Comment on this story
comment
COPIAGUE, NY — Zehra Karaoglu can’t stop repeating the day a month ago on Monday when she learned about the earthquakes in Turkey.
“Every day the pain, not just for one person [but] five,” she said. “All my life my heart has been broken into five pieces.”
She was 5,500 miles away on Long Island on February 6, making helpless calls to relatives that went unanswered. She asked for help on social media and scoured the internet for clues as to whether her family members were still alive in the southern city of Kahramanmaras.
After several hours, Karaoglu finally got in touch with her mother. But no one had heard of Karaoglu’s brother Mustafa.
The family home had collapsed after the 7.8 magnitude quake, they soon discovered, and Mustafa, his wife and their three boys were trapped under the rubble.
Her mother spent the next seven days amidst the rubble, pacing from the front of the building to the back, desperate for any sign of life from her son, daughter-in-law, or three grandchildren.
“She said [for] Nothing happened for four days,” Karaoglu said. “Four days, no help, nobody came.”
While the family waited for rescuers, Karaoglu heard stories from those on the ground.
A man named Mustafa called for help, according to witnesses, saying his legs were trapped under a block of cement. There was no way of knowing if it was her brother; There were three men by that name in the building. But when workers finally found her brother’s body, his legs were broken.
“Someone told me there was a child’s voice” coming from the fifth floor where her nephews lived, Karaoglu said. “They screamed, they cried under the rubble.”
Karaoglu and her husband Kerim accuse the Turkish government of not having acted more quickly.
“The important thing is that on the first day the response was so slow,” he said. “My mother tried to go to City Hall and get help. We’ve been trying to organize everyone around Kahramanmaras to get help, cranes. It just didn’t happen.”
On the fourth day, the bodies of Mustafa’s wife and two older sons were recovered. Karaoglu’s mother passed out as they were being pulled from the building. Her 8-year-old grandson, Emir Yigit, was found in his mother’s arms.
“Maybe Emir Yigit would live now if they find her quickly,” Karaoglu said.
Only on the seventh day were Mustafa and his youngest son, just 3 years old, healed.
The little boy had died just ten hours earlier, the family was told.