«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."
