TORTURE IS ALWAYS WITH YOU'
Drelfus, Claudia
VIEWS REVIEWS TORTURE IS ALWAYS WITH YOU An interview with Jacobo Timerman - BY CLAUDIA DREIFUSW| ith the publication last spring of his best-selling Prisoner Without a I Name, Cell Without a...
...TIMERMAN: My book is not about silence alone, my book is about how a tragedy like what happened in Argentina can happen without any reaction of the world...
...Moreover, he claims he was mistreated not only because he was a political dissident but because he is a Jew...
...Readers will recall that in April 1977, after publishing a series in his paper on los desaparecidos, the thousands of Argentinians who have been either kidnapped or murdered by the military regime, Timerman was himself kidnapped and imprisoned by an ultra-right-wing branch of the Argentine army...
...I don't like the way Israel is occupying the West Bank...
...CD: So it wasn't just show...
...It was not a show...
...CD: Well, let's talk about some of the charges that have been made...
...Reading was very difficult...
...Kristol attacked me because of my human rights position...
...He said something that struck me very strongly...
...TIMERMAN: I don't know...
...Did I read the book correctly...
...But Carter's human rights policy saved the lives of many people who are absolutely unknown...
...Podhoretz, and Mrs...
...After all you've been through, I'm wondering, will you ever feel free...
...Only trying to read again...
...He used anything including a statement by the former Chief of Police of Buenos Aires who says he interrogated me and never tortured me...
...Jews have been doing this for five thousand years...
...Or in a philosophy of life...
...I am going to study his personality...
...At one point in Argentina, when a mother went to see a lawyer lit ELIZABETH VAN ITAUlEi PHOTOGRAPH BY MARTHA KAPLAN THE PROGRESSIVE I 49 It's important not to be silent...
...I have no connections with the government...
...In what way...
...What I did was prove that an "authoritarian" country, as Mr...
...I don't like the way Israel sells arms to Argentina...
...Among his leading critics in this country are such neoconservative luminaries as Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol, who did some moral hair-splitting along the Haig-Kirkpatrick lines at Timerman's expense on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal...
...VIEWS REVIEWS TORTURE IS ALWAYS WITH YOU An interview with Jacobo Timerman - BY CLAUDIA DREIFUSW| ith the publication last spring of his best-selling Prisoner Without a I Name, Cell Without a Number, Jacobo Timerman, the former edi-i tor of the left-liberal Buenos Aires newspaper La Opinion, quickly T^J found himself at the center of a curious political and intellectual controversy...
...CD: Can you say a little more...
...Amery doesn't say he thinks about it...
...They cannot say anything against my Jewishness or my Zionism, so they have to look for other reasons...
...I have studied history...
...In his [Wall Street Journal] article, he said there was a conspiracy of American liberals to support me, but not Hubert Mathos—who'd been for twenty years in Castro's jails...
...I don't like many things in Israel—the aggressiveness of the Orthodox Jews, the intolerance...
...People are afraid all that happened subsequently to you add up to official anti-Semitism...
...I'm trying to rebuild my life...
...That gave me the only strength I have now in my life...
...TIMERMAN: I don't know...
...Shortly before his death, he said, "Nothing has healed, but the infected wound of anti-Semitism has burst open again...
...CD: If we could take up your position in Israel and your feelings about the country...
...President Carter and Patricia Derian [then Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights] and the Senators and the Congressman and everyone intervened for me...
...In psychiatrists...
...TIMERMAN: I don't know and I don't care...
...This is the most important conclusion because her son was kidnapped by the police or the Army, there was no lawyer who wanted to help her with legal advice...
...Irving Kristol, in an article in The Wall Street Journal, said you were not arrested because you were a Jew, but because you were a leftist...
...CD: How do the Israelis respond to you and your book...
...There should be...
...Podhoretz and Kristol] are conservatives and I am very liberal...
...TIMERMAN: Listen, I am a big reader...
...CD: But do you embarrass them with a trading partner...
...I'm always thinking about this problem of how to live after what has happened to me...
...He wrote of his life as an intellectual in Auschwitz...
...CD: How do you feel when you see people like Kristol and Podhoretz denying your experience...
...TIMERMAN: No...
...It brought back the issue of human rights to the American scene...
...Americans were silent during the McCarthy times...
...I felt a moral obligation to the rest of the people...
...The world has changed...
...TIMERMAN: In Argentina, everybody knew about the human rights policy of the Carter Administration...
...The Argentine Government has long claimed that Gravier bankrolled a leftist urban guerrilla group, the Montenaros.] TIMERMAN: I say that he is repeating the accusations of one of the most murderous governments in the last decade: the Argentine government...
...TIMERMAN: Nobody can forecast a Holocaust...
...And this is why he killed himself...
...TIMERMAN: The majority of the people in Argentina who've been through the torture and the killings are Catholic...
...There are always people working for their enemies for ideological reasons...
...Here is an edited transcript of their conversation...
...Kristol is working for the fascists of Argentina because he only cares about anti-Communism...
...It's important not to be silent...
...Can you explain that...
...Or somebody who loves you...
...It is not very easy...
...I still do not feel it...
...In Tel Aviv, the fifty-eight-year-old journalist recovered from his ordeal and began work on his book...
...In jail, I was treated as a Jew, not as a Catholic...
...In the months since publication, Timerman has been making waves—and a grand nuisance of himself in the eyes of the Reagan Administration...
...CD: It's been said of Holocaust survivors that they came out of the concentration camps two ways: either hungry for life or emotionally deadened by all they'd experienced...
...Because the assassins, the killers, are Nazis and not Communists...
...I don't know if there is going to be a Holocaust in Argentina...
...But what happened to me, happened to me as a Jew...
...CD: In your book, you say that once you were kidnapped by a right-wing faction of the Argentine military, the thing that saved your life was their extreme Nazi-ness...
...Later, the military lawyers told these crazy paranoid generals, "You cannot make a case out of that...
...But in 1978, when he killed himself, I was in jail...
...They are not going to forgive me for that...
...TIMERMAN: When the book first came out, I was a big hero...
...Some of Kristol's complaints against me are actually very funny...
...What was true of you when you emerged from the Argentine jails...
...At that point, the most important proof of human decency that existed in Argentina was the American embassy...
...So what...
...Timerman's accounts of his treatment at the hands of what Washington these days considers a ' 'friendly " regime focused attention on the year's most scholastic, not to say ludicrous and cynical, debate, framed on the one side by the likes of Secretary of State Alexander Haig andJeane Kirkpatrick, Reagan's ambassador to the United Nations: Both have made gyrating arguments in favor of distinguishing between America's authoritarian allies and totalitarian foes—Our Thugs, Right or Wrong...
...Speak out...
...They did not say, "Dirty Catholic...
...CD: Perhaps there's no real therapy for the kind of thing you've been through...
...You can have something in you...
...The book set off an incredible controversy...
...CD: When I first read Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, it seemed to me that the book was not so much about your own personal experience as about the silence that paralyzed the Argentine Jewish community when it was faced with very real governmental anti-Semitism...
...You see here on the wall, all the awards I received: the Hubert Humphrey Award of the B'nai B'rith, the Medal of Freedom, I was made an honorary citizen of New York, the American Jewish Committee gave me an award for outstanding Jewishness, everything...
...CD: Do you see them as parallel...
...Jews always suffer in the hands of totalitarian countries— undemocratic countries of the Right and Left____ CD: Do you think a Holocaust is possible in Argentina...
...CD: In your book, you said something completely different...
...What made your arrest and I see silence as a universal condition, not just a Jewish condition...
...My book arrived right at the time of the confirmation hearings for Ernest Lefever...
...What Kristol is doing is asking me to prove my innocence, even after I was declared innocent...
...It became a best-seller, but neo-conservatives like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz issued scathing attacks against you and made charges about your credibility...
...Now, this is what saved my life...
...The fact that the most important Western country was involved in human rights, strongly or less strongly, mattered symbolically...
...Torture is always with you...
...CD: People like Podhoretz and Kristol would differ with you strongly...
...How does one live with that...
...This is something I cannot forget...
...I suppose not...
...Human rights, as an issue, had absolutely disappeared [since the Reagan election...
...Recently, I discovered something I'm going to investigate...
...After thirty months' imprisonment, the Argentine government suddenly gave in to a rising campaign of international pressure, released Timerman, and put him on a plane bound for Israel...
...I don't know in what way...
...Or Quisling in Norway...
...TIMERMAN: I would like to believe there is a therapy for everything...
...What they thought to themselves was: "We have this man who admits he's a Zionist and who admits his newspaper is Zionist...
...Kristol, Mr...
...My agent told the newspapers, "Nine publishing houses have asked for the Mathos memoirs, but he doesn't want to write it...
...TIMERMAN: Not when you looked at it from an Argentine prison...
...So the mothers went to the American embassy and the American embassy in Buenos Aires had a special lawyer that advised the families of the missing people...
...It also helped in practical ways...
...New York free-lance writer Claudia Dreifus, who interviewed Timerman for The Progressive in his Tel Aviv apartment, discussed these and other matters with the refugee editor...
...Is your newspaper Zionist...
...People are afraid and that's why they don't speak up...
...He accused me of something I never said...
...Torture is ineradi-cably burned into the victim...
...Timerman has irritated a good many others, including some leaders of the American and Argentine Jewish communities, whom he has urged to be more forthcoming in their reactions to organized anti-Semitism in his homeland...
...At the same time, I had a need to express, to transmit to others what had happened...
...But the silence is the same...
...I wasn't just talking about the Jewish leaders of Buenos Aires...
...I would like to discover it...
...I said "yes" to everything...
...Then, what I did was to declare that I didn't believe in this theory of "authoritarian" countries that is the basis of the ideological group headed by Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, and Jeane Kirkpatrick—Ronald Reagan supporters, all of them...
...What they did was try to discredit me by inventing many things...
...Amery was tortured...
...So my kidnappers thought they had one of the great members of the "Jewish-Marxist-Zionist" conspiracy in their hands...
...They, like you, are Jewish, and yet, they say you did not suffer from anti-Semitism at the hands of the Argentine military...
...It gave support to those fighting for human rights—to the people in prison...
...He says, "Timerman was not arrested for being a Jew...
...CD: And did they help save you, too...
...And this is very dangerous...
...TIMERMAN: The democratic ones, very sympathetically...
...TIMERMAN: To try to find ways to exert political pressure to change things...
...He wants a second trial of Timerman...
...I've changed some of my opinions many times...
...This is not the point...
...CD: Let's talk about more recent history, about what happened to you after your release from prison and after the publication of your book in the United States...
...We will put him on trial and show the world there is a Jewish conspiracy against Argentina...
...In prison, Timerman says, he was tortured...
...The Pope intervened...
...TIMERMAN: I was an international case...
...TIMERMAN: Listen...
...He defines torture as the most horrible event a human being can retain within himself...
...But does he care...
...Many pro-Israeli Jews like myself find it hard to understand how Israel can sell arms to Argentina...
...My book gave great support to the idea of human rights...
...My dream was to be quiet for several years...
...For psychological reasons...
...CD: Still, when someone like Kristol says that your credibility is suspect because David Gravier was your partner, how do you answer him...
...These people are concerned with violations of human rights when they are committed by Communists, not Nazis...
...And this means I'm living here to fight for democracy and peace in Israel...
...I don't like the way Israel bombed Beirut, killing civilians...
...Sometimes, the politicians and the conservatives in the United States, they want to present a case saying that if we are outspoken we are not going to influence the generals in Argentina...
...I am not a conservative...
...TIMERMAN: I don't know...
...The criticisms have nothing to do with anything except my position on human rights...
...If there is a parallel, it is that the Jewish silence [about official Argentine anti-Semitism] is the same as it was in the early years of Hitler...
...CD: To change the subject slightly, there are many who say that Jimmy Carter's human rights policy was just window dressing—that it meant nothing in the hard reality of Latin American politics...
...How do you explain that Marshal Petain in France worked for the German Nazis...
...TIMERMAN: You see, when I was kidnapped, the first questions I was asked were, "Are you a Zionist...
...They don't tell me and I don't ask them...
...The point is that you're going to scare them and because you are going to scare them, you are going to save lives...
...He doesn't care about that...
...I see silence as a universal condition, not just a Jewish condition...
...TIMERMAN: I did not say I was arrested for being Jewish—this is how the mind of Kristol works...
...TIMERMAN: Yes—and the Judenrat in the concentration camps in Poland were also very Jewish...
...I think perhaps if I would have met Amery before he committed suicide, we could have talked out many things and he would not have committed suicide...
...I suspect they'd consider their critiques of you as very Jewish...
...I think Amery and I had much to share...
...You can have something inside you that never appears in that form, but appears in other forms...
...If you can be outspoken, you can save lives...
...I do not support Jeane Kirkpatrick...
...I say he is repeating the accusations of a group of military people who tortured, killed, and kidnapped twenty thousand people...
...Listen, this is an ideological problem...
...Lefever and against the theory of differing between "authoritarian" countries and "totalitarian" countries, at that point these criticisms began to appear...
...TIMERMAN: As spiritually and politically parallel...
...Kirkpatrick like to call Argentina, is a horribly murderous country...
...He says that it is in you, the torture...
...Before his death in a Mexican plane crash in 1976, Gravier, part owner of La Opinion, was accused by New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau of looting the American Bank and Trust Company...
...CD: One final question: When people ask you what they can do to help human rights in Argentina, what do you tell them...
...Certainly his inconvenient arrival in the United States and his testimony before Congress helped defeat Ernest Lefever, the President's hard-right nominee for Under Secretary of State for Human Rights...
...I'm sure they think they are defending what they define as the best interests of the Argentine Jewish community...
...When they opened the door of my cell and beat me up, they said, "Dirty Jew...
...Being a Zionist is not being guilty of anything...
...Once I said I was against the nomination of Mr...
...CD: In your book, you write, "A journalist asked me how freedom feels...
...This is a book by Jean Amery [At the Mind's Limits...
...CD: Thousands of Argentinians, Catholic and Jewish, have been arrested by the current regime...
...TIMERMAN: You don't think about it...
...People all over the world have been doing this to each other...
...Does this puzzle you, too...
...He killed himself in 1978...
...He was a survivor of Auschwitz and his book was published by the Indiana University Press...
...For instance, if you have torture inside you, you don't think in terms of torture...
...At one point, the only lawyer you could get for human rights violations was the lawyer from the American embassy...
...The others, not...
...And this is true...
...You said that once your torture was over, you didn't think about it very much...
...Students of psychology know that...
...Whoever is tortured, stays tortured, he said...
...CD: Does the government like you or are you an embarrassment to their relations with Argentina...
...Speak out...
...Russians were silent under Stalin...
...This is the most important conclusion of my experience...
...In the Germany of 1938-1939, nobody knew that Auschwitz was in the future of the Jewish people...
...Without that, I am weak at this point in my life...
...They were going to kill me...
...Once I admitted I was a Zionist, they said, "Okay, he's going to trial...
...I said I was arrested for my fight for human rights and that once I was in jail, I was treated as Jew, not as a political prisoner...
...But when the silence is ? Jewish silence, after our experience in history, the silence is more dangerous...
...Germans were silent during Hitler's time...
...Now, the funny thing is that Hubert Mathos and I both have the same literary agent...
...But your relation to your family, with friends, your relation with life, your relation with water, with the sea, with the landscape, with the mountains, in every relation, you have torture as part of it...
...So now / have to prove / was tortured...
Vol. 45 • December 1981 • No. 12
