By Hugo Ginzberg on December 27, 2020
I don’t know where, how, or with whom I spent my first Christmas when I was just 2 months old 43 years ago. I know that on that December 24, 1975, my mother was shot, after she was taken alive along with other comrades. I know that the army was rehearsing its genocidal practice of systematically disappearing people against the militants who had participated in the attempt to take over the barracks in Monte Chingolo and against the inhabitants of the area who had shown solidarity with the combatants.
I also know that my grandmother went around police stations, in the days following Christmas, and that she did not accept my mother’s hand in a jar of formaldehyde offered to her as the only proof of her daughter’s murder, that she refused the death certificate, that she demanded the body never delivered, and that she initiated a trial for murder by the armed forces. I know that a few months later came the murder and disappearance of my father, my grandfather, my mother’s sister and her partner (who had adopted me as their own son), and also of my mother’s other brother and his partner. Only my uncle Luis and my grandmother, already in exile, survived the family massacre.
Maria was like her, a mother who through the centuries sought memory and justice for her murdered son, I believe that this is how she saw it, not in the magical or religious sense, but in some way she felt sisterly, as she felt so many other times with other mothers from so many places, in their unyielding struggle for memory and justice.
In Argentina the ceremony of the 24th started very early, when I woke up she had already returned from the flower market, bought red carnations and we were going on the bus to the cemetery of Avellaneda.
On the wall at the back was the mass grave where in 1984 she had made one of the first exhumations with the remains of disappeared persons, which gave rise in part to the subsequent formation of the Argentine team of forensic anthropology, it was just an open field covered with red carnations, other relatives were going on the 23rd so that day we were generally alone, and while we were chatting sitting on the grass, neighbors in the area and relatives of graves with names came to leave some of their flowers for other dead people who in the end were also part of her story.
That place in the Avellaneda cemetery is now a mausoleum, thanks to the tenacity and work of family members and colleagues, it is a place of historical memory, where one remembers not only the genocide but also the struggle for a more just society, the intense life and commitment of a generation.
Today we woke up early and we went as a family, we took some red carnations, we left some where my mother’s remains are and we explained to the girls that the others were for all her classmates. Carmela is 6 years old, she dedicated herself to arranging flowers, some that we carried and others that were from the day before, to reading aloud the written names as if giving a deeper present than any solemn act and Franca with her 10 years reminded me that there are questions that this town will never stop asking: “Why were they fighting? What did they do with the disappeared prisoners? Why aren’t all the murderers in jail? Who protected them?”
We talked for a long time about the disappeared, the militants, the governments that came, the mothers and their struggle, their great-grandmother, the militias and those who protected them, our own family history, the youngest one at times listened, pausing to play and put in aesthetic opinions about graves and flower arrangements, they decided to take some pieces of brick and leave some red stars drawn as a tribute in the place, they also wanted to write something among the stars before we left. Franca decided to put: “Aida we miss you”. Carmela, who seemed not to have understood the conversation wrote: “ERP”, the one who had not understood was me.
I don’t know much about Christmas, the Holy Spirit and anything else, but I know what I was taught, that today we can share our bread and drink to memory, justice, struggle and solidarity.
So be it!
Hugo Ginzberg is an Argentinean doctor graduated from the Latin American School of Medicine in Cuba
Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – Cuba, translation North America bureau