The  maternity of Elna in civil war

 

The maternity of Elna it was a institution humanitarian dedicated to helping women exiles of civil war Spanish, this allowed to go down the young mortality. Placed in the Roussillon (Catalonia North), it was founded in November, 1939 by the Swiss Elisabeth Eidenbenz. It is there were born approximately 600 children, children of refugees of the Spanish Civil war who were hospitalized in the fields near to Elna.

 

The Bardou castle

In febuary of 1900, Eugène Bardou, industrality and politician of Perpiñán, buys Philippe de Manoel of Nogaret, widower of Thérèse de Lazerne, a park of 8 hectares in Elna, adjacent to Lazerne's farmhouse Of Below.

Into this parck, Eugène Bardou is makes build between 1900 and 1902 a great country house. It will remain in the memory of the people as the Castle " of in Bardou ", whereas the family baptizes her. Bought in 1997 by François Charpentier, main glazier, and his wife, the building is reborn little by little. His rehabilitation is done respecting the spirit of origin, the totality of the building could not have been returned. The renaissance of the Castle of with Bardou coincides with the discovery of the history of the maternity as if the invading ivies had concealed hitherto the collective memory. From the summer of 2005, the building is a property of Elna's municipality.

 

Elisabeth Eidenbez

 

The "Seliora Isabel", call like that for the Spanish mothers of the Maternity, is born in Wila to Zúrich's canton 12juin 1913. It forms a part of the youngest children of a large family of which the father is a shepherd. Multiple collaborators of the Help Switzerland to the Children share the same familiar origin and of Protestant education.

Elisabeth, nanny, teaches for three years. It is in the moment of a stay of one year in Denmark in a school for adult teachers that the proposition of going away to Spain becomes to him by the Civil International Service. He agrees the time of the school vacations. It will not return. She is here in Madrid in the republican Camp, to distributing food in the canteens for the major persons (placed canteens sometimes closely together of the front), in Valencia where the evacuated children find refuge in the big houses left of the Spanish Franco supporters. His free time, it spends it in trips and offers us across his photographies the only testimony of Spain during the civil war.

His first childbirth happens fortuitously one day where the midwife of Elna's Maternity has eczema on the hands. Elisabeth helped a women's quarantine to give birth. It is she that turns the honor of birth dealing with 300, and they were twin.

His personality expresses also across the climate of peace and the warm environment that it manages to restore to the maternity in period of war.