Tiny Hero

Rosa Tarlovsky de Roisinblit died this month, right on the cusp of the High Holiday season. In many ways she was a familiar figure. Born in a Jewish settlement in Argentina, she grew into a career as an obstetrician. Eventually she moved to Buenos Aires and married, raising one daughter, Patricia, with her husband, Benjamin. The chronology of her life tracks my own. If Patricia had lived, she would have been my age today.

But she didn’t live; she died tortured and alone. Like many activists of her generation, she was swept up in Argentina’s “Dirty War,” and taken with her own husband and toddler child into the belly of the military dictatorship. Her special misfortune is that she was pregnant at the time, kept alive just long enough to give birth to her child. The new baby was awarded to a loyal servant of the regime, and Patricia and her husband were disappeared, likely drugged and tossed from a plane into the ocean. Only the toddler, Mariana, survived. By some miracle she was returned to Rosa and Benjamin, to be raised to adulthood in the home of her grandparents.

What the regime didn’t reckon with was the Argentinian people, and mobilized souls like Rosa Roisinblit. She joined herself to the cadre of activists who protested daily in the Plaza de Mayo, circling the fountain in protest against the junta. Eventually, she joined with Estela de Carlotto to found the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, to press for the release of files and dossiers that would bring to light the crimes of the regime.

Rosa Rosinblit eventually achieved more than that. The officers who abducted Patricia and her husband were tried, convicted, and punished with lengthy sentences. The couple who were “awarded” Patricia’s baby were forced to relinquish him and also went to jail. Now renamed Guillermo Perez Roisinblit, he works as legal counsel to his grandmother’s organization and will carry her torch for decades to come.

But I have come to valorize Rosa. Her death is a loss to the Argentinian people and activist humanitarians all over the world. Her trudging protest at the Plaza de Mayo was a relentless act of principled defiance which must have felt at times impotent and fruitless. But eventually it had its intended effect. At any point she could have been whisked away and become an anonymous corpse in the sea off the coast. But she collected strength and political capital the longer she put her life in jeopardy, sitting in the offices of those who had brought ruin to Argentina

We’re going to need models like Rosa in the days ahead. In all of her pictures, she looks barely five feet tall, but she is one of the giants of Argentine history. May the memory of the righteous be for a blessing.