Anatole was too young to make sense of what had happened. It was as if they had dropped from the sky. No one could understand how the two children, whose accents marked them as foreign, had got here. Larrabeiti remembers looking down on snowy peaks from the plane. A few days before Christmas, they were flown to a third country, Chile, in a small aircraft that climbed high above the Andes. The following month, in October 1976, Anatole and Victoria Eva were taken to Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, and held at the military intelligence headquarters. That was in another part of Buenos Aires, the city that their parents had moved to in June 1973, joining thousands of leftwing militants and former guerrillas fleeing a military coup in their native Uruguay. At first, they were held in a grimy car repair garage that had been turned into a clandestine torture centre. Then Larrabeiti remembers being taken away by armed police, along with his 18-month-old sister, Victoria Eva. He remembers the shootout, the bright flashes of gunfire and the sight of his father lying on the ground, mortally wounded, outside their home in a suburb of Buenos Aires, Argentina, with his mother lying beside him. It was 26 September 1976, the day after his birthday. The last time Anatole Larrabeiti saw his parents, he was four years old.
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