9/11 : HOPE AND HEALING
TWO DECADES AFTER THE CATASTROPHIC TERRORIST ATTACK, TWO WOMEN RECALL THEIR ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK CITY’S TWIN TOWERS AND HOW THEIR LIVES WERE CHANGED FOREVER
There was no sense of dread or panic inside the stairwell as Wendy Lanski joined the throng of people making their way down the World Trade Center’s North Tower on the morning of September 11, 2001. Minutes earlier, Lanski and her colleagues on the 29th floor had felt the building lurch following a “tremendous thud” and rumours quickly spread that a small aircraft had accidentally struck the Manhattan skyscraper. But the evacuation felt more routine than necessary.
“It was orderly,” the healthcare executive tells WHO. “People were chatting and courteous, holding doors open at each floor as people came in.”
But once the 31 year-old got to the lobby, it was clear something catastrophic was playing out in the upper floors of the World Trade Center’s iconic twin towers. “Both buildings were on fire and there were people screaming, people bleeding, people were burned and there was glass and marble everywhere,” she says. “Outside, I looked up and I saw the thing of nightmares: people jumping from the tower. I wondered what unimaginable horror was up there that made them decide to do that.”
What raged above was an unprecedented terrorist attack on US soil that would claim 2996 lives, including 10 Australians, and change the world forever. That day, the militant jihadist group Al-Qaeda, led by its radical Islamic founder Osama Bin Laden, launched a multi-pronged assault on the US involving four hijacked passenger jets. Two were flown into the twin towers, causing catastrophic damage and infernos, one flew into the Pentagon, and it’s believed the fourth was headed for the Capitol Building in Washington DC before a valiant band of passengers and crew stormed the cockpit and the plane crashed into a Pennsylvanian field.
By 10.28am, both of the 110-storey twin towers had collapsed, sparking apocalyptic scenes on the streets of Manhattan.
“Today, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack,” said the then-US President George W Bush in an address to a traumatised nation that night. “Thousands
of lives were suddenly ended by evil, despicable acts of terror.”
They were the lives of “everyday people”, says Lanski, who was born and raised in Long Island, New York. “There were children on the planes. There were 80-yearolds. People decided that day that they were going to try to kill me. I don’t know how anyone can forgive that kind of attack.”
Nor forget. Lolita Jackson, who was an executive for Morgan Stanley Investment Management on the 72nd floor of the South Tower, was in a meeting and glanced out the window when the first hijacked plane hit the neighbouring tower. “I saw the impact – and the flames shoot out, the papers flutter down,” she tells WHO. The then34-year-old, who had survived the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 (an attack that claimed six lives) was on her way down when her own tower was struck. “The whole building moved, like this,” says Jackson, moving her hands a metre to the side. “Everybody was like, ‘We’ve got to get out!’”
Lanski had already made it out of the North Tower when a nearby resident kindly ushered her and other survivors inside her apartment. Fifteen minutes later, she heard an “awful sound” – the South Tower collapsing at 9.59am. Lanski fled the apartment building and joined the crush of human lives trying to escape the area. “I had already taken off my heels and I was running barefoot down the street,” she recalls. “It was like a blizzard – a snowstorm of debris.”
Suffering from asthma, and having left her inhaler and other belongings behind, she struggled to breathe. “I yelled out, ‘Does anyone have an inhaler?’ And a man threw me his,” she says. “Then a stranger took off his tie and wrapped it around my mouth, like a little mask. People were just trying to help each other.”
By the time the North Tower collapsed a half-hour later, Jackson had fled the building and was on the subway, heading home. “When I got out of the subway, someone said, ‘The other one just fell,’ so I knew both the buildings had fallen,” she says. “I then just had to get home to tell my loved ones I was alive.”
“People were trying to help each other” LANSKI
Lanski saw the North Tower come down from Battery Park City, a waterfront neighbourhood on the southern tip of Manhattan. “All I’m thinking is that there are going to be people I’m close to, who didn’t make it out,” she says. Among them was her colleague and close friend Abraham “Abe” Zelmanowitz, a 55-year-old computer programmer who famously remained inside the
building to help his friend, quadriplegic Edward Beyea.
“Abe said, ‘I’m going to stay until there’s enough firemen to help get Ed down, too,’” says Lanski of Zelmanowitz, who President Bush hailed a hero. “He called his family to say the fireman had arrived and they were all heading down the stairs. Then the tower fell. He was a wonderful soul.”
Jackson also lost a close friend that devastating day. While evacuating the building, she had been with her colleague Thomas Swift, but he decided to stop on a floor and call his wife. Jackson kept going down. “Thomas then took an elevator and when the plane hit, the cable snapped,” she says, quietly. “He was in the elevator by himself.”
Her experience on 9/11 made Jackson realise “there’s another world out there”. The talented singer, who grew up poor before her intellect landed her a highpaying job on Wall Street, quit her job, performed in jazz bands and travelled, including taking a trip to Australia. She later got a job with the New York City Mayor’s Office, and still sings today.
“I was doing things that fulfilled me as a person,” says Jackson, 54, who has remained in Manhattan and is now the executive director of communications and sustainable cities at Sustainable Development Capital. “I thought, ‘I need to live my life to the fullest. Because I may not be here tomorrow.’”
For Lanski, her exposure to toxins on 9/11 resulted in her contracting the autoimmune disease sarcoidosis (many first responders contracted the disease). She also has post-traumatic stress disorder. “I get nightmares, I get flashbacks,” says Lanski, who is a COVID-19 survivor. “Unexpected sounds and smells can trigger me. If I see a plane and it feels lower than it should be, I’ll think, ‘What if it crashes in front of me?’”
In those moments she’s grateful for the steadfast support of her husband and “love of my life” Jerry, a former salesman who is paraplegic from an accidental fall at a friend’s home in 2016. “He’ll see it in my face and say, ‘The plane’s landing, it’s OK,’” says Lanski, who lives with Jerry in New Jersey. “He gets it, and that’s all you want.”
Despite her ordeal, Lanski has devoted her life to educating people about 9/11 and encouraging goodwill. She volunteers at New York’s 9/11 Tribute Museum and visits schools and organisations to talk about the attack, and combat hatred and ignorance toward the Muslim community.
“Fundamentalist lunatics created 9/11,” says Lanski, who is now a director at a health insurance provider. “If we allow 9/11 to create hatred toward a whole group of people, we let the terrorists take away who we are.”
It’s a message she’ll spread on the 20th anniversary when she delivers a speech at New Jersey’s Remembrance Ceremony
at Jersey City’s memorial, which overlooks Manhattan and the waterway she crossed on 9/11 when she was evacuated by ferry.
“I remember when the boat was pulling out that day, I looked at my city and all I saw was this burning, smoking mountain of rubble,” she recalls. “It was like a piece of your heart was gone.”
She now channels that pain to spread a message of peace and hope. “On September 11, I ask people to pick a name of a person who died and Google them,” she says. “Learn about their lives, what they liked to do. There are so many stories of good people, like Abe, who died that day. We have to honour them.” •