The wounded children in Adana City Hospital are too young to know how much they’ve lost.
I watched doctors in the intensive care unit bottle-feed an injured six-month-old girl whose parents can’t be found.
There are hundreds more cases of unidentified children whose parents are dead or untraceable.
The earthquake broke their homes and now it has taken away their names.
Dr Nursah Keskin grips the hand of the baby girl in intensive care – known only by the tag on her bed: “Anonymous”.
She has multiple fractures, a black eye and her face is badly bruised; but she turns and smiles at us.
“We know where she was found and how she got here. But we’re trying to find an address. The search is continuing,” says Dr Keskin, a paediatrician and deputy director at the hospital.
Many of these cases are children rescued from collapsed buildings in other regions. They were brought to Adana because the hospital is still standing.
Many other medical centres in the disaster zone have fallen or are damaged. Adana became a rescue hub.
In one transfer, newborn babies were rushed here from a maternity ward in a badly-hit hospital in the city of Iskenderun.
Turkish health officials say across the country’s disaster zone there are currently more than 260 wounded children who they have not been able to identify.
That figure may rise significantly as more areas are reached and the scale of homelessness fully emerges.
