Beyond the Headlines: September 11 and The Lives Behind the Day
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Beyond the Headlines: September 11 and The Lives Behind the Day
There are days history remembers in images.
For September 11, 2001, the images seem almost impossible to separate from the event itself: a passenger plane disappearing into a skyscraper; black smoke pouring into a blue New York sky; people running through streets swallowed by dust; firefighters walking in the opposite direction; two enormous buildings collapsing where, only hours earlier, thousands of people had arrived for an ordinary working day.
The numbers are equally familiar. Nineteen al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial aircraft. Two were flown into the World Trade Center in New York City, another into the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C., and a fourth crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers and crew fought back. The attacks killed 2,977 people from around 90 nations.
Smoke rises from the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001.
Photo: Michael Foran / Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.
Numbers help us comprehend the scale of history. They are less useful for comprehending a human being.
Two thousand nine hundred and seventy-seven is almost too large a number to grieve. Stanley, Genelle, Mychal, Moises, Salman and Balbir are different. A name asks us to stop.
And perhaps that is where another way of remembering September 11 can begin.
A voice behind a wall
Stanley Praimnath was at work high in the South Tower of the World Trade Center.
Born in Guyana and living in the United States, he worked for Fuji Bank on the 81st floor. After the first aircraft struck the neighboring North Tower, Praimnath began evacuating. He was then reassured that the danger was in the other building and returned upstairs.
Soon afterward, he looked out and saw United Airlines Flight 175 coming toward his tower.
The impact devastated the floors around him. Praimnath survived, trapped behind wreckage in an office that had suddenly become almost unrecognizable. Somewhere beyond the debris, he began shouting for help.
Brian Clark was several floors above him.
Clark, a Canadian-born executive working at Euro Brokers and a volunteer fire warden, was trying to descend with a small group when he heard something the others did not want to follow: a human voice calling from behind a wall.
He stopped.
There are moments in which an entire moral universe seems to become very small. There is no country, no ideology, no strategy, no explanation. There is simply someone saying, in effect: I am here. Please do not leave me.
Clark climbed through the debris and found Praimnath. Together they struggled out, found a usable stairway and began the long descent. Clark carried a small red-and-white flashlight that helped illuminate their path through darkened portions of the building.
They reached the street shortly before the South Tower collapsed.
The flashlight eventually entered the collection of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. It is an unremarkable object until one knows its story. Then it becomes something else: a reminder that, amid an event measured in skyscrapers and thousands of lives, two strangers met because one cried out and another chose to listen.
Neither man had begun that morning expecting to save or be saved by the other.
History placed a wall between them. A voice crossed it.
Twenty-seven hours in the dark
Genelle Guzman had come to the United States from Trinidad and Tobago only a few years earlier.
She worked for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey on the 64th floor of the North Tower. Like so many people inside the World Trade Center, she initially struggled to understand what had happened when American Airlines Flight 11 struck the building.
Eventually, Guzman and coworkers began making their way down.
They had descended dozens of floors when the North Tower collapsed.
What followed cannot really be conveyed by the word “trapped.” Guzman was buried inside an enormous field of crushed concrete, steel and pulverized building materials. Her body was pinned. Darkness surrounded her. People with whom she had been descending disappeared in the collapse.
For approximately twenty-seven hours, she remained beneath the ruins.
There is something almost unbearably intimate about her story because, for much of that time, there was no visible heroism. There was waiting. Pain. Fear. Thirst. Memory. The possibility of death.
And prayer.
Guzman has spoken openly about turning toward God beneath the rubble. She prayed about her life, the people she loved and the things she wished she had done differently. At one point, she believed she heard a man identify himself as Paul and felt a hand holding hers as rescuers approached. She has interpreted that experience through her Christian faith.
Other people may understand that moment differently. The essential fact needs no embellishment: when rescuers finally reached her, Genelle Guzman was alive.
She became the last person pulled alive from the wreckage of the World Trade Center.
Survival did not return her to the morning of September 10. It could not. She had injuries to heal, friends to mourn and the knowledge that people who had been beside her had died while she had lived.
That is another truth easily lost in the language of miraculous escape. A survivor carries gratitude, certainly, but survival can also carry questions for which there is no satisfactory answer.
Why me?
Why not the person beside me?
How does one accept a life that suddenly feels like a gift received in the presence of so many deaths?
The answer is rarely found on the day of the catastrophe. Sometimes it takes the rest of a lifetime.
The priest who went toward the suffering
Mychal Judge was already accustomed to going where people were hurting.
A Franciscan friar and Catholic priest, he served as chaplain to the Fire Department of the City of New York. Long before September 11 made his face known throughout the world, Judge had spent years accompanying firefighters and their families through injury, trauma and death.
His ministry extended far beyond the fire department. He was known for his closeness to people experiencing homelessness, people struggling with addiction, and men and women living with HIV and AIDS during years when fear and stigma caused many others to keep their distance. He was himself a recovering alcoholic.
People remembered that he listened.
When the World Trade Center was struck, Judge went there with the firefighters.
It is tempting, when describing people who enter dangerous places to help others, to make them seem fearless. That can make courage sound almost inhuman. Courage does not require the absence of fear; sometimes it means deciding that another person’s need is more important than the fear.
Inside the North Tower lobby, Judge prayed for the dead and the dying and ministered to firefighters amid worsening conditions. When the South Tower collapsed, debris crashed into the surrounding area. Judge was fatally injured.
He was 68.
A photograph of firefighters and others carrying his body from the wreckage became one of the enduring religious images of September 11. His death was officially recorded as casualty number 0001 in New York City’s death toll from the attacks.
There is something deeply Christian in the direction of his final journey. While thousands were desperately trying to move away from danger, Mychal Judge was moving toward people who needed him.
His vocation had already taught him that pattern long before that morning.
He went toward people with AIDS when others were afraid to touch them. He went toward people living on the streets when they were easy to overlook. He went toward firefighters in grief. On September 11, he went once more toward suffering.
He did not stop the disaster.
He was simply present inside it.
Sometimes presence is the only gift left to give.
The name of Father Mychal F. Judge, OFM, chaplain of the New York City Fire Department, at the National September 11 Memorial.
Photo: Thomas J. Hannigan / Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.
The shift that belonged to someone else
Far above the offices, at the top of the North Tower, stood Windows on the World.
The celebrated restaurant occupied the building’s uppermost floors and offered astonishing views across New York City. Its dining rooms welcomed wealthy clients, tourists and business gatherings. Behind those dining rooms, however, was another world: kitchens, storage rooms, uniforms, early shifts and hundreds of employees.
The view from Windows on the World, the restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center’s North Tower, before September 11, 2001.
Photo: Chris Morgan / Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.
Many were immigrants.
Sekou Siby was one of them. Originally from Côte d’Ivoire in West Africa, he had come to the United States and eventually found work at Windows on the World.
He was supposed to work on Tuesday morning, September 11.
A coworker, Moises Rivas, had asked him to exchange shifts. Rivas, an immigrant from Ecuador and a musician as well as a cook, wanted time for a weekend performance. Siby agreed to take Rivas’s earlier shift; Rivas would take Siby’s Tuesday morning shift in return.
It was an ordinary favor between coworkers.
Siby was therefore at home when the North Tower was struck. Rivas was at work.
Everyone trapped in Windows on the World that morning died. Seventy-nine employees and 91 guests were among those lost.
Moises Rivas was 29 years old. He was a husband and father.
The mathematics of survival can become cruel when it is personal. A small decision that meant nothing when it was made becomes enormous afterward. One man works Sunday instead of Tuesday. Another works Tuesday instead of Sunday. One lives. One does not.
For Siby, the question was no longer merely what had happened to his workplace. It was why the workplace had disappeared with so many people he knew inside it—and why another man had died during a shift that should have been his.
His response eventually became service.
In the aftermath of the attacks, displaced restaurant workers began organizing to help one another. Siby became involved in the movement that developed into the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, advocating for workers in an industry heavily dependent on immigrants and low-wage labor.
There is an important correction contained in stories such as his.
The World Trade Center was a symbol of global finance, but not everyone who died there was a financier. People were washing dishes, preparing breakfasts, cleaning offices, delivering food, repairing equipment and guarding doors. Some had crossed oceans and borders in search of a safer or more prosperous life.
A catastrophe can flatten those distinctions into a single word: “victims.”
Love requires us to put the distinctions back.
Salman took the train toward Manhattan
Mohammad Salman Hamdani was 23 years old.
Born in Karachi, Pakistan, he had moved to the United States as a child and grown up in New York City. He studied biochemistry at Queens College, worked in medical research, was trained as an emergency medical technician, and served as a cadet with the New York Police Department.
He was also Muslim.
On the morning of September 11, Hamdani was traveling toward work when he apparently saw the disaster unfolding in Lower Manhattan.
He changed direction.
Instead of continuing to his job, he went toward the World Trade Center to help. He was killed there.
His remains were not identified until months later.
Hamdani’s story carries a painful irony. In the confusion after the attacks, suspicion briefly fell on the missing young Muslim man. Questions were raised about whether his disappearance might mean something sinister. His faith and Pakistani background, in the atmosphere of fear surrounding the attacks, could make him appear suspect before the truth of his actions was fully known.
The truth was that he had run toward the catastrophe.
The United States Congress would later explicitly recognize Hamdani among Arab and Muslim Americans who acted heroically during the attacks. New York City eventually named a street in Queens in his honor: Salman Hamdani Way, identifying him as an EMT and NYPD cadet who died on September 11.
His story complicates any easy division of that morning into categories of “us” and “them.”
Al-Qaeda murdered people who were Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and of other faiths or none. It murdered Americans and citizens of many other countries. The terrorists belonged to an Islamist extremist organization; the people they killed cannot be divided according to the religious identity the terrorists claimed to defend.
Salman Hamdani was both Muslim and one of the people who answered suffering by trying to save strangers.
That fact matters.
When grief looks for an enemy
Four days after the attacks, another man was at his gas station in Mesa, Arizona, more than 2,000 miles from New York City.
His name was Balbir Singh Sodhi.
Sodhi had been born in India and immigrated to the United States, where he built a life and eventually owned a gas station and convenience store. He was Sikh and wore a beard and turban as visible expressions of his faith.
Those details became deadly.
A gunman who wanted revenge for September 11 saw Sodhi and decided that he looked like the enemy he had seen on television. The attacker apparently believed he was killing a Muslim.
Sodhi was not Muslim.
The distinction is essential and, at another level, irrelevant. Murdering an innocent Muslim in revenge for a terrorist attack would have been no less monstrous.
Balbir Singh Sodhi was shot and killed outside his business on September 15, 2001. The U.S. Department of Justice would later identify his murder as the first reported fatal act in the wave of violent backlash that followed September 11 against Muslims and people perceived to be Muslim, Arab or South Asian.
His death belongs to the human story of September 11 precisely because he was nowhere near the World Trade Center.
Terrorism seeks more than bodies. It seeks fear. Fear searches for certainty, and certainty can search for an enemy whose face is easy to recognize.
Once that process begins, an innocent Sikh shopkeeper can somehow become responsible for nineteen terrorists he never met.
The chain is ancient: someone wounds us; grief becomes anger; anger becomes suspicion; suspicion spreads guilt from individuals to a people; another innocent person suffers.
Breaking that chain is one of the hardest forms of courage.
The catastrophe that did not end that morning
For thousands of people, September 11 continued inside their bodies.
The enormous cloud produced by the collapse of the World Trade Center contained pulverized building material and hazardous contaminants. Firefighters, police officers, construction workers, volunteers, residents, office workers, students and cleanup crews breathed the air around Lower Manhattan during the attack and its long aftermath.
Among the people performing cleanup work were many immigrant and undocumented Latino workers whose names rarely entered the public story of Ground Zero.
Ground Zero after the attacks. Recovery and cleanup would continue long after September 11, exposing thousands of workers and residents to hazardous dust and contaminants.
Photo: The Eloquent Peasant / Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 4.0.
They cleaned apartments, offices and buildings. They removed dust. They helped make the city inhabitable again.
Some later struggled to obtain medical care or compensation.
The long-term consequences have become impossible to dismiss. The World Trade Center Health Program monitors and treats people with certified conditions that include cancers, respiratory and digestive illnesses, and mental health disorders. The New York City World Trade Center Health Registry has followed tens of thousands of people exposed to the attacks and their aftermath.
This changes the meaning of remembrance.
A disaster is not over because television coverage ends. The person pulling debris from a ruined building may become ill years later. A child who watched people fall may carry trauma into adulthood. A spouse may become a caregiver. A family may discover that the price of someone’s service is still being paid decades afterward.
The first days after catastrophe often produce extraordinary generosity. Food arrives. Volunteers appear. Donations pour in. Strangers embrace.
The harder test comes later.
Who remains when suffering is no longer news?
A Vincentian way of remembering
The story of September 11 belongs to those who died, those who loved them, those who survived and those whose lives were changed by the attacks. Turning a catastrophe of this magnitude into an illustration for any spirituality would diminish both the victims and the event.
A Vincentian perspective asks something different.
It asks how we look.
Vincent de Paul and Louise de Marillac lived in seventeenth-century France amid war, hunger, disease, displacement and enormous social inequality. They did not respond to suffering primarily with abstract explanations. They learned names, entered homes, visited the sick, organized resources, trained people, built networks and insisted that charity become practical enough to reach the person who actually needed it.
For Vincent, compassion without organization was not enough. For Louise, service demanded attention to details precisely because the person receiving care possessed dignity.
That tradition offers a revealing way to look back at September 11.
It directs our attention away from the towers for a moment and toward the person behind the wall.
It notices Genelle beneath the rubble when the skyline has already changed above her.
It walks with Mychal toward the wounded.
It remembers that Moises was not simply one of 2,977 dead but a cook, immigrant, musician, husband, father and coworker who had traded a shift with a friend.
It refuses to look at Salman and see a category before seeing a human being.
It stands beside Balbir and insists that grief cannot be allowed to manufacture another innocent victim.
And when the cameras leave, it stays with the worker who cannot breathe.
This may be one of the most demanding lessons of the Vincentian tradition: the poor and suffering person is never an abstraction. No one is simply “the homeless,” “the immigrant,” “the Muslim,” “the victim,” “the sick,” “the undocumented,” or “the survivor.”
There is always a name.
Names at the National September 11 Memorial in New York. The memorial restores individual names to a tragedy often remembered through enormous numbers.
Photo: The Pancake of Heaven! / Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.
What we choose to carry
September 11 changed the world in ways that reach far beyond the lives described here.
It reshaped security, aviation, intelligence services and foreign policy. It helped unleash wars whose consequences were borne by millions of people far from New York. It altered political language and public fear. It created new arguments about surveillance, liberty, national identity, terrorism, migration and religion.
Those histories matter and must be examined honestly.
They are not the only history.
There is also the history of a man hearing another man behind a wall and stopping to help him. There is the history of a woman praying in total darkness. There is a priest walking toward a burning building, a restaurant worker carrying the guilt of a traded shift, a young Muslim turning toward disaster because he had been trained to save lives, and a Sikh immigrant killed because another man’s grief had learned to hate.
None of those stories makes September 11 beautiful.
Nothing can make the murder of innocent people beautiful.
Compassion does not redeem terrorism, and heroism does not make catastrophe necessary. The goodness people revealed that day belongs to them, not to the violence that forced them to reveal it.
Perhaps this is why remembrance must remain personal.
Monuments preserve names in stone and metal. Ceremonies preserve dates. Archives preserve photographs, recordings and objects: a flashlight, a uniform, a prayer bench, a wallet, a piece of paper.
Human beings must preserve something more difficult.
We must preserve the ability to see one another.
Because somewhere behind every enormous historical event there is still a single person calling from behind a wall.
And the question history eventually asks of us may be very simple:
Did we hear?
And, if we heard, did we stop?
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Thank you, Javier, for another wonderful, well-researched article.