view | The Turkey earthquake and the pain it left behind

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The sad-eyed girl must have been around 10 or 12 years old. She barely moves as she stares at the camera phone. Whenever she moves, her movements are sluggish and slow. The man filming the video spots her and exclaims in amazed delight.

“Someone is here! There is someone here!”

But there is no one around, only leaden light and the silence of falling snow. They are somewhere in southeastern Turkey, an area that has just been devastated by two earthquakes of magnitude 7.8 and 7.5.

The man approaches the girl, whose body has been suspended from her chest by crumbling concrete. It is clear that they do not know each other.

“are you thirsty?” Asked.

The girl replied: “I’m cold.” “My brother is here too.”

“Can you move?”

The girl weakly replied: “No.” Even as her voice faded, she was finally able to make herself heard. But there is no hope in her eyes. It’s been half a day since the first earthquake struck at 4 am. Soon it will be evening again.

“Can you move your legs?”

“Very difficult,” the girl says in a soft, hard-to-understand voice. There was a fresh expression on her face now, as if she was hiding something or as if she was embarrassed by some personal shortcoming.

The snow that fell intermittently during the night and in the morning slowly pulls a blanket over the earthquake suffering, the dead and dying, the ruins of two- to three-story houses and 15-16-story buildings that collapsed within a few seconds in the night.

We can sense that the guy filming on his phone isn’t sure what to do. On his own, he couldn’t get the girl out of that terrifyingly heavy, narrow pile of concrete. They both shut up.

The girl’s eyes start to glow. Her exhaustion and pain are written on her face.

“You stay here. I’ll go get you some help. We’ll get you out of there.”

But the man looks uncertain. This earthquake-ravaged neighborhood was probably far from the city center. With all the streets and bridges destroyed, help has yet to come. It’s not likely to be here anytime soon.

Some of those who live here, who may have managed to survive their ramshackle houses into the dark, snowy night, must have gone elsewhere for refuge from the cold. But it is possible that apart from the girl and her brother, no one in her family has survived, and so there is no one to look for her.

“Do not go!” says the trapped child at the end.

“I must go, but I will be back!” says the man. “I will not forget you. I am going to get help.”

We could tell that the girl, who had spent more than half a day trapped here alone, was already preparing to die and had no strength left to object.

However, she again said “Don’t go!” Her voice was as faint as a whisper.

“I’ll go get you some help!” says the man, and though his voice gets louder this time, we can’t quite believe him.

This is where his phone recording ends. We don’t know if he was able to get help. It was one of the hundreds of desperate pleas and first-person accounts I watched that first day, and it was glued to my screen for hours. Like many others, the man who recorded the trapped little girl posted the video to Twitter directly and without further comment.

I was waiting for another video showing the rescue of the trapped girl, but it didn’t happen.

Getting help isn’t as easy as the guy with the cellphone thinks. According to data released by the state, nearly 7,000 buildings in the area have been damaged or destroyed. The earthquake also struck Syria. Just as the real number of victims is probably much higher than is being reported (the latest figures put the death toll now at more than 23,000), the actual number of collapsed buildings is also likely to be much higher. With roads closed and cell phones not working properly due to power outages and grid congestion, there is little information at all about what is happening in the smaller regional towns. On Twitter and on social media, we see posts that some villages have been completely destroyed. But is this true?

This is the largest earthquake to hit Turkey in more than 80 years. It’s the fourth major earthquake I’ve experienced, near or far, since I was a kid. After the 1999 Marmara earthquake, which killed more than 17,000 people, I went to Yalova, one of the towns devastated by that disaster. I wandered for hours among the concrete rubble, filled with guilt and responsibility, thinking I might at least help remove some of the rubble, only to return home without being able to help anyone at all. The amazing scene from that day has stayed with me, along with the frustration and sadness that I want to forget but have never been able to.

Now these photos are crowded with images that are both new and all too familiar. The feeling of helplessness is crushing.

With airports damaged and roads impassable, it took even media conglomerates hours to reach several major cities, as the earthquake turned into a spectacle of hell. Half a day after the disaster, they arrived in those snowy, rainy and windy streets only to find themselves facing millions of people angrily waiting for help. According to figures released by the Turkish state, 13.5 million people in the region were affected by the earthquake. According to the World Health Organization, up to 23 million people in Turkey and Syria may be affected.

The catastrophe reached truly terrible proportions, nine hours after the first earthquake of magnitude 7.8 occurred in the middle of the night, it was followed by an earthquake of magnitude 7.5 on the Richter scale. This second earthquake, with its epicenter about 60 miles from the first, forced millions of people who had been pushed out by aftershocks from the first to witness scenes of palpable terror. Crowds roamed the streets looking for help or food, sifting with their bare hands, brick by brick, through the rubble of multi-storey blocks turned to rubble or looking for a warm, covered place to take refuge. Now they began filming the devastation on their phones, crying “Oh my God, my God!” Within seconds, building after building collapsed like a house of cards, leaving only mountains of dust in its wake.

Many people posted these horrific horror images on social media without any caption, comment, or even a few words to accompany them. In doing so, they are sending two messages. The first is something that showed in their shock: the staggering, staggering scale of the disaster. The second is the feeling of abandonment and hopelessness that is felt throughout the country and is as horrific as the earthquake itself.

These horrific scenes at once created a poignant spirit of solidarity and mutual aid, rousing people’s instinct to participate, gather witnesses, leave a mark, and make their voices heard. In the middle of every rubble-strewn major city, anyone within reach of a reporter’s microphone seems to be shouting “Movie here, movie here, we need help, we need food, where is the government, where are the rescue teams?”

Aid has been sent, but trucks loaded with supplies are stuck for hours on busy roads hundreds of miles from affected areas. People who have lost their homes, families, loved ones, and everything they found find that no one is doing anything about the fires that are starting to rage in their cities. And so they block the path of any official car, policeman or civil servant they can find and start protesting. I have never seen our people so angry.

As the second day approaches evening, the sounds coming from the piles of rubble and concrete fade and people in the streets begin to get used to the terror. Crowds began to gather in front of trucks to distribute bread and food. But the anger, bitterness and hopeless feeling that they were taken aback were still not quenched.

The next day, I learned from social media posts that there were doctors who had taken it upon themselves to travel long distances to lend a hand in some of the major cities devastated by this earthquake, but there seemed to be no authority, no one in charge of directing their efforts upon arrival. To the people’s dismay, even some public hospitals collapsed.

Two days later, some help reached the major city centres. But for many people, it’s too little, too late.

Orhan Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006. His latest novel is Nights of the Plague. This article was translated by Ekin Oklab from Turkish.

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