Two columns and a fragment of marble from the Castle of the Materity of Elne

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Elisabeth Eidenbenz (1913–2011) was a Swiss schoolteacher who in 1938 volunteered with the Ayuda Suiza aid association during the Spanish Civil War. The following year, she founded a maternity home in Brouilla and then another in Elne for women from internment camps in the Roussillon region of southern France. She learned obstetric care on the job. The Elne Maternity Home, housed in a disused chateau near Perpignan, was the birthplace of children of at least 22 different nationalities. In 1942, the home became associated with the children’s aid programme of the Swiss Red Cross. Eidenbenz and her colleagues saved the lives of many Jewish children during the Second World War by altering their identifying information. One of those children, Guy Eckstein, born on 10 October 1941, saved two railing columns from the Elne home, and donated them to the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum in 2022.