His photo made the front page of dozens of newspapers around the world, from Times au Daily TelegraphPassing by The Republic in Italy and Clarin in Argentina, because she was born at the time of the earthquake, she was born on the freezing night of February 6, a little cry of life in the midst of the horror. In the photo, she looks peaceful, her eyes closed, lying on her side in an incubator, an IV on her wrist. And then looking more closely, we see scratches, especially bruises, and we understand that she is coming back from hell.
Rescuers found her on Tuesday 150 km from the earthquake’s epicenter in Jandairis, Syria, under the rubble of a five-storey building as her uncle was lifting rubble to find survivors. His uncle Khalil, who at this time doesn’t know he has a new niece. This Tuesday morning, he is looking for his sister, his brother-in-law, their four children. No one answers, the lifeless bodies of both parents are located, extricated, and then cries ring out, the cries of a baby whom the rescue team quickly finds in the tangle of concrete, right next to his mother who probably gave birth to her when the building had just collapsed. The delivery, specifies her uncle, was planned for the following day.
VIDEO: Extended family members pull a newborn baby alive from the rubble of a home in northern Syria, after finding her still tied by her umbilical cord to her mother, who died in Monday’s massive 7.8-magnitude earthquake that killed thousands. pic.twitter.com/CGO43JsJ8x
— AFP News Agency (@AFP) February 8, 2023
Very quickly, he cuts the cord, swaddles it in a blanket and entrusts it to his cousin who goes off to the hospital. It is 0°C, she is in a state of hypothermia but reactive, the doctors give her a mixture of calcium and sugars, weigh her, 3.1 kg, then place her in an incubator before the photographers immortalize her, bruised but peaceful, orphaned but alive, “the miracle baby” as she is nicknamed everywhere, a symbol of resilience, of life despite the macabre and endless count of those who have left.
What this photo says is that there are still lives to be saved. Wednesday, a one year old baby was found in the rubble of a building in Turkey, 53 hours after the earthquake. Still in Turkey, it is a mother and her two-year-old daughter who came out alive. Survivors whose stories do not erase the horror of course, but who remind us, when we count and recount the dead, that there are also those who remain, who have nothing left, and that it is of them that we will have to think, like the baby in the photo, a miracle little girl who is waiting for much more than to receive her first name.