Migrants, the tragedy of Esther and his child who died of thirst: “I feared they forced me to throw him into the sea”

It was curled up at the bottom of the rubber boat that transported about sixty migrants. He had the skin arsa, he didn’t speak, he didn’t ask for help. He had tightened his baby to his chest, a motionless for hours now. “His heart no longer beat, I continued to tighten him in his arms, to cradle him, I was afraid that they would make him throw it into the sea». Republic He reported the words of Esther (the name is fantasy) when, finally rescued, he found the strength to speak.

She and her husband, together with another Ghanaian couple, lived the horror that often consumes himself from the eyes of the world: their children, two 3 and 4 -year -old children, are Deaths from dehydration during a crossing desperate from Libya to Europe. A rubber dinghy from Zawia on Tuesday night, who at some point stopped in nothing of the Mediterranean.

“We told us that we would arrive in a day and a half,” says the father of one of the children. “After twenty -four hours the engine failed, we remained drifting. We tried to cover our son from the sun, but it was too hot, and The water was finishing. That little we had given to himin small sips. He cried constantly. Then he stopped, and he no longer moved ».

The first child stopped reacting on Friday afternoon. The other died shortly after. The mothers did not know each other, but they began to scream together, to implore the travel companions for a single drop of water.

The bodies of the children remained in the arms of the mothers for almost a whole day. The women kept them tight, fearing that someone, as already happened in other shipwrecks, asked them to throw them in the waves. Saturday afternoon, when the ship arrived Nadir of the German NGO Resqship to help them, The bodies of the two children were the first to be recovered. A chain of hands brought them on board.

The volunteers found themselves in front of a heartbreaking scene. “We had never seen many people in these conditions,” they say from the Nadir. “Many were in a state of seminconsciousness.” Among them too A boy, just more than twenty years old, who died in the commander’s arms. “We couldn’t do anything for him. Children who die of thirst are an unforgivable political failure ».

When Esther landed in Lampedusa aboard a coastal guard patrol boat, it was alone. The husband and the other survivors remained on the ship. She didn’t speak. The gaze was fixed, absent. Only the next day he was able to embrace his partner in the reception center, where they were entrusted to the psychologists of the Red Cross.

The journey, the survivors tell, cost $ 1500 each. Sixty migrants on an inflatable boat inflated to the limit, without any protection from the sun. Thirteen women sitting in the center, including the two mothers. Just a few bottle of water and nothing to eat. Then the breakdown, the drift, the thirst. Some began to have hallucinations, one launched themselves into the sea in an attempt to find relief from the heat. Others passed out in turn, exhausted. The children, more fragile than everyone, did not make it.