Let My Daughter Go

But for Alta Fixsler, a little girl lying in a windowless room inside the hospital, there’s been no summer.

Since she entered the world, Alta has only known the cold sterile walls of a hospital ward and the winter of intensive medical care. And as her family desperately fight for her survival, the British sky — so often grey and rainy — seems to cry for the fate of this child.

When little Alta was born to a chassidic family in Manchester, UK, two and a half years ago, she joined a growing list of British children who have become tragic household names due to their parents’ battle to keep them alive against the wishes of the local medical system.

Born with severe brain damage, Alta was initially declared brain-dead by doctors, who urged the parents to end their baby’s life. “They told us, ‘You’re both young — why suffer so long?’ ” recalls her father, Avraham Fixsler. “But I answered, ‘We love her as she is, and we won’t do anything to end her life earlier.’ ”