“That was the only option, we thought,” Ali Kafadenk says. “Like, any minute, there’s going to be something that’s going to come crashing down on our heads and this is going to be the end.”
He covered his wife with the bedcovers, and threw himself over her to protect her. They cried together, and prayed together. “We were saying to each other that we came from God. We will go back to God,” he says.
A supernatural sound
He heard his building sink and the earth move. It was a sound he had never heard before in his life: strong and loud, like low thunder.
“It feels like it’s a supernatural sound,” he says. “Like the sound that we hear in sci-fi movies.”
The building shifted and crumbled. The three floors above their apartment fell into the street.
Then somehow an opening formed in the wall. It was too dusty to see anything, but he felt it: snowy, cold air. That is when he heard his neighbors’ screams: My baby’s stuck here. My leg is stuck there. My mom’s under here. My dad’s over there.
