Here’s what’s become of them.
Story by Melissa Fay Greene
For his first three years of life, Izidor lived at the hospital. The
dark-eyed, black-haired boy, born June 20, 1980, had been abandoned
when he was a few weeks old. The reason was obvious to anyone who
bothered to look: His right leg was a bit deformed. After a bout of
illness (probably polio), he had been tossed into a sea of abandoned
infants in the Socialist Republic of Romania.
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 papooses. The women
don’t coo or sing to the babies. You see the small faces trying to
fathom what’s happening as their heads whip by during the wrapping
maneuvers...............
Izidor was destined to spend the rest of his childhood in this building,
to exit the gates only at 18, at which time, if he were thoroughly
incapacitated, he’d be transferred to a home for old men; if he turned
out to be minimally functional, he’d be evicted to make his way on the
streets. Odds were high that he wouldn’t survive that long, that the boy
with the shriveled leg would die in childhood, malnourished, shivering,
unloved................
“I walked into an institution in Bucharest one afternoon, and there was a
small child standing there sobbing,” recalls Charles A. Nelson III, a
professor of pediatrics and neuroscience at Harvard Medical School and
Boston Children’s Hospital. “He was heartbroken and had wet his pants. I
asked, ‘What’s going on with that child?’ A worker said, ‘Well, his
mother abandoned him this morning and he’s been like that all day.’ That
was it. No one comforted the little boy or picked him up. That was my
introduction.”.............To Read More....
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