BUENOS AIRES — At their 30-year reunion, the survivors of the Class of 1973 walked up the stone steps of their old campus and remembered their first day in school, and all the improbable, funny and unbearably tragic things that happened afterward.
They remembered listening to the rector read a list of the famous alumni of El Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires National High School), a roster of presidents, novelists and Nobel Prize winners so intimidating it made them laugh.
They remembered their Latin teacher, who sneaked in subversive messages between verb conjugations, and they remembered their truncated graduation ceremony, where they decided in a fit of self-righteousness that they would break with tradition and not throw eggs.
They remembered the photograph of classmate Pablo Lepiscopo taken by his torturers, weeks or days before he was killed. And they remembered Eduardo Bekerman, arguably the brightest kid in their class and the first to fall into the hands of the clandestine executioners who terrorized Argentina for a decade.
But most of all, the members of the Class of 1973 celebrated the fact that they had survived at all. Theirs is a generation devastated by the "dirty war" waged by right-wing death squads and a military junta against "subversives" in the 1970s and '80s, virtually wiping out the nation's intellectuals and leftist activists.
An estimated 10,000 people were killed and many more driven into exile.
"I will not say we are a 'lost generation,' because after all, we are here," Hugo Dvoskin said in his speech to 100 alumni gathered inside the school's main auditorium. "But yes, we are a mutilated generation that will always be haunted by the unfathomable question of 'what might have been.' "
In all, at least 104 alumni and students of El Colegio -- the nation's oldest and most famous high school -- were killed during the years of political violence. Among the 350 members of the Class of 1973, a dozen "were disappeared," an Argentine coinage that describes extrajudicial kidnapping, executions and burials. A hundred more went into exile.
Every year, El Colegio's alumni gather at a monument to the disappeared on the campus and read the names of the young women and men they knew.
In reunions past, most exiles of the Class of 1973 stayed away: The trip back is too long, the memories too painful. But this year, exactly two decades after the country's last military dictatorship crumbled, more were persuaded to return.
Like people at high school reunions everywhere, they spent long hours catching up on family news and professional accomplishments. But it was almost impossible, even in the most lighthearted moments, to escape the sense of loss.
Now graying versions of their younger selves, the survivors encountered old friends. Dvoskin, who stayed in Buenos Aires and became a psychoanalyst, embraced Cecilia Schiavi, who lost a young husband to the repression, becoming both a widow and a mother at age 20.
"Cecilia, how are you?" he said.
"I am alive," she answered.
'Mission: Impossible'
Step through the neo-Baroque facade of El Colegio, and you feel you are entering a grand and elegant Old World mansion. The building was designed in the monumental style of the Paris Opera, and its auditorium is a kind of fin de siecle lecture hall.
"For a boy or girl of 13, it was just too much," Schiavi said of her first days at the campus in 1968. Her father was a doctor and her mother a geography teacher, but nothing had prepared her for El Colegio's rarefied atmosphere. "You felt like you were nothing there."
For others, the classrooms and hallways of El Colegio were an expected rite of passage. Many were, like Pablo Lepiscopo, the middle-class sons and daughters of the Buenos Aires intelligentsia.
Going to El Colegio, Gladys Lepiscopo said, was a natural continuation of the progressive values to which her son Pablo had been exposed as a child. Even before joining the school, Pablo did volunteer work in the slums of Buenos Aires. One winter night when he was 12 or so, he came back without his new sweater.
"I got angry with him," Gladys recalled. "But he told me, 'Mother, if you had seen what those people had to wear against the cold, you would have given them your sweater too.' "
Like many of his generation, young Pablo believed that he was living the dawn of a new, more democratic and egalitarian society.
Just a few months before the Class of 1973 entered El Colegio, Ernesto "Che" Guevara died in October 1967 in Bolivia leading a band of guerrillas against U.S.-trained counter-insurgency troops. Overnight, "El Che" became a symbol of youthful martyrdom. From Paris to Berkeley, throngs of students were proclaiming "people power."
The news of these far-flung events was like a drug to the educated youth of Argentina, where a handful of leftist guerrilla groups were waging war against the military dictatorship of Juan Carlos Ongania.
