There will always be a place where I’m alone, totally alone before my judges, who are also his judges, and before whom I appear in his company, but suddenly abandoned by him in that singular, inevitable, incomparable, dark, and superb solitude that always begins with the same ritual: “Are you a Jew?”
“Are you a Jew?”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“Your partners, are they or were they Jews?”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“Are you a Zionist?”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“Are your partners always Zionists?”
“No, Mr. President.”
“When did your Zionist activities begin?”
“At the age of eight, Mr. President. My mother enrolled me in a sports club called Macabi.”
“Did your mother take you or did you go by yourself?”
“My mother took me, Mr. President.”
“Therefore, one could say that it wasn’t a voluntary act on your part.”
“I was taken by my mother, Mr. President.”
“In what way did your Zionist activities continue?”
“While attending high school, I was invited to participate in a student Zionist group called Avuca. I was fourteen years old.”
“Does ‘Avuca’ mean ‘torch’?”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“Which means we could say that at age fourteen you voluntarily began your Zionist activities in Argentina?”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“What did you do?”
“We met on Saturdays, Mr. President, in the basement of the Argentine Zionist Federation. We had a library, a Ping-Pong table, and several chess sets. We were all Jewish high-school students.”
“Were you being indoctrinated?”
“Every Saturday, a member of the University Zionist Atheneum, which operated on the top floors, presented a talk on Zionism or Jewish history.”
I was fourteen years old, went to school mornings, and afternoons worked as a messenger for a jewelry store. We lived in the heart of the Jewish quarter. My father had died two years before. My mother worked as a street vendor, my brother studied and helped her. On Saturday mornings we had to attend classes, but in the afternoon the jewelry store was closed. After lunch, my chores were to wash the dishes and pots, iron my shirts, and scrub the stairway of the building. In exchange for running this small apartment building in the Jewish quarter where each family occupied a single room, we were given a free room. For this, we had to scrub the bathrooms, corridors, stairways, and collect the rents. My mother paid me ten cents for washing the stairways, the price of a chocolate bar, and instructed me to buy it shortly before the Avuca activities were over so that I could save her a piece. In the winter, I had to hurry to get to the municipal bathhouse where there was hot water so as to return and get dressed in time and not miss any of the Avuca activities.
Ping-Pong and chess were novelties. Zionism and Jewish history, true discoveries. But meeting Jewish adolescents who didn’t work, were well-to-do, dressed in suits, and had money, this was mind-boggling.
There were also young people of sixteen and seventeen. And they were the ones responsible for the abrupt end of my childhood, thrusting me headlong into the world I would never thereafter abandon. Emilio Salgari and Alexander Dumas had to be set aside in order to read Jack London, Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, Henri Barbusse, and Erich Maria Remarque. On May 1, you had to join the great Socialist demonstration supporting the defense of Madrid, and carry overhead the blue-and-white flag with the star of David amid that sea of red flags. In that year of 1937, you had to explain that Zionism was a national liberation movement and that involvement in Zionism provided a kind of additional energy for the international struggle against fascism, Franco, Hitler, and Mussolini. In small groups, you had to cover the streets of the Jewish quarter, the Once District, where we lived and had our headquarters, to be on the lookout for Fascist, anti-Semitic groups who defaced the walls of synagogues and schools, scribbling SERVE YOUR COUNTRY, KILL A JEW, or improvising little grandstands in front of Jewish cafes where they launched their harangues against those very Jews. There we were, with our heavy Ping-Pong rackets, made of wood in those days, flinging ourselves against the Fascists until two or three bored policemen would separate us and lead a few Jewish youths off to the nearby police station.
I still remember, at age fourteen, standing in front of that police station, crying because my brother had been kicked inside following one of those skirmishes. And I recall my mother, right there, summoned by friends, explaining in her faltering Spanish that her Yosele was only trying to prevent some Jews from being beaten up, and that she was sure the police chief was a good Christian and against fights that were started in the quarter by hooligans who came from outside.
There, at Avuca, when I was already fifteen, two good-looking young men arrived whom we’d never seen, handsome in their white shirts with military pockets and blue kerchief at the neck, to inform us that they were Jewish Boy Scouts in addition to being Socialist Zionists; and that we ought to learn about scouting so as to reacquaint ourselves with the land we’d left so many centuries ago. We ought to return to the land, to Israel, which was ours and under socialism, for the nation we wanted to build had to be the synthesis of the dreams of prophets past and present, namely, humanist socialism. There, in Argentina, stood those two young men from Hashomer Hatzair, and there at Avuca on that memorable night when I heard them speak I became destined for that world I would never abandon and never try to abandon —a world that at times took the form of Zionism, at times the struggle for human rights, at times the fight for freedom of expression, and at other times again the solidarity with dissidents against all totalitarianisms. And it was that world, unique in its beauty and martyrdom, that mythology of pain and memory, that cosmic vision imbued with nostalgia and the future, that Jewish mother charged with hope, resignation, and magic ... it was all of that world that Colonel Clodoveo Battesti, president of the Argentine military tribunal and head of Special War Council No. 2, sought to understand.
He wanted me to confess. To convert that whole consuming mission of love and destiny, identity and future, into a confession.
“Did you at any point abandon Zionism?”
“No, Mr. President.”
“Yet, according to this police report, in 1944 you were arrested for belonging to an organization affiliated with the Communist Party.”
“I was arrested in 1944, Mr. President, while attending a film festival of the Argentine League for Human Rights. I was in jail for only twenty-four hours because it was proven that I hadn’t participated in that organization, which the police considered Communist.”
“During that period, you belonged to the Youth League for Freedom, which was also registered as an affiliate organization of the Communist Party.”
“That’s true, I did belong to that organization. The members were young supporters of an Allied victory during World War II. They disseminated news on the fighting being waged by Great Britain, China, the United States, Russia, and France, without discrimination shown toward any of these countries. They also took up collections for the purchase of medicines that were sent to the Allied nations. What other organization, Mr. President, could I possibly have belonged to?”
“I didn’t belong to that organization.”
“Mr. President, can you imagine a young Jew in 1944 fighting for a Nazi victory?”
“That organization was dissolved by the police for being considered Communist.”
“That designation was the police’s. I belonged to it as an anti-Fascist, a Jew, and a Zionist. Mr. President, in view of the evident interest regarding my relationship with Zionism, I think I ought to explain to the court the meaning of Zionism.” .
‘‘We’re well aware of the nature of Zionism. Confine yourself to answering the questions.”
In 1939 we had no radio, but early in the morning, when the sirens of the thre
e big newspapers in Buenos Aires went off, my mother hurried out into the street and came back with the news that France and England had declared war on Hitler. She was radiant. “In one month he’ll be defeated. Our brothers will be avenged.”
In 1940 and 1941, veterans of the Spanish Civil War began arriving in Argentina, traveling in small groups, from the Far East, the north, and Africa. I couldn’t tear myself away from the bars where they congregated, held their conversations, lived their bohemian lives, their unique, romantic postwar lives. For the first time I heard about the betrayal of democracies from men who’d sought to combat fascism. I heard about the Russian intrigues, the massacre of Trotskyites and anarchists, about the real names of the heroes who had become legendary to me and the young members of our Hashomer Hatzair group when we attended solidarity meetings for Republican Spain—mournful, heroic Spain—when we learned the poems of Pablo Neruda, Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, and Stephen Spender, and were stirred by Upton Sinclair’s They Shall Not Pass and Ilya Ehrenburg’s articles.
We were eighteen, nineteen, and twenty years old at the time, clustered around those men who had had firsthand contact with fascism and explained battle strategy to us, men absorbed in their war, that genuine war; and we acquired words and techniques in order to understand, to attempt to understand the successive Allied defeats, convinced that fascism would be defeated.
Those adolescent youthful convictions! We’d chosen that moment to prepare a group of young Jews for work on the land, collective work, for who could doubt that the war would be won, a Zionist-Socialist state established, and that all of us would be going to kibbutzim? In those years of 1943 and 1944, I too learned how to plow the earth, to milk cows, to plant seeds. Yet my blood and imagination were engaged in the struggle against fascism, though there was little I could do other than sign manifestos, obtain signatures for manifestos, collect money, buy medicines, and roll bandages.
Rolling bandages! I remember my mother going every night to solidarity committee meetings at the Victory League and leaning over a table to roll bandages, after having attended that day to breakfast, making our room, going out to sell clothes, coming back to fix lunch, going out again to sell clothes, doing the shopping, fixing dinner, then rolling bandages. Sometimes she took with her to those neighborhood committee meetings a little blue-and-white collection box from Keren Kayemet (the Jewish National Fund) to collect some coins for land purchase in Israel, although she never mustered enough Spanish to explain the intricate truth about Zionism or why buying land in Israel need be a priority at a time when mankind’s destiny was unfolding in Stalingrad. An educated Jewish woman asserted that this was not the proper moment—the fighting was not in Palestine, the Nazis were elsewhere—but my mother persisted, and, resorting no longer to arguments but merely to a plea for solidarity, managed to collect a few coins owing to the inevitable community of feeling that wells up amongst women.
Little did my mother realize that her son, at that very moment, was brokenhearted because, at twenty, he was engaged in ideological, political, and philosophical debates while the fighting was going on in Stalingrad, and the names of the various kibbutzim seemed so remote, indecipherable, and unpronounceable.
Yes, I did belong to the Youth League for Freedom, because it was impossible to go to Palestine or to war. Because, at age twenty, in 1943, not to fight against fascism was utterly intolerable, and yet all that one could ever do was collect money, roll bandages, sign manifestos, and try to prove to everyone that Zionism wasn’t the obsession of a small group, a hitherto unknown illness, the derivative of North American monopolies and armament dealers. Being able to fight would have simplified everything.
At the Free French Committee, I was told that only Frenchmen or the sons of Frenchmen were being accepted, for there was an excess of volunteers and limited possibilities of transferring them all to Europe or North Africa. At the British Embassy, I was welcomed as a volunteer because of my willingness to go to Asia, but when my application was filed, revealing my Russian origin, this proved counter to an existing agreement with the USSR prohibiting contingents with “White Russians.” At the United States Embassy, I was told that no volunteers were being accepted. That morning, at noon, on leaving the U.S. Embassy, which was only two hundred meters from the Government Building, I witnessed the peaceful takeover of the Government Building by the Argentine army. It was June 4, 1943, and Colonel Juan Domingo Peron made his appearance, still privately and confidentially, but already spinning the threads of military conspiracy on the Argentine political scene.
There was confusion at the venerable Plaza de Mayo facing the Government Building, and amid this confusion I organized a group of young people who were shouting anti-Fascist slogans and heading toward the headquarters of El Pampero, the Nazi newspaper financed by the German Embassy. The police guarding the building prevented us from burning it, and I spent that night in jail, my ankles beaten by a guard.
From that day on, the years of my youth would be further complicated, for all my time, energy, reading, studies, and knowledge flowed in countless directions. And these directions, in my mind totally connected and integrated, seemed so contradictory in the eyes of others, and were so hard to explain: We were fighting against Peron’s dictatorship and his friendship with fascism; we were fighting for Zionism, and we needed to absorb the classical writers; we were siding with the Allies but were opposed to England in Palestine; we were pro-Russia in Stalingrad but anti-Russian with respect to their behavior in Spain and their anti-Zionism. We were trying to establish a parallel between Marx and Freud, Picasso and Socialist realism; we were the unlikely disciples of Ehrenburg’s Julio Jurenito, but announced without any confusion and a touch of solemnity that when the war was over, the Allies ought to grant independence to all their colonies since this was why fascism had been defeated. And we were demanding a second front while remaining staunchly united with Republican Spain, whose struggle against fascism provided our first taste of anti-fascism, as savored in those long conversations in Buenos Aires cafes like the House of Troy with refugee commanders of the Brigades, the Fifth, those from Miaja, Madrid, Asturias, Teruel, and Malaga. . . .
And now that vast sea of doubts and imagination, youth and dreams, that miraculous coexistence of world suffering and Jewish suffering, that anti-Fascist solidarity, that anti-totalitarian dream of my youth, was being suddenly reduced to a police report flourished by Army Colonel Clodoveo Battesti, president of Special War Council No. 2. Colonel Battesti claimed that he was perfectly aware of what Zionism was and didn’t need to have it explained by someone for whom such awful and futile tragedy had created personal doubts regarding Zionism and the Jewish people. Colonel Battesti wanted things to be summed up in a tidy, clear-cut manner, uncluttered for the mind of an Argentine officer by the individual doubts of someone who responded to the news and pictures of Auschwitz, Warsaw, and Babi Yar with questions about himself and all mankind.
Colonel Battesti would have had an easier time understanding Nazi statistics, which computed everything. And Nazi philosophy, too, where hatred figured prominently and love was easily identifiable—hatred of the Jew and love of the Fatherland. Jacobo Timerman, on the other hand, needed to explain what he was doing in the Youth League for Freedom, why he was supporting that strange alliance between the United States and Russia, why he was active in Zionism and simultaneously reading Freud and fighting against Peron, and was also a Socialist though claiming to be opposed to Russian totalitarianism. Then, subsequently, as newspaper publisher and a powerful, well-to-do man, appealing for habeas corpus on behalf of a missing guerrilla fighter. This was the same individual who, according to the police report, had given a lecture at the age of twenty or twenty-two at the Academy of Plastic Arts, formulating a proposal in support of cubism, structuralism, constructivism, or some other ism.
Nothing matched in Jacobo Timerman’s replies, whereas Colonel Clodoveo Battesti’s questions during these proceedings held by the Argentine armed forces
at Special War Council No. 2 seemed so very neat and precise.
“Did you have any contact with the terrorists?”
“No, Mr. President.”
“But you knew terrorists, didn’t you?”
“Mr. President, some of the people classified as terrorists by the armed forces were members of the Argentine Parliament. I had conversations with them in their role as legislators, as I might with any other legislator. I also had conversations with the military commandants of the three branches of the armed services. This was normal for a newspaper publisher.”
“Timerman, answer the questions. You remind me of a pickpocket claiming innocence because the number of handbags that he didn’t steal was greater than those he did. Did you have any contact with the terrorists, yes or no?”
“No, Mr. President.”
“Yet the declarations of leading terrorists often appeared in your newspaper. How did these declarations fall into your hands?”
“Mr. President, I never printed declarations of clandestine individuals. How could I classify as terrorist a person who called a press conference, hadn’t been arrested by the police or armed forces, and whose statements were broadcast on state television? All the newspapers printed such statements, yet their publishers are not in front of this War Council. ”
“Still, when one of those terrorists was arrested, you involved yourself conspicuously in the case.”
“If he was given judicial access, I did not deal with it conspicuously. Only when this was denied did I feel that the issue of legal deprivation was at stake and affected the nation’s judicial structure.”
Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number Page 12