- More than 35,000 people have died after an earthquake rocked Turkey and parts of Syria.
- The 7.8 magnitude tremor has left more than 500 children without surviving parents in Turkey.
- Only 76 of the children had been returned to other family members.
Serkan Tatoglu is haunted by the question his six-year-old son has kept asking him since his house collapsed in last week’s earthquake in Turkey.
“We are going to die?” she wonders herself, as she watches scenes reminiscent of an apocalyptic movie set.
Coffins line the roads and ambulance sirens wail 24 hours a day.
Walking through the rubble of collapsed buildings, the children watch as rescuers lift body bags from the rotting-smelling rubble.
Tatoglu helped his four children, ranging in age from six to 15, escape their home after the first 7.8-magnitude tremor struck southeastern Turkey and parts of Syria before dawn on February 6.
His building collapsed in one of nearly 3,000 aftershocks. More than 35,000 have died across the region and the death toll is likely to keep rising for days.
Tatoglu lost almost a dozen relatives.
But the 41-year-old knows he has to stand his ground in the face of his excruciating pain.
Tatoglu’s first job is to protect his children from the horrors that keep playing in their heads as they await aftershocks in a tent city near the epicenter of the quake in southern Kahramanmaras.
“The youngest, traumatized by the aftershocks, keeps asking: ‘Dad, are we going to die?'” Tatoglu said.
“Keep asking about our relatives. I don’t show them their dead bodies. My wife and I hug them and tell them ‘everything is fine’.”
Psychologist Sueda Deveci from the volunteer organization Doctors Worldwide Turkey said that adults need as much emotional support as children after such a tragedy.
She said older generations were quicker to internalize the deep scale of how much their lives have changed and how much they’ve lost.
“A mother told me, ‘Everyone tells me to be strong, but I can’t do anything. I can’t take care of my children, I can’t eat,'” Deveci said while working in the tent city.
Deveci is gaining a better understanding of what the children are feeling from what they draw while spending time in the cold.
“I don’t talk to them much about the earthquake. We are drawing. We will see how much is reflected in their drawings,” he said.
Syrian children eat at a makeshift shelter for the homeless near the rebel-held town of Jindayris on February 9, 2023, two days after a deadly earthquake struck Turkey and Syria. Rami said / AFP
For now, his art is mostly normal.
Child rights expert Esin Koman said this is because children adapt to their environment faster than adults.
But he added that the destruction of existing social support networks by the earthquake left them dangerously exposed to long-term trauma.
“Some children have lost their families. Now there is no one to give them mental support,” Koman said.
Psychologist Cihan Celik posted an exchange on Twitter that he had with a paramedic involved in rescue work.
The paramedic told Celik that the children pulled from the rubble almost immediately asked about their missing parents.
“Injured children ask: ‘Where is my mom, where is my dad? Are they kidnapping me?’” the paramedic recalled.
Turkey’s Vice President Fuat Oktay said 574 children rescued from collapsed buildings were found with no surviving parents.
Only 76 had been returned to other family members.
A volunteer psychologist who works at a children’s support center in Hatay province, where the level of destruction was among the worst in Turkey, said many parents were desperately searching for the missing children.
Children eat bread while sitting under a canopy in the southeastern Turkish city of Kahramanmaras on February 8, 2023, two days after a strong earthquake hit the region. Search teams continued to pull survivors on February 8 from the rubble of the earthquake that killed more than 11,200 people in Turkey and Syria, even as the window for rescues was narrowing. For two days and nights since the 7.8-magnitude quake, thousands of searchers have worked in freezing temperatures to find those still alive beneath collapsed buildings on both sides of the border. OZAN KOSE / AFP
“We received a barrage of calls about missing children,” Hatice Goz said by phone from Hatay province.
“But if the child still can’t speak, the family can’t find it.”
Selma Karaaslan is doing everything she can to keep her two grandchildren safe.
The 52-year-old has been living with them in a car parked along one of Kahramanmaras’ rubble-strewn roads since the quake struck.
Karaaslan tries to talk to them about anything but the earthquake. She believes that they are much less likely to have disturbing memories of the disaster if you fill their heads with happy thoughts.
But the questions keep coming.
“Grandma, will there be another earthquake?” the six-year-old demanded at one point.
