Books coverage is supported by a generous grant from The Milton and Sophie Meyer Fund.
When studying history, I believe it’s essential to learn both the facts and the human stories behind them.
Haley Cohen Gilliland offers both in “A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children.” The book, published in July, reconstructs the long journey of the women who bravely pursued the truth about what happened to their relatives during Argentina’s 1976-1983 military dictatorship.
Gilliland, who leads the Yale Journalism Initiative and reported from Argentina for four years for the Economist, tells the story by concentrating on a single family, the Roisinblits. The child of Jewish immigrants, Rosa Roisinblit grew up in the agricultural colonies financed in the late 19th century by the European philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch to help settle Eastern European Jews in Argentina. Impatient with rural life, Rosa left for Buenos Aires at 15 and eventually became an obstetrician.
Rosa and her husband’s sole child, Patricia, came of age in a nation in the throes of enormous political unrest and violence. A medical student, Patricia Roisinblit became involved with a revolutionary leftist group. She married a fellow radical, José, and they had a child, Mariana.
After a new military dictatorship was established in 1976, Patricia and Jose largely put aside their activism, with Patricia focusing on her medical studies and Jose on his store. But the government, intent on eliminating all subversive elements, had quietly begun a campaign of mass abductions. In 1978 both Jose and Patricia were taken by armed men. Mariana, who witnessed her mother’s abduction, was left with relatives.
Rosa spent months attempting on her own to learn the whereabouts of her daughter and a grandchild she’d never met. Patricia had been eight months pregnant when she was abducted. Eventually, Rosa found a group of women in similar straits, desperate for news but stonewalled by the government.
The grandmother group, an outgrowth of the group of mothers who regularly assembled at Buenos Aires’ main city square to call attention to their missing children, dubbed themselves the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo. Gilliland relates compellingly how they came together; how they struggled to discover the truth about what was happening to their children and grandchildren; and how they eventually managed to reunite many of the grandchildren with their biological families. It was a daunting endeavor, and one that cost some of the grandparents their lives.
What they would eventually learn is that the hundreds of pregnant women who were among Argentina’s disappeared were brought to military compounds. Though often tortured there, they were allowed to live long enough to give birth. Once they bore their children, most of the women were drugged and loaded onto airplanes. The planes flew above the Atlantic Ocean, at which point the sedated prisoners were pushed out. Their offspring were given away, often to military families.
It took more than two years for the grandmothers to locate their first missing grandchild, but, through unrelenting efforts, they began to achieve successes.
Scientific discovery played a fortuitous role, with a Bay Area connection.
Mary-Claire King, a graduate of and former professor at UC Berkeley, is a pioneering geneticist who is best known today for discovering the BRCA1 genetic marker linked to breast cancer.
In 1984, when Argentina’s dictatorship was replaced by a democratic government with a functioning court system, King was asked by the grandmother group to use her groundbreaking research and her Berkeley lab to develop a system for identifying genetic connections between grandparents and the children who were believed to be the offspring of abducted parents.
Sympathetic to the cause, King created what she called the Index of Grandpaternity, which combined mitochondrial DNA analysis with circumstantial evidence to establish the probability of a biological connection between a child and a possible grandparent. Approved by Argentinean courts, this became the first practical implementation of genetic genealogy, which we now see used profusely. It resulted in more than 100 confirmed relationships between bereaved grandparents and the grandchildren they had never met.
Gilliland demonstrates how the ethical implications of these cases were rarely simple.
When Rosa Roisinblit’s grandson was finally identified, he was 21 years old. He felt such resentment about being turned against his adoptive parents (even though his adoptive father was abusive and worked on an air force base that had been the site of torture and murder) that he spoke out against the grandmothers. His perspective eventually changed, but it took years.
Some of the adults who had raised the children of the disappeared and falsified birth documents were eventually held legally accountable, but the children were often ambivalent about how justice should be implemented.
The book’s Jewish dimension emerges through the saga of Rosa Roisinblit, who served for decades as the grandmother group’s vice president. Her experience reflects the reality that, although Jews accounted for 1% of the Argentine population, they constituted 12% of the approximately 30,000 Argentines who disappeared at the hands of the dictatorship.
One figure who makes an appearance is Rabbi Marshall Meyer, an American Conservative rabbi who served for decades in Buenos Aires and protested human rights abuses. In one instance, he wore a tuxedo when he stood at watch at the port of Buenos Aires to prevent one of the grandchildren from being smuggled to Uruguay. His son was getting married the following day, and he wanted to make sure he was dressed appropriately in case he needed to spend the entire night at the dock.
Gilliland’s account is extraordinarily well researched and assembled, and one wishes it didn’t feel nearly as relevant. It is difficult to read these accounts of masked men pulling people into unmarked cars, or of a dictator’s threats against those he considers subversive, without thinking of developments in our own country.
As an embrace of authoritarianism is on the rise across the world, it is instructive to remember the scars that such regimes leave.