I feel very grateful for this initiative, and especially for this invitation to be part, to offer my testimony and remind those who listen to us today that behind the reports, the judicial cases, politics, local and international interests, there are people.
People like my aunt, Graciela Levinson, and my uncle, Jaime Plaksin, were murdered in the two terrorist attacks that Argentina suffered. There were 29 victims in the first attack in the Israeli Embassy, and 85 in the second, in AMIA.
My aunt, Graciela Levinson, was smiling, sociable, and talkative. She was a dedicated mother and wife, a hard-working woman. A mother who dedicated enormous efforts to find a correct diagnosis for one of her daughters, and once she achieved it, and found a treatment, she set out to help other families in similar situation, to build a community.
She was the axis that united the family, she organized spontaneous family gatherings, with whatever she found at hand. For me, my aunt Graciela is synonymous of a childhood with music from her guitar, costumes that she organized, games that she invented for all my cousins and great crossword puzzles that she shared only with me, as well as a passion for all word games.
On March 17, 1992, Graciela was on the way out of work, at the Israeli Embassy. The explosion hit her completely and it took many days until her body could be rescued from under the rubble. I was pregnant, and expecting my second child. There was a month left until the birth, but that same day the process accelerated and became complicated and the following week doctors had to do a cesarean section.
Two years later, on July 18, 1994, the second blow came and my family fell apart once again.
This time it was my uncle Jaime, who was also at his workplace, at the headquarters of the Jewish community of Buenos Aires, AMIA, on a Monday morning. Jaime had been director of the AMIA Culture Department for decades.
Jaime was a true teacher, in every sense of the word. He taught Jewish history, Kabbalah, Hebrew and had an immense ability to transmit, along with a tireless love for teaching. After his murder we learned of many people he had helped, in silence, without taking any credit. He was a man whose lectures and writings were followed by many people. But I remember him as the guy with the craziest ideas. Funny, unpredictable, the one with the shrill and contagious laughter, that had invented a special greeting for me, just as he invented affectionate nicknames, words and fantastic stories.
On July 18, 1994, I was in my third pregnancy and was expecting my daughter. Since I was nearby, I arrived at the AMIA headquarters just a few minutes after the explosion. I walked along Pasteur Street where at that moment there was only a large gap in the ground, in the place were the AMIA building used to be. I remember the glass that fell from the buildings and the smell, that horrendous smell of burnt flesh that remained impregnated in my memory. I remember looking for my uncle Jaime among the living people, who were looking for other people. Suddenly I saw my two cousins get into an ambulance and leave and I looked for a phone. Someone offered me a cell phone and in that call they confirmed that Jaime had died. From that moment on, I no longer remember anything. Black. Some hours were erased from my memory with those strange ways that the human mind finds to react to too much pain.
When you experience this firsthand, you also understand what these cruelties do to a family. And, as an example, I always mention what happened with my father, who was the one who remained strong after the attacks. 15 years after the attacks, when my father was sick and dying in a hospital in Israel, he suffered panic attacks every time a nurse raised the railing of his hospital bed and screamed desperately how was he going to get out from under the rubble. When the bomb will explode…
And so it happens with each of the families of the victims, with all of us, who today look towards the sinister minds that planned all this cruelty. And we need to find the answers, we need justice, we demand justice. Because from that moment on, the shared happiness died with them, and the shared dreams, vanished into explosives and horror.
And they deserve justice, because wherever they are in the universe, or from inside us, only after justice is done our dead loved ones will be able to rest in peace.
