Miriam Lewin
speaker
112 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Mar 2025
Miriam Lewin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
He was kind of telling me, how come you never thought of this? I was an experienced investigative reporter, so that felt like a lack of respect, you know? How dare he ask me that? I'm a survivor of a concentration camp. Also, I'm like 12 years older than him. I have no idea where the planes could be. And why? Why should I care?
But then again, through those planes, we could get to the pilots and maybe identify them. And that would be amazing.
And then Giancarlo pulls this strange-looking book from his backpack. He puts it on the table. It's written by a guy named Adolfo Silingo, a former Navy captain. He was the first Navy officer to admit to being part of a death flight crew. I knew about Silingo. I mean, I had heard about him. But I hadn't seen this book yet.
Was there possibly something big to investigate? Something that had been overlooked? For a while, I avoided investigating the dictatorship, revisiting that trauma. I had friends who were put on those death flights. I didn't feel I could stick to journalistic boundaries like my emotions might betray me at any moment and send me into a breakdown.
When my dad noticed me bringing flyers home, bringing the anarchist paper, he started feeding me more anarchist literature.
I was into political militancy, but I also loved the idea of working for a newspaper. I was a good writer, so I signed up for journalism school. The problem was my parents wanted me to have a real career, so I had to enroll in economics at the same time to appease them. We were young, but we felt like we'd lived through a lot. Social change, access to education, better salaries.
It all seemed at our fingertips. I mean, it didn't feel like a fantasy. It felt like we could actually change the world. I wanted to see a country where there was equality. We were young and we felt invincible.
Abandoning the cause wasn't even an option for us. We thought if we abandoned the militancy and activism, we would be betraying our friends who gave their lives for the movement.
During the last months of 1975, everyone already knew that a military coup was about to happen. It was March 24th, 1976. My mom barges into my room with a portable radio broadcasting about soldiers marching. And then she tells me that there was a coup. I remember being in bed and just getting into a fetal position and crying. I was crying because I felt afraid of the changes that were coming.
More control, less freedoms. And I remember what it felt like to step out of my house for the first time, just after the coup, watching the tanks rolling down the streets in the middle of the city. We had seen this before, the military that targets activists, sending them to jail, trying them in court, We actually thought, we hoped, the military would help stop the violence.
I never imagined an underground extrajudicial process. Never imagined they would kidnap me, put a hood on me, torture me.
He would say things like the process would require time and effort. They had their own vision for the country, a right-wing neoliberal nation with conservative Christian values.
That rhetoric about preserving Western Christian values, about creating paranoia, that communism was taking over our country, to me, none of that was surprising. I remember a friend telling me he was leaving the country because he'd heard that the military was planning a bloodbath. That they were going to kill us all. We thought it was an exaggeration.
We didn't see Argentina as a banana republic. And we had never witnessed the type of bloodbath my friend was predicting. We thought he was a coward.
Rumors about horrific torture started going around.
People having their arms ripped off their bodies, electric shocks, rape. The orders from our group leaders were clear. Do not be captured alive.
The thing is that immediately after the coup, the military started arresting friends, people they knew, right? So we knew that the military were going to torture those friends. And they had information about where I lived. And the reality is not everyone can endure torture. So if they gave your information, the military would be at my door.
The fear and terror was not only aimed at armed groups or known activists. It was aimed at society. They were going after school teachers, professors, union members, and then they were targeting their families too. It was too dangerous for me to keep sleeping at home. At one point, my dad didn't speak to me for at least six months. He was against my activism.
He knew how committed I was and he knew how dangerous it was. He was scared because people he knew were disappearing left and right and he didn't want me to get killed.
He was sweet, adorable. Never again did I feel the way I felt for Juan. His voice was so special. Just hearing him talk made me emotional. He loved his family and he loved me.
Showing 81–100 of 112 · page 5 of 6
← Previous
Next →