The images he saw earlier in the media did not prepare him for the encounter with the shocking reality itself. Whole buildings turned into ruins, layers upon layers of concrete ceilings that shriveled and crushed everything in between, flying blankets caught between the fallen walls, a bent blue bicycle thrown on a pile of what used to be a house, an old woman hugging a woolen doll, clinging to it in despair.
We are in the chaos zone of a compound that was once a residential neighborhood, and has now become an arena of swampy mud and grayish, suffocating dust.
Around us people, old men, women and children everywhere, walking around idly, some of them warming themselves in the intense cold in front of the fire.
Others wander around with a glassy, disbelieving look in their eyes.
Every now and then a howl of despair is heard.
Man's nothingness is glorious in the face of the horror of nature.
IDF aid forces are stationed in Turkey, photo: Reuters
Every few hours the earth again rages with aftershocks and shakes the people above it.
There is no longer stable ground, in all the layers of meaning and consequences of the physical and mental sensation.
The local rescue teams are working on the fallen piles of concrete to save the last survivors.
A moment of peak and despair
On Wednesday morning I joined Yahcha - the national rescue unit of the Home Front Command, under the command of Col. (Ret.) Golan Vach.
I was the first Israeli journalist on the scene who was able to reach the area and closely observe the wonderful activity of the delegation, numbering 500 people.
They have been in the field since the night between Tuesday and Wednesday, working non-stop in a race against time and the cold.
They do not stop to eat, nor to sleep, even though they have been awake for at least two days in a row.
By the wee hours of Wednesday, they had already managed to rescue a baby, a two-year-old toddler, a 23-year-old woman and a 40-year-old man. Now they are working to rescue the man's wife, a 40-year-old woman. In other scenes in the city, members of the Israeli delegation managed to locate signs of life, a knocking sound, a cry for help.
Miraculously, survivors are still being found, more than 50 hours since they were buried alive, and the representatives of the State of Israel are the first in the world to show up in an emergency.
Amidst the cries of despair and the noises of the excavation, a procedure for silencing the site is carried out from time to time.
Turn off all the bulldozer engines, put aside the digging shovels and ask everyone to keep absolutely quiet.
When the silence prevails, we listen with eager anticipation to the voices rising from the ground.
This is how they manage to locate signs of life and verify the condition of those who know where they are, and work with all their might to rescue them.
The moment a rescuer meets a living rescuer is a moment of peak, but also of despair.
It is one thing to reach a trapped person, find him alive and even succeed in infusing him, and another thing entirely is to succeed in extracting him whole from the layers that are crushing him.
It was at this moment that Gil, a reservist, a member of the IDF delegation, an engineer by profession, collapsed.
"It's hard to rescue a baby. No one wants to work with someone who reminds them of home," says Gil, a 37-year-old father of two toddlers, "The locals who worked to rescue the baby were afraid to go in. They asked for help. I went in together with an officer, and then We saw the baby. It's hard to see such a thing. At first I only saw legs, I thought he was dead. I gently touched his leg and he moved. He cried and I cried with him, then I tried to calm him down. I can look at adult prisoners as objects, but a baby is different . It was too much. I went outside. As an engineer, I realized that from the inside you can't extract it and you have to do it from above, to peel off all the layers above it. I organized people and we started doing it."
After seven hours, Omar, the two-year-old toddler, was rescued alive and well.
"Another member of our delegation took it out and passed it to me," says Gil.
"And I took him to the doctor and from there the locals to the ambulance. It was a very emotional moment, but I didn't cry here."
A city of tents in the stadium, much destruction all around, photo: AFP
Gil didn't shed a tear, but the friends he was with on the expedition moved aside, hugging each other, wiping their moist eyes, regulating their rapid pulse.
"It's like giving birth," one of them said, "just like giving birth."
And what about the toddler's parents, I ask hesitantly.
"I smelled them," Gil answers without filters, "at some point in the night you could hear their living voices, but the voices died down and there was a strong smell of corpses inside."
The children are a language, the children in the house
Tom Shay (39), a reserve population officer of the Israel Defense Forces and an educator, also assisted in rescuing the baby. She heard his cries from afar and was debating whether to go there to help the locals in his rescue. "The one who worked on Omar's rescue most of the time was the Turkish army.
From time to time they turned to us for assistance.
I was together with Naama, who like me is also a mother of small children, so we actually didn't want to go there, it was too difficult.
But we were still drawn to be there, and kept coming over to check what was going on with him.
"Every time they fell silent and heard signs of life from Omer, I breathed a sigh of relief. Towards the end of the rescue, they asked us to participate in his rescue, and so we did. Omer is a heroic child. I am very happy that he came out safe and sound. It is a miracle that a two-year-old survives for three days like that. It is something Amazing".
I talk to Tom in the field an hour after the rescue of the toddler.
She has been awake for 52 hours straight, but radiates impressive peace and calm.
Her role as a population officer is, as she explains, "to gather intelligence from the field and form a picture of the population that was on the site, in order to direct the forces to quick and precise action, and at the same time monitor the behavior of the population in an emergency situation and formulate recommendations to the commanders on how to conduct themselves as an emergency force."
In the past, Tom, a resident of Magashim, had already gone out as part of a rescue mission to help in Nepal after an earthquake.
But this time it's different.
So she was not yet the mother of one-year-old Amri and 3-and-a-half-year-old Jordan.
"It's a significant difference. When I wasn't a mother, I didn't have to put the children in kindergarten in the morning and then debate whether to go and say goodbye to them, and decide not to, and know that I won't see them for the next few days. Today it's leaving the children and knowing that every mother and child I see here will throw me straight into my thoughts on the house".
The extent of the destruction is unimaginable, photo: AP
Her blue eyes shine with pain: "The truth is that you can't do this without knowing that you have your back. What allows me to make this choice every time is the knowledge that I have the back of my husband Ofir at home, and the knowledge that both of our families have our backs. I'm leaving Knowing that there are people who love and are proud of me at home."
Were you debating whether to go out?
"Yes. It's a choice every time. As a mother, I don't have to make reserves. There's always a moment like that when you look at the house in the morning and the work schedule and say, 'Wait, how do I leave all this?'
But right after that, it's very clear.
You understand that being together with the group of amazing and scratched people from the Israel Defense Forces in this mission is an incredible privilege. This is the moment when, with all the difficulty, I choose to dedicate myself to the unit of which I am a part, knowing that when needed, then they come.
"When we were in Nepal, we did not rescue any living people. Here, for me, this is the first time that I am actually part of a mission that saves lives. It is very exciting. We feel that there is value and meaning to our arrival."
Were there tears?
"A little. When Omer was rescued. It was a feeling that we had closed a circle."
Trapped together, embraced
At the same time as Omar's rescue site, most of the Israeli team is working on rescuing people alive from a nearby building.
"We were working elsewhere and there was an excess of strength, so we decided to go relax for a second on the side. We went to the side and people jumped on us," says Gil.
"The first thing we saw was a body trapped above the opening. We couldn't get it out, so we covered it with a sheet," Gil points to the floral sheet above the opening around which the expedition operates.
I am horrified.
I had no idea what the sheet was hiding.
"Near the body we heard voices. It was a 23-year-old young woman. Her face was close to her mother's face, who was no longer alive. We took her out. It was amazing to take someone out alive five minutes after we arrived at the scene. I was previously on a rescue mission in Honduras in a flood and in Brazil in a mudslide , and we were not entitled to such a thing."
After the young woman who was rescued, the Israeli delegation commissioned a particularly complex rescue.
A husband and wife about 40 years old, who were sleeping peacefully in the bedroom of their home and were captured together hugging.
Between the layers of concrete, routine life and love stopped and turned into a tragedy.
The man was trapped above the woman, his leg crushed under a thick concrete beam.
For many hours the medical team debated whether to perform an amputation in the field.
"We discussed it with the injured man himself. He is conscious. He agreed to an amputation," says Gil.
In order for a foreign medical team to be able to perform an amputation in the territory, they need to get permission from the government.
As soon as such approval is received, the commander of the delegation, Golan Vach, goes out to personally supervise the complex operation.
The surgery itself is performed calmly and with endless dedication by Dr. Eldad Katz, a doctor on behalf of the delegation, with a Turkish ambulance team next to him.
Thousands of bodies are buried under the rubble, photo: AFP
"The man had grown in size. He was lying with his leg trapped, and it was very difficult to reach him," Katz said later, "I was lying on my stomach next to him at a very uncomfortable angle. He was lying inside the space from which we wanted to extract him, and I had to get him out of there. It took us 16 minutes. A large part of the time I had to think about how to attach the equipment to him with one hand, while giving him medical treatment. We realized that the situation was serious and that we needed to get him out as soon as possible.
"During the treatment, I saw that he couldn't feel anything in his leg, and we understood that an amputation was necessary. He remained alive, breathed and responded throughout the entire amputation operation, and also moved the other leg. At some point, I went out and one of the rescuers went in to wrap him in a strap and try to get him onto a back board and pull him out . That also took time, but the local guys helped us a lot."
The stretcher stands outside the ambulance, ready to receive the injured quickly.
The Turkish police and army keep the curious crowd away.
They build a human net that holds blankets to hide the rescue itself.
There is something exciting about people standing for a long hour, lifting blankets high, doing everything to preserve the dignity of an injured person, in a reality where the dignity of tens of thousands of people has been trampled upon.
Wounded on plasterboards
After seven hours the man is rescued.
Vach, who was close to the wounded man throughout the operation, comes out with his clothes stained with blood.
One of the members of the delegation comments sarcastically that the last time the IDF uniforms were stained with Turkish blood was in the Marmara flotilla. Black humor. Impossible with him, impossible without him.
On the way to the hospital, the injured man's condition deteriorates.
Katz: "We evacuated him to the ambulance, the paramedics connected him to the monitor, I started to bandage his leg and very quickly he collapsed. We started CPR, gave him adrenaline, and unfortunately after 20 minutes he died. It was very sad, after all the effort we put in and the hope that he would survive."
Reuters
The Israeli team continues with the complicated rescue of his wife, when it turns out that the woman's leg is also trapped under the concrete beam, and the team is again debating what to do.
The military force is joined by the civilian volunteers of the Rescue Union and the national rescue units, a delegation of 41 people, religious, secular and ultra-Orthodox in a special Israeli mix.
The delegation arrived on a special plane chartered by the rescue union and carrying ten tons of life-saving equipment.
With this delegation, under the command of Yossi Cohen, I took off for Turkey.
The forces work together, and with the help of mechanical tools they slowly succeed in removing the concrete beam from above the woman.
Her leg is crushed, but she is fully conscious.
Dr. Itai Labell, the Ihud Hatzla delegation doctor, went in to assess her condition. The woman is conscious, and with the help of painkillers, she also maintains high morale.
"When they picked up her husband, she really encouraged the rescuers by shouting 'Heyda, Heyda.' It's been there for three days," says Yossi Amar, medic, resident of Kochav Ya'akov, head of the Ihud Hatzla branch in Binyamin and director of the organization's drone department.
The local ambulance team asks for the help of the Israelis during the trip as well, and Dr. Labell and Yossi Amar get into the ambulance. "We arrived at the nearest hospital.
It's an undamaged building, but right now it's extremely busy.
In every corridor and in every passage beds with wounded.
Even on a pile of plasterboard that was on the side, he lay wounded.
We entered the shock room with her, arranged an orderly handover to the medical team.
We were happy to lend a hand, to save a life.
That's what we're here for."
The rescue forces evacuate an injured person from the earthquake in Turkey, photo: AFP
A few hours after the dramatic rescue we return to Katz, who in the meantime managed to take a light nap, drink black coffee and return to activity.
He is 39 years old, a doctor specializing in orthopedics who lives in Tel Aviv with his wife and two young children.
"My wife manages every time to keep the house and take care of the children when I'm being pushed around. This is the first time I've joined a YACHT delegation at an event abroad. In Israel, of course, I took part in the unit's activities in the operations Keeper of the Walls and Belat al-Hashar.
"Everyone here hopes to save lives and it is a great privilege, and we came to help as much as possible. The work of the delegation here is amazing, and we all hope that we will still be able to find survivors in the coming days. The difficulty is mainly in the conditions. The cold, the lack of sleep - we haven't slept for two days - and the overcrowding at the destruction sites makes it impossible We can always reach the survivors from the angle we want or use our equipment the way we want."
The Black Bag Convoy
We move to another arena, and another Israeli team is working there.
Unfortunately, only bodies were rescued.
Erdogan comes to visit the place.
Hundreds of police and undercover troops form a path past the presidential motorcade.
Crowds stand and sit around bonfires on the boulevard in the center of the road, watching the convoy that stops for several minutes.
The audience is mostly made up of residents who are anxiously waiting to hear what happened to their loved ones.
The president continues his journey, and the residents are left to wait alone.
Three women run screaming to one of the buildings.
Every moment something is happening.
For us it is a painful item, for them it is a life cut short.
The most difficult moments, when the audience freezes in silence, are when silent convoys of men pass by with a humiliated look, carrying corpses in black bags.
But in all this pain there are chilling human moments, and more rescues of people alive from the ruins.
As of Wednesday evening, the Israeli delegations managed to rescue eight people alive.
During the night, the IDF delegation managed to make contact with two more people alive and began working to rescue them. The hope is that by Saturday they will be able to save at least a number of people.
We spend the nights outside the destroyed city in a huge open field intended for the rescue missions from all over the world.
The amount of Israeli volunteers doubles and triples compared to any other country and fills the heart with tremendous pride.
The IDF forces continue to flow in and there are already hundreds of soldiers and female soldiers in the field, among them the female fighters of Okets stand out, who walk among the ruins with dogs trained to detect life.
The good spirit between the members of the delegation cracks only in the race to load.
The generator that works intermittently manages to heat two large heaters, the only way to warm the frozen hands with a cup of tea.
The desired sockets are also connected to the generator, and you have to stand in line to get some energy.
But the race for electrical energy may come at the expense of thermal energy.
If in the race for the empty socket you put the cup of tea on some box with a layer of ice, you ate it.
All you have to do is enjoy iced tea, made in Turkey.
The physical conditions in the camp are not easy, there is no running water, no electricity.
Sleeping in tents or temporary structures on the floor in the bitter cold of minus six degrees is not easy either.
But the great spirit warms the heart, knowing that everyone here is doing the greatest thing possible - trying to save lives.
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