Author, Presenter & Lecturer Book Reviews By Hilda Bernstein Persephone Books Ltd 10 Review by Anne Sebba, Jewish Chronicle, April 17 2004 It's hard to imagine a greater dilemma for a mother: to flee, certain that the police are only minutes away, or to stay and risk being arrested which would prevent your being with your children anyway. Hilda Bernstein, one of the most courageous of the anti-apartheid campaigners in 1960?s South Africa, gets to the core of what it means to be a woman and to care passionately about a political cause in her deeply moving book, The World that was Ours , now reissued with a reflective preface and afterword by the author. She maintains that only a very few people are able to turn their backs on the responsibilities and emotional ties of family life. Her most important possessions were always her children "at that stage still too strongly tied to every cell of my physical and mental being and I could not find the will to set them on one side and live without them." When she finally rushes out of the back door through the garden, as the Special Branch arrive at the front, the children are unaware that she has gone. In the kitchen never to be entered again, the washing machine goes into its rinsing cycle and the pressure cooker sends out its agitated puffs of steam- an indelible image. In this riveting book, written in the immediate aftermath of her flight to