be able to lie to rest her husband’s remains. // My story, Mr. Chairman and Commission members, is actually just the story of a woman who could not bury her husband because there was no body. Thank you for listening to me. | Full Transcript |
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