For Mother's Day 2008 I have chosen the story of a great woman to show that no need to give birth to be and exercise as a Mother: giver of life and love.
This is the story about Elisabeth Eidenbenz, a Swiss teacher who saved 597 children between 1939 and 1944 during the Spanish Civil War in a motherhood in Elna, a small town near Perpignan.
It is not usual to find episodes with a happy ending in a warlike context, Elna's motherhood is one of those wonderful exceptions.
Elisabeth was a volunteer nurse within a Swiss non-governmental organization that with 25 years lived the harshness of the republican exodus to France: the misery, the poor living conditions and the vexatious treatment given by the Gallic authorities to the almost 500,000 refugees. She then decides to work for women and newborns.
Pregnant women gave birth directly in the sand of French beaches, without any help or privacy. And that was synonymous with death. Infant mortality in the French refugee camps of 1939 it was 95.7%.
Elisabeth's work was, therefore, totally countercurrent: in favor of life and dignity. Together with a group of pregnant women and several volunteer nurses like her, she set up an abandoned house in Elna.
They say that she was generous, discreet, that she didn't want to take center stage, enormously brave and that she never gave up. If the gendarmes came for a mother, she squared and shouted at them: "This is Switzerland!"
Motherhood became a oasis of peace, of mutual help and happiness in the midst of the horrors of war. And thanks to this, 597 children were born and survived. Finally that maternal center of Elna was closed by the Nazis.
This emotional story has been collected in the book "The Motherhood of Elna" by ARA books by the historian Assumpta Montellà that he was able to take it forward also fighting against the current, because in the university environment they considered this to be a minor story: "A woman who helped other women ... and little else."
Unfortunately, this is the concept that our society still has of motherhood, of solidarity between mothers and of everything that is governed far from the laws of the market and money.
In the book the story of motherhood is told, the personality of its director is revealed, the experiences of some of those mothers who have never forgotten, and their children, who know for them what happened and have returned to the place are collected of the facts to recall this story and understand.
In 2002, many of those babies, now grandparents, met more than 60 years later to thank this nonagenaria Elisabeth.
Manuel Huerga, director of the film Salvador, is going to take this emotional and exemplary story to the cinema with this title: "Elna's mothers".
To finish a reflection of the author of the book:
"We need many Eidenbenz to turn the course of our battered ship, but episodes like Elna's Maternity make us think that, in this life of ours, we still have hope".
