POSTPONED – Book launch | The Endless Absence

Postponed due to illness; a new date will be announced

The book The Endless Absence is an exemplary ethical testimony to a generous and courageous human experience in its astute confrontation with evil in its worst forms. Furthermore, it is a detailed study of the psychological, moral, spiritual and often physical trauma caused to people by the disappearance of close family members.

The disappearance of people – an issue that has affected, and continues to affect, thousands in Chile – has not only lasting but also enduring consequences. It is a psychological trauma without end, inconsolable and endless, as the title aptly describes. It is an extraordinary book which, drawing on a wealth of eyewitness accounts and the transcripts of three in-depth interviews with a mother, a daughter and a sister of the disappeared, raises fundamental questions for our understanding of the recent past and for the future of our coexistence as a nation.

Paz Rojas Baeza was born in Santiago de Chile in 1932 and is a doctor specialising in neuropsychiatry. Since the beginning of the dictatorship in Chile in 1973, she has worked with the Comité Pro Paz , which provided support to victims of torture and the relatives of those who had disappeared or been executed. Until 1974, she was a professor and head of the Neurology Department at the José Joaquín Aguirre Hospital (University of Chile). She continued her work whilst in exile in France. In 1981, she returned and joined the Corporación de Promoción y Defensa de los Derechos del Pueblo ( CODEPU), where she fought against impunity. In 2001, she helped to establish the Ethics Commission against Torture, whose work was instrumental in the creation of the Valech Commission in 2003, which acknowledged the use of torture by state officials. P. Rojas was awarded the Human Rights Prize by the University of Oslo (Norway) in 1998 and the Human Rights Prize by the Chilean Medical Association in 2019.

On site for the discussion: Dr Rainer Huhle (Nuremberg Human Rights Centre)

Rainer Huhle, who holds a PhD in Political Science (FAU), teaches ‘Transitional Justice’ on the Master’s in Human Rights programme at FAU. He has spent several years in Peru and Colombia, where, from 1997, he helped to establish the UN OHCHR field office. He co-founded (1989) the Nuremberg Centre for Human Rights and was a member of the CED (Committee on Enforced Disappearances) from 2011 to 2019.

The book will be published on 1 August 2026 and can be purchased here or at the event itself.

An event organised by the Fritz Bauer Forum.