"In exile, there are basically two kinds of people," said Alberto Grinberg, who lives in Barcelona, Spain. "There's those of us who have a lot of nostalgia for Argentina, and there are those who have said, 'I'm closing the blinds, that part of my life is over, I'm never going back.' "
Grinberg came to spend a few hours with his old friends, to look at black-and-white photographs of themselves lined up in neat rows. So did his wife, Susana Oxer, once Eduardo Bekerman's girlfriend and now a doctor.
The tragedy of the dirty war was the defining element of their lives, Oxer said. Some were spiritually broken, others embittered, the idealistic impulses of their youths silenced forever.
"We were adolescents, and from one day to the next we had to confront these things of adult life," Oxer said. "Some of us were already on the way to becoming widows, and we were still just kids. It wasn't easy to adapt to an adult life, to a supposedly normal life."
Those who went to Europe and the U.S. faced the hardships common to immigrants. They have children who are growing up more French, American and Spanish than Argentine.
Alumnus Jose Iujvidin, who left Buenos Aires the day after his wedding in 1981, came back for the reunion but says he will never live in Buenos Aires again. In Los Angeles, after many adventures, he became an architect. This year, he became a U.S. citizen -- at the insistence of his American-born children. The ballot he cast in California's recall election was his first.
Iujvidin still feels a sense of imminent danger in Argentina. Political violence, he says, "is like a cancer that's gone into remission. You can't be certain the disease won't come back someday."
Ariel Neuhaus, who took the cautious route during the dirty war, is also an architect. Successful at business, he lives in an expansive home in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. At the reunion, many old friends didn't recognize him at first. His thick mop of reddish-brown hair is gone, replaced by a close-cropped, mostly bald pate.
"It's a curious thing, but most of the people who weren't very political then are now the most enthusiastic about politics and organizing," Neuhaus said.
Marcelo Koremblit stayed in Argentina and, like many others, has suffered through the roller coaster of the country's most recent crises of economic collapse and bank crashes. He wonders whether his country would be as troubled if the Bekermans and Lepiscopos of their generation were still among them.
"You have to ask yourself, what country did they [the leaders of the military regime] think they were producing by killing these young people?" said Koremblit, now 48, as are most of the '73 alumni. "What sort of legacy did they think they were leaving us?"
Mindful of the old divisions between those who embraced politics and those who did not, Dvoskin did not begin his reunion speech with the salutation that opened student addresses at El Colegio back in their glory days -- companeros, a Spanish synonym for "comrades."
Instead, he began with the more neutral "amigos."
Later, he led his classmates in singing "The Dinosaurs" by the Argentine rocker Charly Garcia, a 1983 protest song. Like the dinosaurs, the junta that had disappeared so many became extinct itself.
"Those who are in the street can disappear on the street
Your friends from the barrio can disappear
But the dinosaurs will disappear."
The proceedings eventually shifted to a nearby restaurant. The survivors of the Class of 1973, like people in reunions elsewhere, decided to party late into the night.
Some even tried dancing.
