A 17-year-old Turkish boy from Adiyaman was separated from his family and trapped under the rubble of his building after the February 6 earthquake. Taha Erdem then recorded a farewell video on his cell phone. He was finally able to be rescued and reunited with his loved ones.
We mourn the deaths of more than 44,000 people following the earthquakes that hit Turkey and Syria on February 6, including 40,000 in the first, according to the report transmitted by the authorities this Saturday. A statistic that speaks of collective horror and captures just as many individual tragedies.
Taha Erdem’s story came very close to being one of them: it is ultimately one of a miracle. And if its trajectory moves Turkey so much, as the American agency Associated Press reports this Saturday, it is because the 17-year-old teenager, who believed his last hour had come and was then buried under the rubble, died his Torture filmed with his cellphone. He is rescued a few hours later.
A whole family surprises in the night
In their building in a working-class neighborhood of Adiyaman, very close to the epicenter of the earthquake, the earthquake surprised the Erdem family in the middle of the night: Taha then, but also his father Ali, his mother Zeliha , their little sister Semanur (13 years old ) and her little brother Ygit Cinar (9 years old).
After the four-story building collapses, Taha finds himself isolated under the rubble. Convinced that his people are no more and that he is destined to join them in death – as he confides in his video – he manages to grab his laptop to film his final moments. He’s hoping we’ll exhume his laptop with his body.
“There are many things I regret”
The young man says a prayer in Arabic, but above all describes the desperation of his situation.
“I think that’s the last video I’m going to shoot for you,” he says in particular.
Despite being wedged under stone and steel, it is still rattling from the earthquake’s aftershocks. “We’re still shaking (…), yes, it’s shaking. My hand isn’t shaking, it’s the earthquake,” he slips elsewhere and continues: “Death, my friends, falls upon you when we least expect it.” “There are many things I regret. May God forgive me my sins. There are so many things I want to do when I get out of here,” he adds.
Taha Erdem is eventually rescued through providential intervention by neighbors who then take him to one of his aunts. Then, ten hours after the disaster, it was his parents’, brother’s and sister’s turn to be pulled from the rubble of their building.
Zeliha confided in her feelings upon discovering that her eldest was also alive and well: “The world was mine. I don’t have anything anymore, but I have my children.” The Erdem family now lives in a government-provided tent.
Robin Verner Journalist BFMTV