A breath of humanity in the middle of the ruins. The photo of this father holding the hand of his dead daughter, in the devastation which followed the violent earthquake of February 6 in Turkey, moved the whole world and caused an outpouring of solidarity towards this broken man, he says today today.
Nearly three weeks after this natural disaster which killed more than 44,000 people in Turkey and Syria, Adem Altan, the AFP photographer who took the shot, found Mesut Hancer. This grief-stricken Turk, father of four children including Irmak, 15, who died buried under the rubble of an eight-storey building, recently left his town of Kahramanmaras, in southeastern Turkey, to settle in Ankara.
“I also lost my mother, my brothers, my nephews in the earthquake. But burying your child has nothing comparable,” confides this forty-year-old. “It’s an indescribable pain.” Today, the family is trying to rebuild a life away from Kahramanmaras, the city near the epicenter of the 7.8 magnitude earthquake that also hit northern Syria. The photo of Mesut Hancer, petrified, insensitive to the cold and the rain, dressed in an orange jacket and not letting go of the hand of his dead child, has become the symbol of a disaster that claimed tens of thousands of lives .
On the front page of many newspapers around the world, reproduced millions of times on the Internet, the snapshot provoked a surge of solidarity with regard to the father and his family. A businessman from Ankara offered them accommodation and offered to recruit the grieving father as an administrative employee in his private television channel.
“My daughter slept like an angel in her bed”
Offered by an artist, a drawing representing Irmak as an angel next to his father now adorns the family living room. “I couldn’t let go of his hand. My daughter slept like an angel in her bed,” he says.
At the time of the earthquake, which occurred at 04:17 am (01:17 GMT), Mesut Hancer was working in his bakery. He immediately called his family, in search of news. Their one-story home, although damaged, was standing and his wife and three adult children were safe.
But the family couldn’t reach the youngest child, Irmak, who that night had slept at her grandmother’s. The teenager wanted to spend more time with her cousins who came to visit from Istanbul and Hatay. Worried, Mesut Hancer rushed running to his mother’s house.
There, he found the eight-story building collapsed, reduced to a mountain of rubble from which emerge, scattered, the remains of a daily life reduced to nothing. And in the middle of the ruins, his daughter. No rescue team will come until the next day, leaving Mesut Hancer and other residents alone in their desperate efforts to find their loved ones under the rubble.
Mr. Hancer attempted to extricate Irmak’s body by clearing the concrete blocks with his bare hands. In vain. So he remained, motionless, gnawed by infinite grief, seated next to his dead daughter. “I held her hand, stroked her hair, kissed her cheeks,” he says. Later, he noticed that an AFP photographer, Adem Altan, was taking pictures. “Take pictures of my child,” he whispered then, his voice breaking and shaking.