Earthquake survivor recounts psychological ‘aftershocks’

I instinctively opened the door, checking our escape route from the building. The ground was swaying under my feet, and the terrifying sounds multiplied.

Outside, I saw stones and blocks of snow falling from our building and those nearby. I quickly returned to the hall. The bulges under the wallpaper had multiplied, and I heard the cracking of the cement underneath.

It felt like a real horror movie.

I am not sure now if I was afraid or if I swallowed my fear and suppressed it. Maybe I was numb, and my mind was working slowly.

Outside, I saw stones and blocks of snow falling from our building and those nearby. I heard the cracking of the cement underneath the walls. It felt like a real horror movie. I am not sure now if I was afraid or if I swallowed my fear and suppressed it. Maybe I was numb.

I pulled my wife, who was huddled on the sofa with her arms over her head, and we moved towards the decorative iron arch at the entrance to the parlour.

As the house swayed with us still inside, a scene from the horror movie 'The Shining' – directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Robert De Niro – flashed through my head.

Strangely composed

In my job, I received training courses in helping people during disasters, but I always thought that if a disaster occurred, I would forget everything and need someone to help and save me.

This did not happen. I instinctively acted with composure and told my wife to wear her thickest clothes. I might have heard her scream in the bedroom before she came out in her snowsuit. In turn, I put on thick clothes, carried Pixel, our dog, and stood at the house's open door.

At that time, I felt the shaking subsiding. Suddenly the door to our neighbour's apartment opened, and I saw her at the door with her six children behind her. I don't know how I said this in Turkish, but I shouted, asking them not to leave their house because small cement blocks were falling from the top of the stairs.

I do not know what the woman and her children did after that.

I thought going out into the open was dangerous, as the temperature before dawn was 13 degrees below zero, which, in addition to the terror we were experiencing, would freeze our bodies.

When the building's swaying stopped, I thought about taking our car, parked in the underground garage, and leaving before the aftershock. I told my wife we would run to the garage, and she would drive the car because she was a better driver than me.

I told her she might need to slam into the garage door if it didn't open electronically. I threw Pixel in the car trunk and sat next to my wife, who drove towards the garage door, which the janitor had opened electronically, and rushed us towards a vast space away from the buildings.

I learned later that we did not feel the aftershock.

Cell phone, fuel, and biscuits

I stood momentarily outside our car, the only one parked in the empty lot, smoking a cigarette and staring in all directions. I saw the lights of the nearby gas station and told my wife to drive there.

I remember now – or imagine – that the universe around us was silent and numb. The station workers filled our car's tank with gas, then I entered the station's convenience store, emptied a shelf filled with boxes of biscuits into the shopping cart, paid for it, threw it in the backseat of the car, and went back to the big empty lot.

We didn't turn off the engine because we had to keep the heat on. We received text messages from the Turkish Disaster Authority warning those who left their homes not to return to them.

We did not know the extent of what had happened, so we stayed in the car.

The phone didn't stop ringing. We called our friends and family and followed up on the data of the Afet ve Acil Durum Yönetimi Başkanlığı- AFAD (Disaster and Management Authority).

By six in the morning, the phone had already absorbed our tension and fear. Some friends and neighbours drove into the empty clearing because the roads out of Gaziantep were blocked. There were five of us with a little girl in our car, so we lit a fire on the side of the clearing.

The number of people who had not left the city to go to their towns and villages, as they usually do during the weekend, was small.

A building collapses into rubble

We drove around the city streets in our car. We stopped away from a 10-storey building with a big crack in the middle from bottom to top and saw men, women, and children standing on the balconies waving pieces of cloth.

There were a few cars on the streets with Turkish flags on and cranes trying to remove the rubble of a building not far from the cracked one. We learned that the stairs of that building had fallen on the second or third floors, and the elevator was broken.

It was close to seven o'clock in the morning when the earth shook us again with a tremor stronger than the first one that happened at 3:30am.

What a horror scene.

The cracked building crumbled into rubble, and the fluttering laundry on the balconies completely disappeared. The sound of collapse and dust swallowed up our screams, and our instincts made us run and scatter in different directions in a doomsday panic.

Silent panic suffocated us, and our hands and feet were shaking, our faces were pale, and our eyes were stunned as we drove our car away to the clearing.

It was close to 7am when the earth shook us again with a tremor stronger than the first one. The sound of collapse and dust swallowed up our screams, and our instincts made us run and scatter in different directions in a doomsday panic.

Our hands and feet were shaking, our faces were pale, and our eyes were stunned as we drove our car away to the clearing.

Until that building collapsed, I had not understood or imagined the magnitude of the disaster or how horrifying it was: it took only a minute for the world to turn into rubble with people trapped underneath. 

Trapped in an open-air prison

In the evening at sunset, we could eat some biscuits. The phone helped us waste a little time as we got in and out of cars in that space and stood around the blazing fire.

The phone was broadcasting data and pictures: the Gaziantep-Adana Highway was cracked, a large bridge over a valley between two mountains collapsed and moving from one city to another was impossible.

The city of Malatya was flattened, and villages, towns, buildings, and entire families completely vanished. The buildings that were cracked by the first quake collapsed in the second.

There were pictures of massive destruction in Antakya. The aftershocks did not stop, so we slept a little in our cars and had nightmares. The number of tremors reached 1,200 in the first two days.

Sometimes we would suddenly cry. We were in an open-air prison, so we organised our needs just like prisoners would do: when to charge our phones, go to the bathroom, and force ourselves to eat.

The shelves of grocery stores were emptying quick.

When I entered our house to fetch water, I felt like a stranger returning to his strange abode after years of absence. On the third day, we began thinking about a way out of the city.

We received news of friends who died under the rubble and others who were missing. There was also news about factories on the city's outskirts that collapsed over the heads of the Syrian workers who slept in them.

The ancient castle of Gaziantep, which had been in the restoration process, also collapsed.

We left our open prison on the fifth day to go to Adana. Instead of two hours in the car, we spent five and a half hours on the cracked road amid crowds of aid convoys.

The city of Osmaniya completely disappeared along with the hill it was built on. We passed through many towns and cities that had become rubble with residents trapped underneath them.

The faces of the living in the cars and on the roads were pale, and their eyes looked empty as they stared into space.

Psychological aftershocks

When we reached safety at Adana Airport, sudden nightmarish terror gripped me. I started screaming hysterically and violently at trivial things and couldn't stop myself.

I had pain in my chest, feet, shoulders, and joints. I couldn't focus on anything and didn't know what to do. The night we spent at Adana Airport waiting to depart was more challenging than the first night of the earthquake.

When we reached safety, sudden nightmarish terror gripped me. I started screaming hysterically and violently at trivial things. I had pain in my chest, feet, shoulders, and joints. I still find myself trembling for no reason.

I still find myself trembling for no reason, and I need psychological treatment.

I can't stay in Beirut, so I'm going back to Adana, and from there, I'll return to my work in Gaziantep. I'll keep myself busy there, which could be my only treatment.

The rise of Gaziantep

Bezzi visited Gaziantep for the first time in 2011 as part of a campaign to train Syrian journalists at the beginning of the Syrian revolution against Bashar al-Assad's regime.

At that time, he noticed that in that Turkish city, which was close to the Syrian border, shops, cafes, and restaurants closed their doors at 8:00 p.m. However, before the devastating earthquake hit it on 6 February, it had turned into a thriving city full of broad industrial, commercial, and service activities where life did not stop until midnight.

In the last 10 years, Gaziantep has hosted the headquarters of most NGOs tasked with alleviating the Syrian crisis. It was where most of the Syrian organisations were established. And it witnessed significant growth in urbanisation and construction. A new airport was even built there.

It competed with the city of Adana, near Mersin, the sea tourist gate to the Mediterranean in southeastern Turkey.

Bezzi began his career in activism in Beirut. He was one of the founders of the You Stink campaign, protesting against the accumulation of waste and the failure of the Lebanese authorities to collect and treat it in 2015.

He remained active in international organisations and Lebanese civil society associations until 2018 when he left to work in tourism. He chose Istanbul to establish a small tourism company because over 800 Lebanese tourists used to visit Turkey annually before Lebanon collapsed and went bankrupt.

Soon, the Corona pandemic ended his work in Istanbul, so he returned to Beirut penniless and participated in the "revolution" of 17 October 2019, until the port bombing displaced him to Gaziantep, where he started working in the humanitarian field.