How can one fail to feel pity for them? After all, wasn’t it a sheer accident that the military dictatorship organized the largest scandal ever launched in Argentina against Jews who considered themselves the equal of other citizens? The greatest anti-Semitic act was silencing those who were not afraid to speak up. A silent, frightened Jewry. A Jewry that has once again found it necessary to make a pragmatic compromise with reality by way of silence. One could not ask for a greater victory for Argentine anti-Semitism: a Jewry at a loss as to what to do, unaware of what lies in store, unaware of its strength or the strength of the enemy.
It is possible to feel pity and it is possible to feel rage. Both feelings are the result of love. And how can one fail to love this tortured, sacrificed people, who are abandoned each time that history becomes very complicated and dangerous for them? .
In the clandestine jail of Puesto Vasco, headed by Colonel Ramon Camps, a woman is tortured. My cell is very close to the kitchen where the torture is applied. I can hear her clearly, crying out, shouting that she isn’t a Jew, that her name is German. There’s nothing simpler for an Argentine policeman than to confuse names that are odd-sounding to him. But here in Tel Aviv, facing the Jewish Mediterranean, I think about that scene, that had she been a Jew, she wouldn’t have had even that last line of defense. What loneliness! And I also think that if she was lying, and actually was Jewish, what a terrible renunciation.
In the clandestine prison of Coti Martinez, which was under the supervision of General Guillermo Suarez Mason, a man of about seventy is being beaten by a policeman. The man’s hands are tied behind his back and his eyes are blindfolded. The policeman pulls off the cross the man is wearing around his neck and accuses him of being a Jew, of wanting to hide his identity. After his beating, the old man is put into my cell, and he tells me that he converted to Catholicism nearly fifty years ago and that the cross was a gift from Pope Paul VI. He considers himself a Catholic and is enraged that they do not believe him. He vows to avenge himself on the gray-haired policeman with the small, pudgy hands who beat him and who passes our cell every day smiling.
And here, facing the Jewish Mediterranean, I think about that old man, eternally Jewish in my eyes, who was beaten as a Jew, and that Catholic woman who was beaten as a Jew, about those two Catholics beaten as Jews because they were hated as Jews, and I suppose that I no longer have a right to demand anything of any Jew. What people, what individual, can withstand such hatred? How can one demand anyone to exercise such a superhuman effort so that his right to life is respected, to have the strength to live if he barely has the strength to allow himself to be led to death?
Yet—once again that yet—is there perhaps any other human group, any other people, that incurs such a risk in not confronting their enemies as the Jews? In Argentina, in 1980, thirty-five years after Hitler’s defeat, on the army-controlled television channel in Buenos Aires, one heard the following questions voiced by a journalist who has practiced his profession for twenty years and is not naive, the brother of a general who heads the press services of the military government: Why aren’t there any poor Jews? Why do Jews give so much money to Israel? Why don’t Jews marry Catholics? Why do Jews consider themselves superior?
A repetition of the insults and defamations of Nazi rulers, stemming from one of the most powerful forces in Argentine life, the army. It’s easy enough to react to this anti-Semitic campaign, to feel offended, to have no hesitation in identifying this journalist, whose name is Llamas de Madariaga.
It’s easy to recognize an anti-Semite. It is more complicated to recognize an anti-Semitic situation. It ought not to be, since the Jews for hundreds of years have found themselves faced with similar situations. Yet—once again yet—it isn’t easy to live in a country and have to accuse the army of indirectly fostering anti-Semitism. And it’s harder still to denounce liberals who, as in all countries that succumb to anti-Semitic totalitarianism of the Left or the Right, lend their service not to anti-Semites but to the anti-Semitic situation in general.
Maximo Gainza, the head of the Buenos Aires newspaper La Prensa, is a liberal, a democratic man. His newspaper reported that I had received the award given by the International Federation of Newspaper Publishers, the Golden Pen of Freedom of 1980, and also the Arthur Morse Award from the Aspen Institute. These are two of the most distinguished awards in international journalism. Only one Argentine journalist before myself received the former award, Maximo Gainza’s own father, the late Alberto Gainza Paz. Neither of these two institutions is Jewish. In addition, I have also received awards from the United Jewish Appeal, the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League of Bnai Brith, Hadassah, and the United Synagogue of America. And yet this liberal man, in statements to a Buenos Aires magazine, indicated that I had received “two or three awards, all given by Jewish organizations.”
Reading this, how easy it is to conclude that there exists a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, that Jews give awards to Jews for mutual support. Clearly a liberal man like Maximo Gainza doesn’t believe this. The curious thing is that he says it without believing it, that he allows this conclusion to be reached without bothering to say it directly, leaving the task of such interpretation to the Nazis.
It’s a psychological and ideological process we’ve seen repeated many times in the history of this century: adjusting to a situation without sharing its ideas leads inevitably to being an accomplice of the acts engendered by those ideas.
Maximo Gainza is not an anti-Semite, and his newspaper will defend the Jews. Yet he will be used as an instrument by anti-Semites because he has been dragged into the situation. Maximo Gainza knows that the International Federation of Newspaper Publishers which cited his father some years ago is not a Jewish organization. But he remains silent on that identification. He remains silent exactly the way the anti-Semites require him to, leading public opinion to believe that my struggle for freedom of the press has been recognized only by Jews. And if only Jews were awarding a Jew, the whole matter became suspect.
Again, once again, the Jew is a man under total suspicion.
11
When they broke into the house, they didn’t find the one they were looking for, the father. They placed hoods over the others and took them away—the mother, both sons, the daughter-in-law, and the servant. A few days later the servant was released. They began torturing the mother, the sons, and daughter-in-law. Whereupon the father appeared before a judge to testify that it was he who the police were after and that he was turning himself over to the hands of justice. The judge turned him over to the police, and the police released his wife.
The father, the sons, and the daughter-in-law were incarcerated at Coti Martinez, the clandestine prison. For a while all four were tortured. Then only the father. Before each of the father’s torture sessions, his sons were ordered to prepare food for him and take care of him so that he’d be fortified for the torture. The father was tied to the bed with an iron ring, and ate with his other hand, assisted by his sons and daughter-in-law. The three would then say goodbye to him, trying to bolster his spirits for the torture session.
If we were to leave the scene at this juncture, we might ask ourselves which universe, country, and period does it belong to? How does this scene conceivably differ from the events that transpired during the period of Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Stalin?. In certain procedural details, perhaps, though not in the conception of the event. For the event was conceived in accordance with a basic totalitarian principle: A political deed can be achieved through the destruction of an individual; violence committed upon one person can signify the solution of a political problem, the strengthening of an ideology, a system.
If this scene were printed in Russian, would anyone doubt that it had occurred in some remote region of the USSR? And if written in German, would it differ in any way from the episodes that occurred repeatedly during the consolidation process of the Hitler regime, the suppression of opponents and personal enemies of the regime’
s hierarchy, or the result of intrigues arising between various leaders of the regime?
The scene actually took place in Argentina and involved the Miralles family. The father had been Minister of Economics to a provincial Peronist governor, and had fought alongside army moderates against leftist Peronist guerrillas and in support of Isabel Peron’s overthrow. This governor, Victorio Calabro, might become in the future a leader who was favorable to a moderate military that wanted to win the Peronist vote. The most probable candidate, General Roberto Viola, then chief of the Army General Staff, was guaranteeing Calabro’s security against kidnapping. The hard line, pursued by Generals Iberico Saint Jean, Guillermo Suarez Mason, and Ramon J. Camps, sought to destroy Viola and his potential future aspirations, and thereby Calabro as well, whose leadership had its origins in the union world. Since kidnapping Calabro was impossible, the other alternative was to put him on trial, accuse him of some crime. Hence, a charge had to be found, and nothing certainly could serve this purpose better than questioning his Minister of Economics in order to prove illegal profiteering.
If this story of intrigues were framed solely in political language, it would be no different from countless accounts in a democracy. A group of conservatives attempts to find arguments that will invalidate the potential future candidacy of a liberal or moderate military leader. That is democracy. What transforms this into a Hitlerian episode is that the methods assume precedence over the goals. And that, in brief, is the clue to Argentina: rulers who declare democratic goals, refuse to be accused of having other goals, go to great pains to receive international journalists and declare that their aims are the reconstruction of Argentine democracy. Yet when the actual mechanisms that govern Argentine life begin to emerge, the situation is no different than the one in prewar Germany between 1933 and 1939.
I was imprisoned with the Miralles family at Coti Martinez, and afterwards at Puesto Vasco with the father and one of his sons. Many times I heard the father, after prolonged torture, crying out that he would sign whatever was demanded, pleading to be killed. But the fact remained that he couldn’t provide any incriminating evidence against Calabro, for there was none. Several months later he was released.
Of all the dramatic situations I witnessed in clandestine prisons, nothing can compare to those family groups who were tortured often together, sometimes separately but in view of one another, or in different cells, while one was aware of the other being tortured. The entire affective world, constructed over the years with utmost difficulty, collapses with a kick in the father’s genitals, a smack on the mother’s face, an obscene insult to the sister, or the sexual violation of a daughter. Suddenly an entire culture based on familial love, devotion, the capacity for mutual sacrifice collapses. Nothing is possible in such a universe, and that is precisely what the torturers know.
The father’s glances: of desperation at first, then of apology, and then of encouragement. Seeking some way to mutually help one another—sending an apple, a glass of water. Those fathers, thrown on the ground, bleeding, endeavoring for their children to find the strength to resist the tortures still in store for them. The impotence, that impotence that arises not from one’s failure to do something in defense of one’s children but from one’s inability to extend a tender gesture. From my cell, I’d hear the whispered voices of children trying to learn what was happening to their parents, and I’d witness the efforts of daughters to win over a guard, to arouse a feeling of tenderness in him, to incite the hope of some lovely future relationship between them in order to learn what was happening to her mother, to have an orange sent to her, to get permission for her to go to the bathroom.
Those family groups, destroyed and crushed together, without the hope that comes from thinking about others on the outside, as I was able to do with regard to my wife and children. Those fathers, devoid of heroism, desperate to provide the answers the torturers were after, but often uninformed about the matter, ignorant of the intrigue that was unfolding around them with them at its center. It was the true end of the civilization I’d been reared in, because it marked the disappearance of what was once the family; consolation was impossible, tenderness untenable, protection violated in every form. The old protective, tender family was vanishing, to give way to a group that was unable to express anything toward one another that possessed any force, validity, or semblance of utility. It all wound up in a fresh moan from a beloved person being tortured, and once again only madness provided some escape from the collapse of a life that had begun with love, was based on tenderness, and ought to have been enveloped in solidarity.
An old one-story house in the village of Martinez, twenty kilometers north of Buenos Aires. Formerly a police station. There is a narrow entrance and an entry gate for automobiles. A small anteroom of the house serves as depot for weapons and leads into another small room with two bunk beds, the guard’s bedroom. Both give out on a narrow, short passageway with a door going into the office of intelligence and files. This is followed by another room, the chief s office, and still another room that has a private bathroom and two beds—the bedroom of the two chief officers and, when the kitchen is occupied, the torture chamber. This bedroom and the guard’s bedroom both face a square yard, in the middle of which stands a narrow tin shed where prisoners are held for hours or days, either standing, lying down, or tied to a chair. One of the kitchen doors opens on this yard, and another leads into an additional bedroom with bunk beds for the ten men who comprise the police garrison. A door off this bedroom leads into another yard, where there’s a common bathroom and a door at the far end leading into a basement. In the basement is a corridor lined with several cells. Here, prisoners are enclosed. The walls are perpetually damp, though some cells are fortunately provided with a hole in the ground. The prisoners in the other cells that lack this provision must ask the guard to accompany them to the bathroom in the yard, which the guard is not always willing to do. One of the cells with a hole hasn’t been opened up for a year. They say a guerrilla is inside. The cells have no numbers, the prisoners have no names, in this clandestine prison operated by General Guillermo Suarez Mason and known as Coti Martinez.
I am in the guard’s bedroom off the first passageway, tied to the bed after the beating given me the day I was brought from police headquarters in Buenos Aires. All the cells are occupied, and I am being detained either because no clear instructions regarding my disposition have been received or they’ve been delayed. No one knows why I’m here. I’ve already been tortured, questioned in April and May of 1977, and now June and July have arrived. They’re intrigued. Afterwards, orders are received that I’m to be held but not molested. Never have they had a similar case, and don’t quite know what it bodes for the future. Each in his own way tries to establish some sort of dialogue with me. They imagine that one day I’ll again be in charge of a newspaper. They’re professionals, and wouldn’t like me, due to some twist in politics, to get involved in their persecution.
A guard asks me for work for one of his sons who doesn’t want to study. A boy of fourteen who’s causing him problems, and whom he’d like to have learn a good trade. I recommend a trade school, and despite the fact of my disappearance, he isn’t worried about visiting the director of this school and using my name to apply for an opening for his son. He doesn’t feel he’s doing anything incorrect, and goes on to explain that it’s all simply a matter of preventing thieves—at first he says Jews, but then corrects himself—from carrying off Argentina’s money. He has his morals: When sent by his chief to find a terrorist, he will kill the man and others with him— wife, parents, children—only if resistance is offered; but if the terrorist doesn’t resist, he’s brought to the chief. Only if the chief issues the order does the guard place the revolver at the prisoner’s neck and kill him. He doesn’t kill for pleasure, only out of necessity or in obedience to an order. There are others, he says, who do it for pleasure or in a sporting spirit, competing with the others in the number of enfriados, the captives who
wind up as “cold bodies.” He’s a nice man, who looks after his diet, brings his utensils from home because he thinks the ones in the kitchen are contaminated, hopes to be able to retire soon while still young, for since his job is dangerous the years of service are calculated as double. When his chiefs are not around, he lets me use their bathroom.
There’s always someone who comes to chat with me. Gradually, my situation is eased. I’m no longer chained to the bed night and day, only at night, and eventually this too is abandoned. I’m allowed to walk in the yard, providing there’s a guard in sight. Above the house stands a tower occupied by two men with machine guns. The food at first is extremely poor; afterwards I’m offered what the guards eat. Some of the prisoners are wealthy, and once their interrogations and torture are over, they enjoy special status if able to pay the officers a daily sum. They’re allowed to cook, wash their clothes, and some are permitted to talk to their families on the telephone.
I’m continually asked why I’m here. I don’t know, nor do they. The only order they have is to take care of me. I have a number, without a name, but my picture has appeared in the newspapers so many times that no one is ignorant of my identity. At times some of the prisoners are taken out into the courtyard, whereupon I must remain in my cell room, though I can see them through the windows.
Discipline at the beginning is always rigid, then as the days pass it becomes lax. By now, I think all the prisoners are aware of my presence, aside from those who’ve been enclosed for a year or two in underground cells without permission to leave. I get to know prisoners, and can’t help hearing the remarks of the police or military about each one. Some had relatives who’d paid a ransom, assuming that the kidnapping had been committed by criminals. In certain cases, the men were allowed to leave after the ransom was received; in others, they were killed despite receipt of the money. The ransom is regarded as a means of financing the operations and existence of this parallel army, without having to touch government funds. When a sum is collected, there’s great rejoicing and a celebration party, leading me to suspect that the money is divided among everybody. This is what happened with the huge stipend paid by Rafael Perrota’s family to obtain his release. Judging by the attention given to this elderly journalist, the efforts at concealing him here at Coti Martinez from the view of others, there never was any intention of granting his freedom. In any event, a decision was awaited from Colonel Ramon Camps or General Suarez Mason whether to release or to kill him.
Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number Page 15