Stephen Lewis uncovers a harrowing true-life story about the 'disappeared' of Argentina.

WHEN Andres Jaroslavsky was five years old, his father, a cardiologist, set off for work one day.

His family never saw him again. He had become one of the "desaparecidos" - the "disappeared", victims of the vicious military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983.

That was almost 30 years ago and in all that time, Andres has never discovered what happened to his father. "He went to work, and we never heard from him again," he says.

He and his younger brother grew up in a climate of fear. But children, he points out, are infinitely adaptable. It was the adults who really suffered - and not just the people who were directly targeted, abducted from their workplaces, killed in the street, or simply thrown into prison for daring to oppose the regime.

"The real target was society," Andres says. "The people who remained alive. They were the ones that became quiet."

The military dictatorship was overthrown in 1983 following the Falkands War. They left behind them an economically shattered country. But at least it was now a democracy.

As a young man, Andres began working with various human rights organisations, trying to find out what happened to the "desaparecidos".

He took testimony from countless people who had been children during the dictatorship, and who had members of their own families "disappear".

Now living in York, where he teaches music, he has brought together 30 of these testimonies in a harrowing book, The Future Of Memory.

Among the worst cases were the pregnant women who were kidnapped, Andres says. They were kept alive until they had their babies, then murdered and their babies adopted and brought up by military families.

There are believed to have been about 500 such cases. Human rights groups have traced 70 such children - children who didn't know, until they were contacted, that their 'parents' weren't really their parents at all.

The final testimony in Andres' book comes from a young girl whose pregnant mother was kidnapped at the height of the terror and never heard from again.

It was only much later that the girl, Mariana, learned she had a brother. Then began the search for him.

It was a search that eventually paid off. In April 2000, he writes, Mariana received a telephone call, giving information about a young man who had been "appropriated" by the Air Force. "And so Mariana found her brother," he writes.

There is always hope.

The Future of Memory by Andres Jaroslavsky is published by the Latin America Bureau, priced £12.99. Andres will be at Borders in York at 7pm on Thursday to talk about Argentina's "disappeared" and his work with human rights organisations there.

Updated: 10:42 Saturday, April 23, 2005