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Message: <br /><br /> If you are having trouble reading this email, you may view this article online at: http://www.jweekly.com/39925/full/39925/argentinas-disappeared-are-remembered-in-moving-documentary/ <br /><br /> <b>Argentina’s ‘disappeared’ are remembered in moving documentary</b> <br /> Thursday, September 17, 2009 | by <br /><br /><p>For a number of European Jewish families, like those of Juan Mandelbaum and Ruth Weisz, Argentina provided a haven from the Third Reich. But the honeymoon ended in 1976.</p> <p>Mandelbaum’s movingly personal and beautifully rendered documentary, “Our Disappeared,” revisits the ruthless abuses meted out by the military regime that took power in Argentina in March 1976. In an interview, and implicitly in the film, Mandelbaum reveals that Jews who were secretly detained suffered disproportionately under the regime.</p> <div class="capDivLeft" style="width: 360px;"><img align="left" alt="Adisappeared" height="242" src="/images/uploads/z_photos_2009/n09_18_09/Adisappeared.jpg" title="Juan Mandelbaum stands in the basement of the Navy Mechanics School in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where citizens were tortured. photos/francisco garcia faure/itvs" width="360" /> <div class="caption">Juan Mandelbaum stands in the basement of the Navy Mechanics School in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where citizens were tortured. photos/francisco garcia faure/itvs</div> </div> Although just 2 percent of Argentina’s population is Jewish, Jews comprised 10 percent of the 30,000 people who were arrested, tortured and “disappeared” by the military. <p>“I see a parallel to Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Project, to preserve these stories and these memories,” Mandelbaum said during a visit to San Francisco earlier this year. “To keep a record in people’s own words, to give people an opportunity to tell their own stories.”</p> <p>“Our Disappeared” airs at 10 p.m. Monday, Sept. 21 on KQED–Channel 9 as part of the “Independent Lens” documentary series.</p> <p>Mandelbaum’s father was a German Jew who fled to South America in 1935, and his mother was a Catholic sent out of Germany by her family in 1939. The filmmaker was raised Catholic and did not learn that his paternal grandfather had died in a displaced persons camp in the Pyrenees until after his father’s death.</p> <p>Mandelbaum grew up in an upscale Buenos Aires neighborhood where most of his friends were secular German Jews. Like them, he was left of center and politically active. He was luckier than most, though, and got out of Argentina one step ahead of the detention squads.</p> <p>“I grew up in a family that had been uprooted, that didn’t have deep Argentinean roots,” Mandelbaum explains. “I come from a family of immigrants, and I am an immigrant.”</p> <p>He moved to the States in 1977, where he “felt like the distant observer of a catastrophe.” He settled in Boston and carved out a successful career as a documentary filmmaker. His lovely 1995 film, “Ringl and Pit” (available on DVD from Icarus Films), profiled the elderly German Jewish photographers Grete (“Ringl”) Stern and Ellen (“Pit”) Auerbach, who lived for many years in New York.</p> <p>The catalyst for the powerful and profound “Our Disappeared” was a casual Internet search for Patricia Dixon, a long-ago college girlfriend. Mandelbaum was stunned to discover her snapshot on a list of people confirmed to have been arrested and disappeared.</p> <p>So he went back to Argentina, a place of both sweet and ugly memories. Mandelbaum’s profoundly empathetic journey has many goals: to discover what happened to Patricia, to come to terms with a reprehensible chapter in Argentina’s recent past and to see how the suffering of that era still intrudes on families 35 years later.</p> <p>Among the old friends and acquaintances the filmmaker visits is Ruth Weisz, the mother of one of his boyhood friends. Weisz’s son, Marcelo, and daughter-in-law, Susana, were taken by the government, leaving behind a baby son.</p> <p>Growing up, Mandelbaum had spent a lot of time in the Weisz house, and the years seem to melt away as she shows him around.</p> <p>“I was like one of the sons she had lost,” Mandelbaum recalls. “There was something very deep between us, I feel.”</p> <p>It’s one of the most touching passages in a film that’s full of them. As difficult as it is to grieve for a loved one, it’s even more painful to mourn a young person whose potential was snuffed before it could bloom. </p> <p>“The worst curse in the Jewish religion is when no one remembers you,” Weisz tells Mandelbaum.</p> <p>Then she expands her statement to include all of the disappeared.</p> <p>“The worst that can happen to someone is not to be remembered,” she says, unbowed.</p> <p><br /><strong>“Our Disappeared” </strong>airs 10 p.m. Monday, Sept. 21 and 4 a.m. Tuesday, Sept. 22 on KQED–Channel 9.</p> <p> </p>

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