Malevolence in the Malvinas

Jews fighting in the Malvinas/Falkland Islands war had to battle anti-Semitism as well as the enemy.

By HERNAN DOBRY
Malevolence in the Malvinas (photo credit: HERNAN DOBRY)
Malevolence in the Malvinas
(photo credit: HERNAN DOBRY)
All the Argentine conscripts in the 1982 Malvinas War suffered from constant cold and hunger, but the Jewish soldiers bore an additional burden – anti-Semitism at the hands of their superiors.
These stories were made public for the first time in my book The Rabbis of the Malvinas: The Jewish Community in Argentina, the South Atlantic War and Anti-Semitism, published in March in Buenos Aires.
The conflict began on April 2, 1982, after Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands. Located in the South Atlantic, the Malvinas had been under British control since 1833. Argentina’s intention was to reassert its sovereignty over the islands, which it had already been championing in the international arena for several decades.
In reality, it was a final and desperate attempt by dictator Leopoldo Fortunato Galtieri to retain his hold on power at a time when the country was in the midst of a severe economic and social crisis.
The ruling junta was also under fire for human-rights violations and the forced disappearance of tens of thousands of people since coming to power in 1976.
Cold and hungry  
The war plan did not work out in Argentina’s favor. The British bombed the Malvinas on May 1 and continued until June 14, when the island’s Argentine governor, General Mario Benjamin Menendez, signed a surrender with his British counterpart, Jeremy Moore.
During that time, the Argentine soldiers were cold and hungry. Their own superiors withheld food and ate the soldiers’ rations.
Although the majority of conscripts were treated poorly, Jewish soldiers were singled out for targeted abuse ranging from verbal insults and discrimination to forced labor and torture.
Many Jewish conscripts, however, were not surprised by the anti-Semitism that they experienced. Many of them had experienced anti-Semitism during their compulsory military service, and the climate was particularly hostile during the military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983. Anti-Semitic attitudes and behavior have been common in the military – and unfortunately, it will likely continue.
Of all the incidents of anti-Semitism during the war, it is Silvio Katz’s case that is the most extreme. The abuse that he suffered under Lieutenant Eduardo Flores Ardoino was so intense that he filed a lawsuit against him. The case is currently pending resolution by the Supreme Court of Argentina.
“Every day we were on the island, he punished me for being a Jew,” said Katz.
“He froze my hands and head in ice water. He threw my food in shit and forced me to pick it up with my mouth. He told me that I was gay, that all Jews were wimps, and thousands of other insults. He gloated about what he did and was happy to see me suffer.
He told me that he would have done the same to the others, if they had been Jewish too,” he said.
One cold day, Flores Ardoino tied Katz’s hands and feet to four stakes driven into the floor and left him there for hours in temperatures several degrees below zero, wearing nothing but a shirt and underwear.
Then he forced the other soldiers to urinate on Katz, and threatened that whoever refused to obey would be tied to the stake, nearly naked and in the cold, and urinated on as well.
Sigrid Kogan recalls that he would escape with fellow soldier Omar Morales to Port Stanley to buy food with money they received from their parents. The army didn’t provide food for him because of his rank.
On one such occasion, a captain discovered them and informed their superior officer, Lieutenant Ricardo Ferrer.
Broken nose
“When the lieutenant caught us, he told his assistant to bring him some boxing gloves because we were going to have a match,” says Kogan. “He hit me and he slapped Morales twice. He beat me up because I’m a Jew. I fell and he hit me, I got up and he hit me again. He was more interested in beating up the Jew who escaped and went into town, and not the Catholic soldier. Before he started hitting me, he called the whole unit to show them how he abused me. It was about doing what he did to a Jew. It wasn’t about making an example of a soldier who misbehaved or ran away, but about showing what he could do to a Jew.”
Kogan says he couldn’t eat afterwards because he was in so much pain. His nose was broken and his body and clothes were covered in blood. However, he chose to stay in his tent rather than going to the hospital for fear of reprisals.
“I was in bad shape,” he says. “I couldn’t eat the little food they gave us because my mouth was a mess and I couldn’t chew. My nose never healed properly either. That night, I was supposed to be on guard duty but the staff sergeant excused me and told me to rest because I was in so much pain that I couldn’t move.”
This was not Kogan’s only experience with anti-Semitism in the army. At other times, he preferred to put up with the mistreatment instead of avoiding Ferrer’s insults and abuse by saying he had to see a doctor. In the diary that he kept after the war, Kogan wrote: “Even when I was in pain, I avoided going to the hospital so I could get away from the lieutenant’s frequent comments about the ‘fucking Jew.’”
Kogan recalls that the discrimination began even before the war. At the headquarters in Buenos Aires, an officer of another company went through the list of troops selected to go to Port Stanley and found Jewish soldiers’ names missing from the list. Kogan and another soldier, Dario Ertel, were told to take the place of the non-Jewish soldiers who hadn’t showed up. Kogan says it was clear the decision was based solely on their religion.
“They made us all stand on the beach. They began to put together a list and they asked, ‘The Jews are not going to go? Who are the Jews? Ertel, Kogan, step over here.’ They told me, ‘When we call out Fernandez, say Here.’ So that’s how I ended up going to the Malvinas Islands. I wasn’t on the original list, but I had to take the place of a Catholic soldier who didn’t show up. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have gone.”
During the Malvinas War, some officers claimed that Jewish soldiers were foreigners. In their eyes, it wasn’t possible to be simultaneously Jewish and Argentinian. To the Argentine Jewish soldiers who proudly fought in the war, this was a nonsensical allegation.
“There was this issue about if you were or weren’t Argentine. It was like if you were Jewish, then you couldn’t be Argentine,” says Claudio Szpin, a veteran who witnessed it. Pablo Macharowski, who is also an Israeli citizen, recalls an incident.
“A sergeant came up to me and said, ‘How strange that you’re a Jew and you’re fighting here.’ I told him, ‘I’m Argentine, and it has nothing to do with whether or not I’m Jewish.’ The sergeant was amazed, like it was a totally foreign concept,” says Macharowski Marcelo Nissim Eddi’s experience was even worse. His unit was chosen to cross to the Malvinas from the city of Comodoro Rivadavia in Patagonia, where they were mobilized.
“One day we were all lined up and the first lieutenant said, ‘The mortar unit will cross to the Malvinas.’ I was pulled aside. This lieutenant who was with us, he was like Hitler’s son. He was a Nazi and he dressed like Hitler, down to the gel in his hair.
“This man came up to me and said, ‘I’m taking only Argentine soldiers, not a Jew.’ I answered, ‘We are all brave like you and fighting for the same thing.’ He said, ‘Don’t talk back to me, Private.’ I said, ‘What will you do? Are you going to hit me, throw me in jail?’ ‘Fucking Jew,’ he shouted.”
In the end, Eddi traded places with another soldier without the lieutenant knowing. He landed in the Malvinas on June 8, a week before the war ended.
The aggression was irrational and completely baseless. “One day, Sergeant Frinko called me over and told me, ‘You know what? I hate Jews. Why? I don’t know, but I hate them.’ I didn’t say anything because the comment took me by surprise,” says Adrian Haase.
In some cases, anti-Semitism was often rooted in misguided religious belief. Daniel Kockziac, who served as a doctor at the Stanley Hospital, says the corporal who worked under him as a nurse in the hospital blamed him and other Jewish soldiers for the death of Jesus.
“One day he began to say nasty things about the Jews, that they killed Christ. I didn’t answer, which made him angrier,” Kockziac recalls. His experiences are documented in the book Tears of Ice by Natasha Niebieskikwiat.
During the war, Sergio Vainroj had to withstand the hatred and envy of his superior officer on several occasions.
“Every so often, he would call me a fucking Jew, and when he could, he gave me extra work. For example, he would make me dig a trench, then fill it and start over. The others did not have to do this,” says Vainroj.
This abuse continued as the war drew to a close. “It was June, when the British bombing campaign was already well underway. I had received a parcel and the sergeant ordered me to bring it to him. He kept it and said, ‘Fucking Jew, why is it that you got a package and I got nothing?’ He was merciless. I watched as he undid his fly and shouted, ‘Come here, suck my dick.’
Overruled
Then he tried to force himself on me, but I turned away. At that very moment, Claudio Szpin came and saw what was happening and he tried to defend me. He stepped on the sergeant’s foot, shoved him and hit him.”
In response, the sergeant took Szpin to the captain, reported that Szpin had defied orders, and asked to send him to the front lines.
Eventually, a superior overruled the sergeant and let him stay.
The greatest paradox of the war is that at the same time as Jewish soldiers were subjected to routine anti-Semitism, Israel was Argentina’s largest supplier of weapons. The arms sales were carried out despite the blockade that Britain, Europe, the Commonwealth and the United States had imposed on Argentina’s ruling military junta. Sales totaled nearly $173 million – equivalent to $403 million today.
Permission was given in person by Prime Minister Menachem Begin to go ahead with the sales after a cabinet meeting in late April 1982.
The arms transfers were funneled via the Peruvian government, which purchased the weapons and sent them to Argentina. Israel sold the Argentine junta Mirage IIIC fighter bombers, radar warning systems, military parkas, ammunition, Shafrir missiles and communications equipment.
In the years immediately following the war, the veterans were largely abandoned and forgotten. They were ignored by successive governments and unrecognized by society, which led to significant problems in reintegrating them into civil society when they returned to the mainland.
Veterans were not allowed to collect state pensions until 10 years after the war, and it was nearly 10 more years until they were provided with counseling and mental health services. This large-scale denial has had tremendous consequences – to date, more veterans have died by suicide than fatalities in combat. Three decades later, their stories of abuse and neglect are only now starting to surface as they begin to talk about their wartime experiences.
The main Jewish institutions in Argentina displayed the same attitude and gave little thought to the Jewish veterans. The emotional pain and stress caused by the lack of recognition is an ongoing issue and a source of grief for the veterans until today.
It took three decades for the Jewish community to pay tribute to their fellow Jews. The first initiative came from Beit El synagogue in Buenos Aires, which honored them in March, followed by the Argentina Israel Mutual Association on April 19 and the Delegation of Argentine Jewish Associations in June.
English translation by Elysse Zarek