New Haven Independent

Linda Biehl brought those questions the other day to a classroom full of 60 New Haven Academy students. The questions weren’t hypothetical for her: she faced thema fter her daughter Amy was killed by a mob in apartheid-era South Africa.

Amy, a Stanford graduate, had gone to South Africa to help promote legal reforms on behalf of the black majority seeking to overturn the country’s legalized system of racial segregation. A friend described what happened on this website: “On August 25, 1993, while Amy was driving three black colleagues back to Cape Town’s Guguletu Township, a group of youths pelted her car with stones and forced it to stop. Dozens of young men then surrounded the car repeating the militant Pan Africanist Congress chant, “One settler [white person], one bullet!” Amy was then pulled from the car, struck in the head with a brick as she tried to flee, and then beaten and stabbed in the heart while she lay on the ground. During the attack, Amy’s black friends yelled that she was a ‘comrade’ and friend of black South Africa to no avail. Amy was carried back to the car after the attack by her friends who then drove her to the nearest police station where she died. Amy was 26 years old at the time of her murder.”

In her discussion at New Haven Academy, Linda Biehl described flying to Cape Town as a family to see what her daughter was confronted with. She spoke of extreme poverty, of a school made out of dumpsters piled together and how the children valued education.

Biehl asked the students how they would have reacted if confronted by reporters at that scene.

“I would want everyone to go away,” said sophomore Jane Kozy.

As much as she wanted tto do that, Biehl said, she couldn’t. “We had to support Amy and what she stood up for.”

Biehl even talked to her daugher’s killers — and forgave them.

“Did you and your husband have the same view of deciding whether or not to forgive them?” asked student Katherine Podgwaite (who is pictured at the top of this article with Biehl).

“When we went to talk to them we felt as one. But we did have lots of discussions and debated over it but we agreed to talk to them,” Biehl responded.

Why forgive?

“Number one,” she said, “they didn’t reason. It wasn’t about Amy. And they didn’t know who Amy Biehl was. We didn’t opposed or react too much to amnesty. They didn’t intend to kill Amy for Amy; they were brought up in violent ways.

“I have never understood the word death until I went into those communities.”

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