«That noise of collapsing buildings haunts me, I don't think I'll be able to get it out of my head. Then the dark, the dust, the silence before the screams and all those dead». Pasquale Brau, 53, from Orotelli, was in Kahramanmaras on the night of 6 February, the epicenter of the 7.9 magnitude earthquake that devastated southern Turkey, on the border with Syria. "I'm a survivor," he says from his home in Rubiera, a small town in Emilia where the Sardinian works. “I helped bring people out, the dead. The Turks helped me. The support from the Farnesina? Just a text message on the phone», says Brau after being welcomed on his return to Italy by the mayor of Rubiera, Emanuele Cavallaro.

The escape

Brau, an employee of an Emilian company that deals with automation, was luckier than the Venetian entrepreneur Angelo Zen, who hasn't been traced for a week. He managed to escape from the second floor room of the Alcatraz hotel in Kahramanmaras an instant before the ladder collapsed on him. “At 4 in the morning I was in bed. I felt the jolt got dressed and flew out the door. The third floor staircase collapsed, it grazed me. I went out into the street and nothing could be seen, just dust. It was raining. I climbed up on a pile of rubble, it was the seven-story building that was no longer there. I managed to text my folks telling them I was fine. Then the phones stopped working. No light, water. Monday and Tuesday were awful."

Among rescuers

“I helped out in the rubble, but there were many more people we pulled out dead than alive. They didn't know the language, no one knew English. We spoke with gestures, but we understood each other: we had to try. The conditions of the victims? It looked like a butcher shop."

Solidarity

In that apocalypse he met Durdu, a boy who had been in the Italian army for 4 months as a soldier. «He told me: tonight come to my house. I ate with them, under a tin roof with two wood-burning stoves. They welcomed me like one of the family. I was in pitiful condition, I was able to dry and warm up. The only help the Embassy sent me was a message taken from the Turkish Airline website, inviting me to go and take a bus to cities 50 kilometers away, and from there to the airport. But you couldn't go to the airport without a reservation. The only call was from a friend of an executive at the company where we worked. He told me: "don't worry, the Ankara embassy will call you". A phone call that I'm still waiting for. I was the only Italian left alive in Kahramanmaras, in the end we did everything, I arrived in Adana with a businessman who gave me a lift, his employee Ali who was working with me died. From there I took a flight with a stopover in Istanbul. I escaped the earthquake in Emilia in 2012, but everything passed in front of me in Turkey: my childhood and youth in Sardinia. Then in two weeks I become a grandfather. I always tell myself that at the next earthquake that arrives in Emilia "mi che torro a bidda" but not just for the summer. Now with my wife Emanuela Cau (Sardinian from Cossoine) I'm really thinking about it».

Fabio Ledda

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