Closing Credits

Roby's final excerpt. Powerful memories mix with tales of exile culminating in a theater production honoring and remembering some of the worst years in El Salvador's history.
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We came back to Salvador and we stayed in Salvador until 1980. We left in December of 1980.

(So now you have a European wife. How did that affect your coming back?)

Difficult. Difficult for her. Difficult for me. A whole different adaptation. That’s a culture shock which continues till now for thirty-five years, thirty-two.

(Were you here when Ernesto Liebes was killed?)

Yes. Wait a minute, what year was that?

(’79.)

Yes, I was here. Mm-hmm.

(When the tension began, when would you say that started?)

I think the social tension in Salvador for the Jewish community began in—I can pinpoint the day. I can’t remember the date, but I can tell you about it. It was 1972, and it was Ernesto Regalado Dueñas kidnapping and subsequent horrible death at the hands not of those who kidnapped him,. now it apparently is proved beyond a reasonable doubt that he was kidnapped by a group of university students who were involved in a relationship with the Communist Party but were much more to the left of the Communist Party, which is where the extreme leftist groups came from, the Trotskyites and the Maoists, etc. And the prisoner that they had was stolen from them by certain military and then horribly tortured in order to pin the blame on the communists. It’s in the papers. It was in the papers two weeks ago. This is something that a lot of us have known for twenty years. This kidnapping completely jarred—because it was the first time that somebody from the dominating class had actually been kidnapped and killed, and then the kidnappings started after that. Even when Kidnappings were politically motivated, they were still motivated for reasons of money,—and there were other kidnappings which were only commercial ventures.

I mean, who was kidnapping? There were five different leftist groups with five different ideologies who were fighting against each other. There was the government. There were the dissident militaries of the government. There was the extreme right. And there was the Mafia. So how can you know who for sure was kidnapping who?—or “whom,” I never know.

(Your friends, no one felt safe?)

No, no one felt safe. And I think at the moment—let me see, let me just try to get this straight. My parents left because of the kidnappings in ’77. Ernesto Liebes was kidnapped in ’79. Ernesto Liebes had left because of the kidnappings. And if I understand correctly—you can get that story much better from people in your own family—Ernesto Liebes, they agreed with all the family that he was not to come back, and then he decided to come back. Which is very significant to the love of country. My parents left in ’77. My father got a kidnapping menace note, in other words, “Give us so much money or we’ll kidnap you.” He got it at 8 o’clock in the morning, and at noon he was in Guatemala and didn’t come back for twenty years. And my mother was out, too. You never know if that was a real note or a false note. But my father—it was clear that I was never gonna go into the business with him. He had already closed the door to my sisters in the business. There was absolutely no chance of their going into the business, even though they wanted to- My father was seventy years old and he had had enough and the violence in the country wasn’t pleasing him at all, and he wanted to leave anyway, I think. I think the ransom note was just a catalyst that served its purpose at that moment.

(So they went to Guatemala but you and Hélène were still here?)

I was—we were—Naara and I were in Europe at the time. We were in Berlin visiting friends. Yeah, you know, in ’76 there was a kidnapping, no ’75, ’76, or was it ’77, that’s easy to find out. There was a kidnapping and a death which was very traumatic to me and to the entire Salvadoran society, which was Roberto Poma. That was really a terrible blow, because not only was he a friend, somebody I had gone to school with, somebody my own age, somebody who I had shared an awful lot of childhood with, but after he was kidnapped , he was returned to the family -after ransom was paid- as a corpse, which of course goes against any ethic of any kidnapping. What happened was that he resisted the kidnapping and was mortally wounded. When they realized they couldn’t save him any more, they had already given the names of the people they wanted freed in exchange for him, because it was a political changeover. So of course if they announced that he was dead, all these leaders who are big leaders today would have been killed, big leftist leaders today. And central, not so leftist. One of the heads of the Christian Democrats going to elections tomorrow is one of them.

And so this of course was an enormous blow. To me personally it was much more important than Ernesto Liebes. I’ve always thought that Ernesto Liebes was kidnapped more as Liebes coffee than as Consul of Israel. I’m convinced of that.
But I have no proof of that.

(When did you decide to leave?)

We decided to leave when Jorge Weill got kidnapped. We didn’t decide to leave. My parents had been harping on Hélène and me to leave since they had left. So it was a very difficult time, extremely difficult time. I’m very glad that we managed to ride through that and keep our very close friendship with Jorge, because Jorge is my baby brother, really. We were brought up very close, and we always have been.

(Were you involved at all in helping out with that?)

With Jorge’s kidnapping? No, no. I was—no, that was handled by three people and I was not part of it.

(You decided to leave in 1980.)

At the end of 1980, uh-huh.

(And you went to—?)

We went—Jorge was kidnapped at the time, we stayed some time in Miami because his father was dying. Naara was 6 months pregnant at the time. One of the reasons that we left was, we had a theater, and people were having a hard time getting to the theater. The day that we decided that this was it was one day when we had to go to the theater and we couldn’t get to the theater because there was some sort of street warfare going on, and we were blocked in one section of town, and there were people actually coming to see a show and we had to leave them outside and they were caught in a crossfire right in front of the theater, and they came running into the theater and the theater was closed because we had not been able to get there. So that’s when we said, “We can’t go on. We can’t go on with the theater now.” And we decided to close it. So there had been—there’s something that was called the ofensiva final, which was going to be a power takeover of the left.

So this was announced. And we would get also at the theater daily threats from government-close people saying, “tomorrow we’re having a march. Close the theater to show that you support us.” And the next day we would get a message from the left saying, “We’re having a march. Close the theater to show that you support us.” And all this sort of thing. So actually we were always really caught between two fires. So we decided, since the ofensiva final was announced, we decided this was a good moment to close the theater and to make—I think I’ve got my years mixed up. This was after Jorge’s kidnapping.

(’81?)

No, this is ’80. We decided to go on tour. There was a big problem also that we were expecting Mateo, our second child, and Naara was afraid that—you know, there were cases of people who had not been able to get to hospitals, things like that, and she was six months pregnant. If we waited two more months, she couldn’t be able to travel. She just had had enough of this, and she said, “Let’s go.” So we left. We ended up in Geneva, which was logical because we had—we hadn’t thought of going anywhere, so the fact of going to Geneva was logical since she had family there. So our two children, Ariella, who was born in Salvador and didn’t speak a word of French and was five at the time and Mateo, who was born in Geneva, were raised in Geneva.

And then while in Geneva, I decided to make this tour that we had talked about before and bring four of our actors here who were doing theater with us here and bring them to Europe and tour Europe with them, with the company. So that’s what we did.

(You were able to get them out of Salvador?)

Yeah, mm-hmm.

(Did they end up going back eventually, or they stayed in Europe for a while?)

Two of them live in New York and two of them live in Geneva.

(They never went back?)

They did go back and forth, but mainly stayed over there.

(So you were in Geneva for how long?)

Twenty-five years.

(You didn’t come back?)

Oh, yeah, oh, yeah. I didn’t come back for about four years. And then—or three years, something like that. And then started coming back once every two years and then after ’89, every year. No, after ’90 every year, once they—actually the war went on and on and on and on, and in 1991, I was asked by a festival in Spain, the Festival Iberoamericano de Cádiz, to do a play in Salvador about Salvador and about the war. And so I came here and did that in ’91 and we took it to Spain. The play ended with the signing of the peace, which was signed two months after we finished the play. The play was called Tierra de cenizas y esperanza, “Land of Hope and Ashes.”

(Who wrote it?)

Naara. It was an idea of Naara’s, based on a play that we had done in 1975, which was Eric Bentley’s play called A Time to Die, based on the Antigone myth. She developed the idea with me and then we did it on the basis of improvisations. Two Salvadoran actor-writers codified the text.

(What kind of a story did it tell?)

It was the story of three women who take their clothes down to the river to wash them and all of a sudden the river is littered with bodies. We were very impressed with the massacres of the Río Sumpul at the time and had photographs of that in Europe, which we did not have here. And the three women get totally traumatized by this. One of them goes crazy. One of them leaves for the North , the other one stays. that part of the story is told through letters they write each other. But then, the one who stays, all of a sudden travels through time and is privy to different myths that formed Salvador. And the river becomes the river gods and the spirit of the river and then the play goes into the Conquest and the history of violence in Salvador and ends with the fight between the tigre y el venado which is a folklore theme from here. Of course it was obviously a guerrillero [guerilla fighter] and a soldier who finish up killing each other and then the historiantes [historians] come in and sign a peace. [chuckles]

(Has it been performed again?)

No. We performed it in ’91 and ’92.

(Here, or in Europe?)

We performed it here, in Europe, and in South America.

(How was it received?)

Very well everywhere. Very well. It went over very well. It was very, very strong. It was strong stuff, and it was a nice production. Maybe we should do it again.....

Transcript by Sandy Adler, Adler Enterprises LLC.