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Somehow it feels even more shocking than a combat zone: the violence of natural disasters shakes even this cruel and warlike era with its unfair blows against quiet domestic privacy.
When the shaking and rumbling began, people in Turkey and Syria were at home going about their business: innocent, asleep, or perhaps planning the next direction for their work, life, or love.
As the Mail reported yesterday, some were giving birth, the most private and familiar of miracles: hearts around the world shuddered at the tale of a newborn baby dug out of the rubble in the Syrian town of Jindires, next to the afrin river.
The little girl was alive, still attached by the umbilical cord to her dead mother. The woman, Afraa, will have gone through the usual pains and strains of childbirth and expected good things for her baby. Perhaps when she died she knew that she was a daughter; she perhaps had a brief moment to rejoice at her arrival.
Pictured: A newborn baby found still attached by its umbilical cord to its mother and pulled alive from the rubble of a house in northern Syria after a deadly earthquake receives medical attention at a clinic in Afrin, the February 7, 2023
Video footage captured the moment the boy was pulled from the rubble.
Now she is one of the thousands dead, but her nameless son will find warmth. She was discovered by Khalil al-Sawadi, who is the father’s cousin and her brother-in-law. Another cousin of hers ran to a hospital through her choking dust with her in her arms, while Khalil continued to dig for others.
The bodies of the baby’s parents, along with four siblings and an aunt, were placed in a neighbor’s house for the funeral: prayers were said, dignity and pain respected.
Outside the search continued; at the besieged hospital, Dr. Maarouf treated the baby’s bruises and hypothermia. She is a survivor. Her life must be asserted.
That family, like many others, had already been displaced from another city in recent years of fighting in this troubled region; for a natural catastrophe, then, hitting them in their new home is terribly cruel.
Imagining personal disaster, bereavement, homelessness, or humiliation, we, with our easier lives, too easily think we’d give up the will to live.
But when reality hits, human beings are not like that. They cling with determination to survival. That girl’s extended family wants her to live: in that harsh and poor region they will do everything they can to make sure she lives.
And we all need this solid proof that where there is life there is hope. The thousands of deaths in this earthquake are profoundly shocking, but it is human instinct to search intensely for the stories of survivors, reach out to them mentally, and send solid help in whatever way we can.
For us far away it can be difficult to find the right causes to help and keep the momentum going as the news cycle progresses. It takes discipline and mindfulness. But it’s a good instinct: not just because we shudder and find helplessness painful, but because we owe a tribute to the survivors, as well as the seekers and healers.
Perhaps seeing this hunger to affirm life touches parents especially: any mother knows the intensity of that will to survive.
We mourn Afraa of Jindires, but we respect that she would have fought as hard to save her other children as to free the one who signaled her arrival in such severe pain.
Afraa Abu Hadiya, the mother of the baby who was still attached to the non-bilical cord when he was rescued, was found dead. Pictured: Mourners in the city of Jinderis, Aleppo province, Syria, bury their family members who died in the earthquake.
We also salute Hulya Yilmaz in southern Turkey, who spent 29 hours trapped with her baby Ayse Vera under rubble, and must have been calming and warming the girl even as she herself was facing death.
We can remember the extraordinary story of the Mozambique floods in 2000 and the birth of Rosita Mabuiango. She was born in a tree above the swirling torrent, which had crocodiles in it, for God’s sake. Later, interviewed when she was a teenager, Ella Rosita said that this did not make her special, “she was just a different way of being born.”
But we know that it was special and inevitable that her mother Chirindza did what she did: trap the baby in a lace on her sarong and survive holding her for four days without eating or drinking before the helicopters arrived.
Or we can remember Karin Svard in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, a mother running to her children playing in the shallows as the wave approached. She was so focused. . . ‘ she said later. ‘I could see this white wall coming towards me and it was coming faster. I did not care. She was looking at my children. She wanted to hold them and take care of them.’
The 37-year-old Swedish policewoman was engulfed and eventually dragged to higher ground. All three of her children, her husband and her brother survived.
Pictured: Destruction is seen in Hatay, southern Turkey, where rubble collapsed onto a soccer field.
Mothers in such moments are heroic, but men also run to children at the cost of their own lives and seek to save them with passionate determination at any cost.
Even now in Turkey and Syria, many are digging, stubborn and unstoppable, during the cold days and nights, for their own families and those of their neighbors.
Another unforgettable image was that of a little girl whose bewildered face emerged as a small patch of hope from the rubble of bricks. A White Helmets rescuer smoothed her hair back and carefully dug around her with his other hand, saying that her father was close to her.
If he still has a mother, siblings, or other family, we don’t know yet. But she is there. Her people and her world want her safe.
The surge of human kinship in disasters can be almost overwhelming. Lately here in East Anglia we have been commemorating the January 1953 floods, a storm surge that devastated the coast from Lincolnshire to Essex.
It was a small loss compared to this quake, but more than 300 people died and 40,000 were left homeless. One record describes the remarkable community rescue effort as a ‘spontaneous mobilization’. While official action was slow, it was ordinary people who rushed to help, saving lives and saving lives.
Pictured: Young Yigit cried as he was passed through a line of rescuers, who smiled as they carried the boy to safety in Hatay, Turkey.
When Hurricane Katrina hit the poorest in New Orleans in 2005, the state was again too slow to react. But, as one observer wrote, thousands only survived ‘because grandchildren, aunts, neighbors, or complete strangers reached out to those in need all over the Gulf Coast, and because an armada of boat owners went to New Orleans to carry stranded people to safety.’
There is a powerful willingness to help, whether it is collecting clothes for refugees, donating or asking governments to hurry. It’s not just pity, often a maudlin and useless emotion, but admiration.
We need to see heads rise, spirits revive. When I was a teenager with my father stationed in Hamburg, we had a Polish Jewish cleaner who one day, on her coffee break, told us her story. She had walked alone many miles through ravaged Central Europe and given birth in a ditch, aided by passing men.
It was not the only such story we heard from my mother’s Polish friends. But there, 20 years later, was this hard-working middle-aged woman, remarried, proud of her mud-born son, graduating as an engineer. She expressed no self-pity, only sadness for those who hadn’t survived.
I think of her often today when we talk too easily about fragile emotional victimization and being ‘broken’. Women are strong. Humans are strong.
Given the chance, when fate tries to finish them off, they defy it, they want to flourish. It is a privilege and an honor to help give them that opportunity.