Survivors Endured With Fantasy, Hope and Prayer

Relatives had already dug her grave when Dilek Aslan--alive and well--was pulled from the ruins of her 11-story apartment building 133 hours after Turkey’s devastating earthquake knocked her to her knees.

For six days and five nights, Aslan slipped in and out of consciousness as she crouched in utter darkness. She dreamed of laughter and parties with her friends. She mentally reenacted conversations with her parents. She promised herself that she would become a better person.

Meanwhile, her family had given her up for dead.

Meliha Sarsan prayed unceasingly for her own salvation. It came 138 hours after she was buried alive in her bedroom. During all that time, she lay next to the lifeless body of her husband, crushed by a falling armoire that, in turn, shielded her.

When the final toll of last week’s mammoth quake is tallied, Aslan, 18, and Sarsan, 53, who were recuperating Monday in an Istanbul hospital, will figure among the final victims to be rescued. Both were found in the seafront town of Cinarcik on Sunday, long after many rescue crews had packed up and gone home, long after searching had begun to switch to demolition.

Also in Cinarcik on Monday, 4-year-old Ismail Cimen was discovered by workers looking for bodies. For 146 hours, he had crouched in a tiny space below a collapsed balcony waiting for help. Emaciated and dehydrated, he had badly chapped lips but was otherwise OK, doctors said.

Remarkably too, Aslan and Sarsan were in good condition. While their legs and arms were scratched and bruised, neither bore the least mark on her face. No broken bones, no internal injuries.

Following their rescues, the two women were whisked by helicopter to Istanbul’s Marmara University Hospital, where they told their stories.

Every earthquake yields a number of survivors in amazingly fit condition long after survival seems impossible. Their fate is determined by air pockets, the angle of rubble, access to fluids or humidity that gives them moisture, a random chance of being heard, and sheer, unadulterated luck. Babies trapped in a maternity ward in the 1985 Mexico City earthquake survived up to nine days. The certainty that such survivors will emerge, however, makes their discovery no less dramatic.

When the quake hit at 3:02 last Tuesday morning, Aslan, her brother and two sisters were trapped, but they were separated and could not communicate. Her parents were gone on an overnight fishing trip.

“For the first two days, all I did was cry. I cried and cried,” Aslan, a high school senior who wants to be a chemical engineer, recalled from her hospital bed. Black-haired with a pretty oval face, Aslan wore a neck brace, which doctors said was a precaution, and received visiting friends.

By the third day, Aslan said, she drifted into fantasy-filled slumber. She dreamed she had been rescued and was chatting and drinking with friends. Then she would awake to the reality of a dark tomb that held her unable to stand or to lie down straight, unable to lift her head.

She heard voices and earth-moving machines outside, the volume of noise louder during what she took to be daytime, more quiet when it must have been night. She repeatedly called out for help--or at least she thinks she did. But no one seemed to hear.

Aslan’s younger sister was saved barely an hour after the quake. But her other sister and her brother were killed. Their bodies were recovered Friday, the fourth day. Their father, Osman, dug three graves and hired a Turkish salvage team to continue digging until Aslan’s body also could be retrieved for proper burial.

On the fifth day, under tons of debris where Aslan waited, the sounds of heavy machinery seemed to get closer. The concrete and bricks around her shifted. The dust became thicker. It was getting harder to breathe.

On the sixth day, the salvage crew broke through to Aslan’s room.

She was asleep.

They called out to her. She roused herself and blinked against light she had not seen for days as they pulled her--weak, dehydrated and dirty--from the wreckage and to the embrace of her father.

Aslan was in good spirits Monday--too good, perhaps. Doctors said she is overly euphoric, talking too excitedly, a compensation for the trauma she has suffered. Her parents have not visited her in the hospital yet because they have not figured out how to tell her that two siblings are dead.

By contrast, Sarsan was more subdued, wearing a serene smile but grimacing in pain that seemed as much emotional as physical.

“My husband is still down there, my husband is still down there,” she said over and over.

Sarsan was lying next to him in bed when the wall exploded and the ceiling came crashing on top of them. An armoire crushed him but then wedged in a V above Sarsan, protecting her from tons of debris and giving her breathing space.

Unfathomable hours of darkness and silence followed, Sarsan said. With her hands she could dig a little more space from time to time, and she was able to move bricks around, placing cool ones nearer her face and body when the heat became unbearable.

She prayed and prayed.

“I always expected someone would save me,” she said.

Israeli and Turkish rescuers searching the site of Sarsan’s five-story apartment building found her. She muttered the names of her children, but said nothing else, they reported. A diabetic, Sarsan emerged with a blood sugar count nearly six times the normal level but otherwise had no serious injuries or infections.

Aslan said the experience has been an epiphany.

“I had time to think about my past and all the mistakes I’ve made,” she said. “I’ve been an irritable person, and sometimes I’ve hurt my friends and fought with my mother. I promised myself to be better and to never again cause my mother any pain.”