Ahmet Firat steps out of the cramped confines of his container for a cigarette, and to share memories from last year’s earthquakes that he doesn’t want his children to hear about – details that continue to prey on his mind.

After the first magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck southern Turkey and northern Syria in the early morning of February 6, 2023, Ahmet, his wife, and their three children drove 50km (31 miles) from their heavily damaged home in Besni to Adiyaman, where most of their relatives lived.

The southeast Turkish city was a war-scape of collapsed and crippled buildings, and a second magnitude 7.5 earthquake later in the day compounded the carnage.

Over the next 10 days, Ahmet dug out the remains of 12 relatives.

“Sometimes we retrieved the body parts, piece by piece, not the whole body. Sometimes the parents were holding their kids and died like that. It really affected me psychologically,” he recalled, his soft voice becoming nearly a whisper.

“The sights and smells often come back to me. If I see a damaged building, I start to smell death, my brain automatically reminds me.”

More than 8,000 people are thought to have died in the earthquakes in Adıyaman province, with the official death toll in Turkey at more than 50,000.

When Al Jazeera first met the now 40-year-old plumber and construction worker and his family last February, they had just buried the last of their dead.

The family were living in a tent encampment in Adiyaman with dozens of other relatives. They had no electricity and faced gnawing cold and scouring winds that blew smoke from a wood-burning stove back into the tent.

The children were constantly ill and the adults took turns to guard the tents during the night. They had no idea what to do next.

A year later, Ahmet, his wife and their children Muhammed Ali, Havvanur and Emir now live in a prefabricated container on the edge of Besni.

They are among 689,101 people currently living in 407 container cities across the Britain-sized disaster zone in Turkey, according to the latest figures from Turkey’s disaster agency AFAD, out of an estimated three million displaced people.

But while the Firat family’s circumstances have improved since last February, they still grapple with the aftershocks of trauma as they struggle to rebuild their lives.

Read the rest of the article published by Al Jazeera English here.