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We bid farewell to our dear friend, companion and teacher, Dr. Pedro Boschan. We mourn the loss of his warmth, devotion, honesty and loyalty, and remember our shared moments, our meetings and his profound knowledge of psychoanalysis. These are the memories and feelings that accompany us in the process of mourning.
Pedro came out of the hospital, accompanied by Marcos Tabacznick, before his home medical care was to start, strolled through the Botanical Gardens of Buenos Aires and said, full of hope: “The sun gives me strength and the will to continue fighting.”
That was the sun that greeted young Pedro and his family in Argentina. He was born in Hungary at the beginning of the Second World War, during hard times. In the summer of 1944, his family was imprisoned by the Nazis in the ghetto of Újpest, but in a lucky strike and by means of his mother, Lily's enormous courage, both managed to escape before being transported to a concentration camp deportation collection site, though, agonizingly, they had to leave some family members behind. They hid under changed identities until the war was over. Mother and son continued the search for Pedro's sister Lucy for years, her true fate never having become known, but she is presumed to have died in a bombing. After the War, as the suffering and horror continued under the Russian occupation, in 1948, mother and son rejoined Pedro's father, and immigrated to Argentina.
Pedro was 9 when he arrived in Buenos Aires, where he studied, worked and kept his mother tongue as part of his identity; this not quite apart from his passion for football, tango and cafés. He entered medical school at the University of Buenos Aires, receiving his medical degree in 1963, and completed his specialization at the Children's Hospital. The US became his home between the years 1965 and 1968, as post-doctoral Research Fellow with the National Institute of Health, specializing in Infant Psychosomatic Illnesses at the State University of New