PRISONER WITHOUT A NAME, CELL WITHOUT A NUMBER - Book review

Jacobo Timerman’s autobiographical book Prisoner without a name, Cell without a Number was published in 1980, its English translation released in 1981.

Timerman was the editor of La Opinión, Argentina’s leading liberal newspaper. The paper was not popular with the military government because he was not averse to castigate both the Left and the Right for human rights abuses. Inevitably, it came to a head one dawn in ‘April 1977 some twenty civilians besieged my apartment in midtown Buenos Aires. They said they were obeying orders from the Tenth Infantry Brigade of the First Army Corps’ (p9). He was covered with a blanket and bundled in a car and taken away. Eventually, blindfolded and handcuffed, he discovered he was kidnapped ‘by the extremist sector of the army’ (p29) ...which was at the heart of Nazi operations in Argentina...  In effect, they mistakenly believed he was part of a Jewish anti-Argentine conspiracy!

He was held for two and a half years – tortured, abused and humiliated – without charges ever being brought against him.

It was probably because he was internationally known and his wife continued to raise awareness of his plight that he was not murdered – or ‘disappeared’. Certainly, he believed that his only crime was to be born Jewish.

‘Entire families disappeared. The bodies were covered in cement and thrown to the bottom of the Plata or Paraná rivers. Sometimes the cement was badly applied and corpses were washed up along the coasts of Argentina and Uruguay... (others were) thrown into old cemeteries under existing graves... (and some) heaved into the middle of the ocean from helicopters... (while others were) dismembered and burned... Small children were turned over to grandparents or more commonly presented to childless couples in Chile, Paraguay, and Brazil ...’ (p50/51).

Then in late 1979, his citizenship of Argentina was revoked and he was expelled from the country, and then resided in Israel.

Timerman was born in Bar, Ukraine, to Jewish parents. To escape the Russian persecution of Jews and pogroms there, the family emigrated to Argentina in 1928, when he was five years old.

This is a searing account of a brave man. He died in November, 1999, aged 76.