Yes, that’s me – happily celebrating my birthday on the NY harbour boat, a short cruise we arranged for family and friends, heading toward downtown Manhattan, toward sunset, posing for and taking some of the most memorable photos of the spectacular NYC skyline, the way we knew it then. World Trade Center to my right, behind me…
Then at 9AM on 9/11/01 a friend called from her office to ask: “Are you watching it?” “What?” I said switching to CNN that instant and just in time to watch the second plane hit.
It was just about noon on 9/11/01, most phones had stopped working, we have not been able to reach my daughter’s dad and I headed to high school to pick her up, dreading the moment I would have to tell her this. As it turned out when he was able to call at around 6pm, he was transferred out from 68th floor, where he would have most certainly died from impact, to the building a couple blocks away, just a few days prior. From his new office he watched the second plane flying by his window. He saw the passengers’ horrified faces and followed them with his eyes to the point of hitting the South Tower just where he would have been… He was on the phone with London co-workers who in turn were on the phone with the coworkers who walked up in hopes to escape and then either jumped or collapsed with the building…I am forever a broken-hearted New Yorker with many similar stories to remember.
I think we still had the TV transmission at about 3pm on 9/11/01 when my mom’s significant other called. He then worked in the Piano Museum right by WTC, was in the basement at the time of the South Tower collapse, heard and felt it and, completely ignorant of what was going on, opened the door to the street to find himself in the midst of all that white debris cloud. He and his 3 coworkers locked the Museum, and walked to NJ ferry. They witnessed many horrors, such as people jumping and landing near them, and stepping over bodies and body parts. We picked him up in NJ, white from head to toe, unable to utter a single complete sentence. He did not talk about what he saw until years later…I will never forget or let anyone else forget that it was Islamic Terrorism that caused America’s heartbreak!
On September 11. 2001 millions of parents around the world had to explain to their children what terrorism is and how heartless the “humans” who carry out such acts of terror against civilians and civilization. It was not an easy task and we were all doing best we could, while ourselves trying to understand what just happened. My daughter made a new friend on 9/10/01. At about 8PM on 9/11 her mom called our home through very unstable telephone service, looking for Darina. The girl could not return home, they were in a midst of a move to NJ, and her mom was in NY on the other side of now closed bridges and tunnels. Darina was picked up from HS by their thoughtful family friends earlier in the day, as it later turned out, but became my temporary third child for the next few months, when in the aftermath of 9/11, their house purchase fell through, because the sellers were supposed to move to Battery Park…The flowers Darina gave me on the day of the girls’ graduation were very special to me. She was G-d’s gift to our family to help us endure these next several months, when Radio Free Europe was working in our home studio at all odd hours of day and night, because they lost access to their downtown building, and we had 2 film directors working on the 9/11 films right in our home as well…9/11 in our home lasted for a long time. We did not lose anyone close to us, like so many people whose stories we helped get out. We gained a temporary child to help us all cope and heel together.