We’re definitely running from death right now. In hospices, patients are taken out (s.s.: to accommodate the victims). It is difficult to find bread and clean water. All shops are closed.”

These are the first words of 36-year-old Ibrahim Polat, a resident of wild Enceladus. Gaziantepwho spoke to “K” from a safe temporary shelter he had found in a nearby village.

“Now we are in the village (in Nizip, outside of Gaziantep). So we don’t know what to do. Most of the villages were leveled from Islahiye and Nurdaga (sb: west of Gaziantep). We jumped out of bed in the middle of the night and constantly swayed from side to side, it did not stop. Basically, it’s not over yet, we’re still rocking. Now the children are in their arms, I pray to God that the building does not collapse. I even cry now as I write. Around noon there was another strong earthquake. Half an hour ago, another building collapsed in Antep. We are experiencing incredible things,” he adds.

“Like the plane crashed.” “Like a ship tossed by the waves.” “Like a meteor hitting the ground.” These are descriptions of people from Gaziantep who managed to survive a deadly earthquake that woke up Turkey shortly after 3 am and left thousands of dead and wounded in its wake. And even more shocked, desperate, scared.

Yusuf Ertugrul describes the moment of the incident: “We were all woken up by a loud noise and saw cabinets open and close on their own, as well as doors and windows. Many people were left in shock from this event and the severity of the earthquake, unable to do anything,” he tells us.

“Some jumped out of windows from balconies because they were on the ground floor, but others were not so lucky and were trapped under the apartments they had been working to buy all their lives,” says Yusuf Ertugrul.