By BASSEM MROUE and FAY ABUELGASIM
BEIRUT (AP) – Emmanuelle Khnaisser had been in labor all day and now it was in the final stages. Her baby – her first – was the icing on the cake.
Five floors down, Jessica Bezdjian was just coming through the entrance to St. George Hospital in Beirut. She was an hour early for her 12-hour shift as a nurse in the mental hospital.
Everything exploded.
Windows burst in no time in every room on every floor. Doors flew off their hinges, ceilings collapsed, and appliances toppled. A wave of dust and powdered glass surged through the stations and halls. In the darkness and chaos came the screams of bloodied patients, doctors and nurses.
St. George is one of the most prestigious and oldest medical centers in Lebanon and overlooks the Mediterranean coast about 900 meters (yards) from the port of Beirut. On that day a year ago, one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history exploded hundreds of tons of ammonium nitrate improperly stored in a warehouse in a port.
The August 4, 2020 explosion ripped through the Lebanese capital at 6:07 p.m., devastating entire neighborhoods and killing at least 214 people, including 22 in St. George Hospital.
A year later, every moment of that day stays in the minds of those who lived through it. Many are still struggling with the physical and psychological trauma. Some grapple with the inexplicable loss of a loved one, some try to understand what it means to have survived.
“It was the happiest moment of my life and the ugliest at the same time,” said Edmond Khnaisser, Emmanuelle’s husband.
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Emmanuelles water broke around 5 a.m. that morning. She went into labor two weeks early. She and Edmond rushed to the hospital and were admitted to a room on the fifth floor.
Emmanuelle, a 29-year-old lawyer, soon joined her parents and sister, as well as her husband’s mother and sister.
Together they waited for Baby George – as they already knew they would name him – to be born.
On the northern outskirts of Beirut, Chouchan Yeghiyan woke her youngest daughter Jessica at 4 p.m. to get ready. Jessica usually slept most of the day since she was on night shifts in St. George. The 22 year old loved her job and saved money to do a master’s.
She ate and showered. When her older sister Rosaline got home around 5:30 pm, Jessica went downstairs and took the car.
She waved to her father, George Bezdjian, who was standing on the balcony as she drove off.
“I wish I hadn’t woken her that day,” her mother said, tears streaming down her face.
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At around 5:45 p.m., the baby’s head was visible. Emmanuelle was wheeled into the operating room. Just as Edmond asked if he could intervene, the explosion struck.
Ceiling tiles and window frames collapsed on Emmanuelle, and glass spilled over her from the waist down. Her entire bed was torn out of position nearly a yard. One doctor was thrown under the bed, another was hit by rubble. Their blue and white uniforms were splattered with blood. The machine that registered George’s heartbeat broke.
“I was in shock. We had no idea what had happened, ”said Emmanuelle.
Videos from Edmond’s cell phone document the panic. In one video you can hear him scream, “Where is my wife? Stay where you are. Oh, Virgin Mary. ”
He was bleeding from a nasty cut on his leg, freed Emmanuelle from the debris and began to remove the glass from her body.
The baby had pushed back into her and the birth had to start over. Doctors moved her bed to the emergency exit corridor, where there was less damage.
She was disoriented and didn’t know if her baby was still alive. A doctor took out a monitor and placed it on her stomach. After a few tense moments, they heard his heartbeat.
“I felt like there was a reason I should live for. I have to do everything I can because I have a great responsibility for George to come into this life, ”Emmanuelle recalled. She thought of her parents, her husband’s parents, and “I gathered all my strength and removed all negative thoughts and concentrated.”
As she pressed, Emmanuelle could hear people crying and hear the ambulance sirens wail. Disturbed people hurried past her into the emergency exit and out again, looking for their loved ones. When the evening got dark, the doctors continued the delivery in the light of their cell phones.
Edmond ran out briefly to take care of his mother, who had a broken rib, and Emmanuelle’s father, who had a head injury.
When he returned, the doctor pulled George out with tweezers. At 7:18 p.m., the little boy with dark brown hair appeared 71 minutes after the explosion.
“When George was born I didn’t think he was crying. I didn’t believe my son would be born, ”said Emmanuelle, holding back her tears.
“When they put him on my chest, I felt very guilty and told him … ‘I’m sorry, my life, that you had to be born this way.’”
In one of Edmond’s videos, a nurse can be heard showing Emmanuelle a crying baby George. “He’s so beautiful,” says the nurse.
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When Jessica comes to work, she usually sends her mom emojis with kisses or hearts. At 6:05 p.m. that day, she sent an angel emoji. Two minutes later came the terrible bang, which was deafening even in her house four miles from the port.
When they saw the news about the extent of the explosion, Yeghiyan started screaming, “I feel something in my heart. Maybe the girl died. ”
Her husband and eldest daughter rushed out of the house and headed for St. George, while Yeghiyan stayed behind, desperately trying to call Jessica. Then she knocked on the neighbor’s door and asked him to take her to the hospital. When they hit the traffic, Yeghiyan jumped out of the car and stopped a man on a motorcycle. She climbed onto her back and he snaked through the jammed vehicles to St. George.
The father and daughter got there first. They were told Jessica was in the emergency room. They assumed she was helping the wounded.
You recognized them by their shoes. She was lying on the emergency room floor with doctors ventilating her and pressing her chest.
Bezdjian saw the gash on his daughter’s neck and her blood-soaked bag on the floor beside her.
“I took off my daughter’s shoes and started kissing her feet,” he recalled in a trembling voice. “I asked God, ‘I’ll be 60 in nine days. Breathe and give it to her.’”
Yeghiyan arrived and saw her daughter’s body. She passed out.
Jessica succumbed to her wounds around the same time that George was born.
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St. George Hospital was in a state of crisis. The damage was too great from top to bottom. It had to close – for the first time since it was founded in 1878. The stunned staff evacuated patients and carried them down the stairs on plastic chairs or sheets. Patients stood outside on the sidewalk while medical staff treated seriously injured people in the open air of a main courtyard.
At the same time, ambulances with wounded people from all over the city rushed in. Dr. Alexandre Nehme, the hospital’s chief physician, remembers how he had to tell them: “We no longer exist.”
Back on the 5th floor, Edmond held his son for fear of losing him in the midst of the chaos. Doctors told the couple that they would have to take George to another hospital within four hours.
Emmanuelle was carried down the stairs in a chair while Edmond called each WhatsApp group on his phone and asked who was closest to pick them up. They walked a block through rubble and broken glass until his brother-in-law waited in his badly damaged car.
They drove about 8 kilometers (5 miles) north of downtown Beirut and reached a hospital. It was only after the admission that they discovered that the infusion needle in Emmanuelle’s arm had broken and the epidural was still in her back.
They spent a week in the hospital while Emmanuelle was treated for an infection. Then they finally brought their baby home.
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Jessica’s family headed home just before midnight on August 4th. The next day the hospital called. They asked Bezdjian to pick up his daughter’s body because there was no electricity in the morgue.
They waited four days for relatives from abroad to come to hold the funeral. It had the trappings of a wedding, as is sometimes the case in Lebanon for young dying people. The mourners are dressed in white. The Armenian Catholic priest said a prayer that was used at weddings.
“I thank God that our daughter died in one piece and that we were able to bury her,” said Bezdjian in her apartment in the suburbs in northern Beirut, where several photos of Jessica are hanging. Others had to bury parts of the bodies of their loved ones.
Three days after the funeral, the family took Jessica’s dog, Foxy, a Pomeranian, to the cemetery where she was buried. They let go of the dog and watched from a distance as it ran from grave to grave, then jumped on Jessica’s and began to howl.
Then, in November, on Jessica’s 23rd birthday, the family went to the cemetery and celebrated the occasion next to their grave.
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The other day Emmanuelle and Edmond were sitting in their apartment in Beirut and watching George play in his room.
You will celebrate his first birthday a few days after August 4th, out of respect for the many people who lost their lives or were injured that day a year ago.
Edmond, a dual Lebanese-Canadian citizen who was born in Edmonton, Alberta, said the couple currently have no plans to leave despite the extreme hardship in Lebanon. They hope to eventually give George a brother or sister.
Emmanuelle said she was told that babies know everything that is going on around them. One day, she said, she would tell George about his birth in the explosion.
“I will tell him that his birth was a ray of hope in all the darkness.”
