Raquel Liberman: Story of a woman who was a symbol of the fight against trafficking

Rachel Liberman she died in 1935. Thyroid cancer had consumed her. She no longer spoke. Her agony was short but very painful. Before she fell ill, her appearance was also not good. She was 35 years old, but she appeared to be in her fifties. She was a worn out, broken person. With a past that would not leave her, with a perpetual pain running through her. However, she was a quiet woman. She had fought, she had not given up despite adverse circumstances and she had won. Against all odds.

Ruchla Laja Liberman He was born on July 10, 1900 in Berdichev, present-day Ukraine. As a child she emigrated with her parents to Warsaw, where she spent more than two thirds of her short life. In 1919 she married Jacob Ferber and the following year she had her first child, Joshua. In 1921, when she was pregnant with her second child, her husband emigrated to Argentina in search of work. But her final years (and the name she took during them) are what gave her immortality. Her destiny was to go unnoticed, to be subjected, one more victim, like so many thousands. But she refused, she rebelled. And with unusual courage she stood up to her exploiters.

It inspired -with many historical licenses- the character played by Eugenia La China Suárez in Argentina, land of love and revenge.
At the beginning of the last century, life in Poland was very hard. Hunger, needs and pogroms. For young Jews, any exit seemed tempting, any other destination in the world offered illusion.

Ruchla, like so many other young Polish Jews, left for Argentina looking for a better future, to escape misery. But her story is not the same as the others. "La Polaca" she emigrated to Argentina in 1922 together with two small children -Josué, two years old and Moisés, months old- to meet her husband, who was waiting for her in the Buenos Aires town of Tapalqué. Elke, the sister-in-law of "la Polaca", was the madam of a brothel. "It is not known if Raquel knew about this before arriving in the country or if she believed that she was going to work helping her husband, who was a tailor, but she had never found a job and lived off her sister."

Soon tuberculosis caused the death of Jacob. Ruchla, who upon arriving in Argentina adopted the name of Rachel Liberman, (immigrants' names used to be castellanized) left her children in the care of people from Tapalqué and settled in Buenos Aires willing to earn a living. Prostitution, a time mark, was an almost impossible path to avoid.
The ruffians moved throughout Buenos Aires. They were of all origins. Italians, Spanish, French, Jews. The organization that gained the most fame over time was the Zwi Migdal, of Polish Jewish origin.

Rachel Liberman he worked for several years in the brothels of the Zwi Migdal. Her agreement was better than the rest of the girls'. She kept a higher percentage. Thus, she was soon able to buy her freedom for $1.500.

He continued to practice on his own. She married José Korn, considered by many to be an envoy of the Zwi Migdal to bring her back under her clutches. No one is easily freed from these mafia associations. This man scammed Raquel. He acquired her house in her name with 60 pesos from her, in a fraudulent maneuver. Korn installed in that house, how could it be otherwise, a brothel. Raquel was left, once again, with nothing. And she began her quest for justice.

The downfall of this prostitution emporium, which raked in millions a year, began with this little swindle that the cracked thirty-year-old decided not to forgive. Ambition and impunity lost the Zwi Migdal. She came across a woman with determination and tired of the harassment, a principled commissioner and a judge who did not fall into the temptation of venality.

Raquel had the same destiny as the other Polish women: to give her youth to the ruffians and the clients, to grow old prematurely, to get fed up with life and to be replaced by a younger one, perhaps only five years younger than her, but without the obvious wear and tear. , without the rictus of defeat chiseled on his face, without the marks of exploitation crossing his body.

The woman claimed for her money. That money was her independence. The paradox is that she managed to put an end to the organization of ruffians she wanted, with her savings, to become a madam herself. They did not hear her requests. Neither her ex-husband Korn nor the directors of the Zwi Migdal whom she went to. She then denounced the scam, but no one believed that her Justice would listen to her. Who would pay attention to a Polish prostitute? What kind of investigation couldn't they stop with a few opportune bribes?
Commissioner Julio Alsogaray, a moralist and with a reputation for incorruptibility, listened to Raquel and got into action: he had been behind the organization for years and always ran into the wall of silence and complicity. With nobility, Alsogaray warned Raquel of the risks of ratifying her denunciations. Raquel chose to move on. She found an echo in an honest judge, Judge Manuel Rodríguez Ocampo.

For the complaint to prosper, Raquel lied about her origin. She wanted to protect her children. She just followed the script of the legend. She recounted that she traveled seduced by a deceitful marriage proposal and that upon disembarking at the port she was kidnapped and forced into prostitution.

As Jorge Luis Borges wrote about his Emma Zunz: “The story was incredible, indeed, but it imposed itself on everyone, because it was substantially true. True was the tone, true the modesty, true the hatred. True also was the outrage he had suffered; only the circumstances, the time, and one or two proper names were false.”

Raquel, who began by just claiming her debt, ended up denouncing and describing the operation of the criminal network. The Zwi Migdal could not withstand the onslaught. The judge ordered 108 arrests. The courts of that time - on the eve of the so-called "infamous decade" -, through the Appeals Chamber, finally left only three secondary members of the organization under preventive detention. All the others were released. But circumstances caused the ruffians' emporium to be demolished.

Public opinion was becoming more moralistic (in 1936 prostitution was outlawed by law: Raquel never saw him, she died the year before). The impact of the news and sensationalism gave it a great impact and the anti-Semitic factor also played a role. More important and established prostitution networks were bypassed because they belonged to other communities.
With her denunciation, Raquel had caused the fall of the Zwi Migdal. It was an unintentional consequence. For years the story of the trip, of the fraudulent marriage, of the swindle of his credulity was repeated.

At one point, Raquel rejoined her children and lived in Buenos Aires for a few more years. She reportedly wanted to get a passport to return to Warsaw, but the trip to Poland never took place. A few months later, on April 7, 1935, she was admitted to the Cosme Argerich hospital where she died.
Thirteen years had passed since that arrival in Buenos Aires. If that return to Warsaw had not failed, José and Moisés would have fallen into the clutches of Nazism that was already flying over Germany and especially Poland.

The children only had a few photographs left of their mother, in which she was happy.
This woman who escaped poverty in Poland and traveled with hope to Argentina, in search of an opportunity, found here death, pain, abuse and exploitation. However, in her own way, alone, against an entire era, she was encouraged to fight, to fight for what was hers. That is her legacy, although unfortunately she would not find out about the National Prophylaxis Law of which she was the seed.

In 2015, on the 80th anniversary of his death, a plaque was placed in his honor in the Avellaneda cemetery. During the Infamous Decade it was said that this was "the place to bury prostitutes and pimps." It is not known where her grave is because the parcel books are in Israel. But it is with Iacoov.

His story of bravery transcended time. Other books were written about the Polish. The Undersecretariat of Human Rights and Cultural Pluralism of the city of Buenos Aires awards every year the "Rachel Liberman Award"To all people and non-governmental organizations committed to the protection and/or promotion of the rights of women survivors of situations of violence", according to the official website of the City.

A project presented before the Legislature of Buenos Aires requests that the name of Rachel Liberman to the Callao station on line D. The author of the project, UCR-Evolución legislator Patricia Vischi said that “it seemed very important to us that this station be on the D subway because the life of Rachel Liberman It developed in this area, where she was victimized, but also where, when she was able to recover, she was able to start a business with a lot of sacrifice to raise her children.”

Compilation of texts from: Infobae, La Nación. With the news people, National Library Researcher José Luis Scarsi. Myrtha Schalom in her book La Polaca demolished all these legends with a formidable research work.