Reaching out directly to the source of information about my illegal adoption would have probably been the most logical and sensible thing to do in this entire search. After all, I knew who they were—or at least who the person was that informed my mother of my existence. In fact, one of my best friends in Sweden, an Argentine son of exiles from the military dictatorship, gave me the idea, but I never dared to do it until May 2018. I’ll explain why.

My mom and my dad, as I’ve mentioned before, were opposed to my search. The fact that I would go and ask their friend if she knew anything more about my adoption filled them with terror and shame. “Don’t you dare bother her!” they told me. And to be honest, I felt the same way. As ridiculous as it sounds, even though I had the right to my own history, the idea of knocking on someone’s door and asking what they knew about my past terrified me. Especially because everyone—absolutely everyone—since 2003 had assumed that I was the child of desaparecidos, of a disappeared person. That meant that my search would imply that this person was somehow involved in a crime against humanity. And I know—a crime is a crime, and the guilty are guilty, period—but for me, it wasn’t that simple.

Maybe it was my constant Stockholm syndrome, my codependency, my denial, my fear of rejection, my fear of people being angry with me, my fear of conflict, my shame, my low self-esteem, or a combination of all of that, but I couldn’t find the strength within me to take that step. Until the DNA result from The Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo came back negative, and that path was closed.

If I was the daughter of desaparecidos, we would never find out.

After Simón and my partner at the time convinced me to continue despite the negative result, the search had to take a new path. On one hand, it meant approaching the Human Rights Office and Mercedes Yañez, and on the other, going directly to the source—to the witnesses who truly knew what had happened in August 1977 when my family went to pick me up from Dr. Bartucca’s place.

It took me a lot—an incredible amount—of courage to first contact the daughter of the woman I will call Marta for anonymity. Marta’s daughter had been my brother’s schoolmate, and every time I had met her, she had been so kind to me. I wrote to her, asking if she thought it would be okay for me to contact her mother and ask her about my adoption. She said yes and gave me her mother’s contact information.

So, in May 2018, during one of our trips to continue my search, I gathered all the courage I had and went to visit Marta and her husband in their apartment in Palermo, Buenos Aires. I was terrified, not knowing what to expect.

After so much time, so much anticipation, after having lived with a narrative of how everything had happened at the beginning of my life—what truth would emerge?

They received me, of course, with all the warmth and kindness in the world. They hadn’t seen me in so long! After all, the couple had always kept me in their thoughts. Our destinies had crossed in the strangest way, creating an undeniable bond.

First, we talked about my life in Sweden—how I handled the cold and the darkness, whether I actually could make a living making music, if I was married and had children… the usual things. I truly felt like they had been waiting for me.

After a while, as we drank coffee and ate sándwiches de miga—those sandwiches I love so much and miss dearly since moving to Stockholm—Marta told her husband that she and I would go to the living room to talk. He wasn’t included in the conversation.

“Interesting,” I thought, because for all those years, I had been sure that the husband—the man I had seen in uniform at their daughter’s wedding, the event that triggered this entire search—was the main figure in this story. But apparently, that wasn’t the case. At least, he wasn’t the protagonist of the story that Marta had protected in her memory for so many years, waiting for the day I would come knocking at her door.

She, more than anyone else—far more than my own family—made it clear to me how important truth and memory are. Perhaps that’s why she had preserved it so carefully.

This is the story she told me the day I visited her:

In August 1977, Marta’s brother—who was a truck driver at the time—was on his route from Buenos Aires to Ushuaia (a stretch of just over 3,000 kilometers) when he received news that his six-months-pregnant wife had been hospitalized. Marta’s brother, whom I’ll call Ralf for anonymity, took the first flight back to Buenos Aires to be with his wife, who had to undergo an emergency C-section. Unfortunately, the baby didn’t survive.

It turned out that she had been in severe pain for three days due to a perforated intestine, which the doctors had failed to detect. In that time, the baby had become intoxicated and did not survive. The family, understandably, was devastated.

At that moment, Marta’s aunt—her mother’s sister-in-law and Ralf’s godmother—contacted him, telling him that there was a baby girl available for adoption. Since he had just lost one, she asked if he wanted to go pick her up.

Ralf, who had just lost his daughter and whose wife was now in intensive care, fighting for her life with a gangrenous intestine, reacted with horror and refused the offer.

Marta, meanwhile, wanting to help her brother and sister-in-law, who was in critical condition, went to my parents’ house to ask if someone could donate blood for her. She knew them not only from the kindergarten where her daughter and my brother went but also because her brother Ralf played handball in the same German sports club as my father and my uncle.

That’s when she told my mother the whole story—including the part about her aunt Anita suggesting they adopt the baby—and Ralf’s reaction.

That same day or the next, Marta received a call from my mother, who expressed interest in the baby girl up for adoption—me.

My mother told her that she had been on the adoption waiting list for three years and had still not been assigned a baby girl. She asked for the contact of the doctor who had the baby waiting for adoption. Marta gave her the phone number and thought nothing more of it—until the next day, when she stopped by my parents’ house and, to her great surprise, found me there, wrapped up like a package.

My mother told her that the night before, she, my father, and my brother had gone to pick me up. Apparently, they had spoken with the doctor in the evening and, around midnight, had driven to his address—a private clinic—to get me. They returned home as quickly as possible, knowing they were doing something illegal and aware that they had violated the military curfew. My mother recalled being terrified that someone would follow them and take the baby away.

The next day, she took me to the pediatrician and had to go out and buy baby clothes. Everything had happened so fast that they weren’t prepared for my arrival.

Marta didn’t know anything beyond that.

She had waited 41 years to tell me everything she remembered.

She even asked me several times if my parents had ever told me how it all happened, and when I told her that neither of them wanted to share anything, she was horrified.

“And how are you supposed to heal if you don’t know your truth?” she exclaimed, in pain.

Marta understood everything. She had preserved a piece of my story and waited for me—consciously or unconsciously—knowing that one day I would ask, and she would fulfill her role: to pass the information to its rightful owner.

To ensure the truth didn’t disappear.

To help me heal.

Something so clear to her, yet denied to me by my family all along.

A question that comes up from time to time—often with the best intentions—from people who grew up knowing their biological origins is: Why do I need to know? If I already am who I am, why does it matter what happened at the moment of my birth? Why does it matter why my biological family couldn't raise me? What does it have to do with me that my biological mother gave me away to strangers? What matters is the here and now, the love that surrounds me, the life I have built.

I'll try to explain it, to bring some clarity to the matter.

Surely, at some point in life, you've been in love. You felt your heart wide open, expanded, fragile, vulnerable, and surrendered. And it was impossible not to love. That person became the center of your universe, just like in love songs. You felt at home with them, safe, seen, as if their presence confirmed your existence.

But one day, out of nowhere, in the midst of that vulnerability, the person holding your heart in their hands suddenly rejects you. They say or do something that makes it clear that the love isn't reciprocated. They leave. They disappear, without really explaining anything.

At that moment, it's very likely that your mind, trying to understand what happened—so it doesn't happen again, so you’re not abandoned or rejected again, to avoid the feeling of betrayal, the helplessness and lack of control, maybe even the shame of having believed you were loved—starts to create theories or stories about what happened and why. Something to explain the other person’s behavior, something that could predict it in someone else in the future.

Now, let’s translate that heartbreak story—something that hurt so much—into something as profound as the reality that those who were supposed to protect and love us more than anyone in the world, instead, gave us away to strangers. And we never know why, or what really happened.

The mind starts crafting a narrative with the information it has to make sense of it. A narrative that, over time, becomes our identity.

Reality stops existing outside of us and becomes only a story we tell ourselves, a story we recreate. A reality that confirms what we believe, that hurts us, that abandons us. And within that reality, in that bubble we live in, we do the best we can, unable to break free from that first message. We protect ourselves from the pain, from a wound that never stops bleeding, and we develop different, intelligent survival mechanisms.

We leave before we are left.

The fact that we were given up for reasons beyond us has no place in this narrative. The mind tells us:

But the truth of reality is far deeper and more complex than that. And that’s why it is so necessary.

Yes, in most cases, mothers couldn’t keep their children, and that’s why they gave them up. But within those unique stories, there is much more—context, the reality they lived in, social injustices, even the political situation of the time.

What we seek, when we search for the full, complex story of how everything happened, is redemption. It’s understanding why.

It’s realizing that this was never personal.

This was not our fault.

As painful as it was, the era we were born into, the reality and the context we entered the world in—none of it was about us.

We seek understanding, to finally free ourselves from a burden that was never ours to carry.

And then, yes—cry, scream, or find some way to release that pain. Because what hurt, hurt. That little girl, that little boy—like all children in the world—only wanted to be loved and couldn’t understand what they did to deserve such treatment.

Once we are free, we can truly begin to heal, to let go, even to forgive—each in our own time.

So, thank you, Marta, for your bravery, for your humanity, for your patience, and for your care for my soul. Thank you for at least preserving a small piece of my story.

I always say that the most beautiful heroes are those who don’t even know they are heroes.

Marta, you are one of them.

1. A teacher with a doctor
2. A doctor with a nurse
3. A 40-year-old widow who was the lover of her brother-in-law or neighbor and who, thinking she was already in menopause, had instead become pregnant.