LiberPress Association Award 2012

DAME is the acronym for Descendants et Amis de la Maternité d’Elne, created in 2006, and its objectives include bringing together the children of the Maternity Hospital in Elne, their descendants and the friends of the hospital, gathering testimonies and retrieving their personal histories, supporting Elne’s disadvantaged children and telling the world the exemplary story of the Maternity in Elne, an institution founded in 1939 by Swiss nurse and teacher Elisabeth Eidenbenz, where 400 children of Republican mothers fleeing from the Spanish Civil War and interned in concentration camps were born, and also 200 children of Jewish women persecuted by the Nazis during World War II.

The Maternity Hospital was closed by the Gestapo in 1944. Up to then Elisabeth Eidenbenz had assisted with the birth of a total of 597 babies (an average of twenty per month), since the conditions in the concentration camps made the survival of a baby practically impossible and giving birth posed a serious danger for the mothers.

Elizabeth Eidenbenz set up the Maternity Hospital in an abandoned mansion in Elne: the castle of Bardou. The first child was born on 7 December 1939. Afterwards, the castle was abandoned, and it was thanks to François Charpentier, who bought the building and reconstructed it, Nicolás García, the communist mayor of Elne, and many other people who supported the project that the Maternity could be restored. Charpentier, its director, has never accepted the mistreatment suffered by the refugees fleeing from Spain, who were treated as bandits and reds.