When she felt the first tremors of the earthquake that struck Syria and Turkey last week, Um Kanan woke up her three children and took them to a small closet in her bedroom for shelter, along with a collection of family photographs and documents.
The force of the earthquake leveled a fourth-floor apartment in the Syrian Mediterranean city of Jableh to the ground, killing almost all of their neighbors but four of them and leaving behind their precious duffle bags of memories.
Um Kanan and her youngest child were locked inside a space more than a meter wide in the closet, while her two older children huddled in a corner between the closet and her bed, trying to shield themselves when the building collapsed. For used pillows.
“I kept thinking to myself: ‘Could this be happening? Did the building just collapse? Is this a dream?’ I tried to move but I couldn’t,” she said. “The kids and I, by some miracle, got into this little space I had left empty.”
