pregnant from her relationship with the law student. Her son, Nesti, was born in May 1981. Arène continued assembling reports. Then, in March 1983, García Villas was killed during a trip to El Sal- vador. Authorities said she was caught in crossfire; human rights investigators said she was tortured. Arène was devastated, on top of the


accumulated tension of five years of liv- ing dangerously. She stopped working for the commission, to focus on being a mother and to resume teaching. She moved to Washington in 1989. Unless prompted, she didn’t say much about the war years, “but the box wasn’t big enough to lock it all away,” Nesti Arène said. She saved the camera she had used


to photograph corpses. Her son would hear his mother cry out in her sleep, in Spanish, “Not me, not me! Don’t take me!”


She taught languages at Bell Mul-


ticultural High School, then at St. Anselm’s Abbey School. And she sa- vored a certain symmetry — and irony — in the trajectory of her life: At Bell, located near the heart of the


Salvadoran community in Columbia Heights, some students wrote essays about their families’ traumatic experi- ences in the war. Having documented the displacement of so many coun- trymen, now she was tending to their offspring — never forgetting that the new country, where she became a citi- zen, had played a controversial role in the years of strife. At St. Anselm’s boys school, where


she started teaching in 1998, most col- leagues didn’t know of her war years. One who did was Jeffrey Harwood, who teaches world geography to sixth-grad- ers. He would screen “Romero” and invite Arène to bear witness to history. “She was very modest,” Harwood said. “The boys were spellbound.” Arène died of cancer in August.


She was 57. In both San Salvador and Washington, Masses were said in her memory.


David Montgomery is a Washington Post staff writer. He can be reached at montgomery@washpost.com.


                     


                                                               


         


  


        


       





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