No one from Izidor’s Cămin Spital was ever taken there, no matter how sick, not even if they were dying. Real children, children wearing shoes and coats, children holding their parents’ hands, came and went from that hospital. Through bare branches in winter, Izidor got a look at another hospital that sat right in front of his own and concealed it from the street. In boyhood, he stood there often, gazing down on an empty mud yard enclosed by a barbed-wire fence. The windows on Izidor’s third-floor ward had been fitted with prison bars.
It stood mournfully aloof from the cobblestone streets and sparkling river of the town where Elie Wiesel had been born, in 1928, and enjoyed a happy childhood before the Nazi deportations. The cement fortress emitted no sounds of children playing, though as many as 500 lived inside at one time. At 3, he was deemed “deficient” and transferred across town to a Cămin Spital Pentru Copii Deficienţi, a Home Hospital for Irrecoverable Children. Without proper care or physical therapy, the baby’s leg muscles wasted.
Well past the age when children in the outside world began tasting solid food and then feeding themselves, he and his age-mates remained on their backs, sucking from bottles with widened openings to allow the passage of a watery gruel. In his hospital, in the Southern Carpathian mountain town of Sighetu Marmaţiei, Izidor would have been fed by a bottle stuck into his mouth and propped against the bars of a crib. * You see the small faces trying to fathom what’s happening as their heads whip by during the wrapping maneuvers. In films of the period documenting orphan care, you see nurses like assembly-line workers swaddling newborns out of a seemingly endless supply with muscled arms and casual indifference, they sling each one onto a square of cloth, expertly knot it into a tidy package, and stick it at the end of a row of silent, worried-looking babies. To hear more feature stories, get the Audm iPhone app.
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