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A TERROR THAT TOWERS OVER US
Twenty years after the collapse of the World Trade Center, those who survived, and their families, are haunted by the horror. A searing new documentary shares their stories
Two decades on from 9/11, artist Vanessa Lawrence is running along a deserted beach near her home on the west coast of Scotland. She is in a setting about as far removed from the horrors of that day in New York as you can get. It’s a clever and poignant opening to a new documentary about the attacks on the Twin Towers of Manhattan’s World Trade Center, underlining that however many miles – or years – we put between ourselves and personal tragedy, sometimes there is no escape.
Manchester-born Vanessa is, technically, a survivor of the terror attacks (although the film questions that neat description). As an artist, she had won a residency at the World Trade Center and was working on a painting of the city skyline from a studio on the 91st floor of the North Tower.
Vanessa, then 26, had arrived at 6am to catch the early morning light, which was particularly beautiful that day. ‘I’d been trying to capture that amazing sunrise,’ she recalls.
Had Vanessa been at her easel when the plane hit, she would not be here to tell the tale. ‘My studio was on that side of the tower. It would have been over very quickly, I think.’ But she’d popped downstairs to get a juice, and at 8.46am was just coming back up in the lift, which was on the opposite side of the building. As she stepped out on the 91st floor the tower was rocked by a massive explosion, which threw her out. The lift plunged downwards.
No one in the building above this level survived. That Vanessa made it down at all is a miracle, but she did, walking down 1,729 fire escape steps, in the pitch black, sometimes trapped in smoke-filled stairwells.
Today, the images are still vivid in her head, which is a whole other terror. ‘I was watching a film the other night and there was an explosion, and it happened in slow motion. I thought, “They’ve got that right”, because it is what it felt like.’
She was on the ground at the bottom of the North Tower, when she saw the South Tower coming down. ‘I remember it being silent, but obviously it can’t have been. The thing that strikes me now is how every tiny decision you make in that situation determines whether you will live. I remember seeing people rushing down a subway entrance across the road. I’d only taken one step when there was a big explosion coming out of it.’
In the chaos, she was aware she’d lost one of her flip-flops, then that she couldn’t breathe. ‘I was trying but I just couldn’t,’ she recalls. ‘Then this little voice, which seemed to come from my stomach, said, “Keep going, keep going.”’ Somehow she managed to get a breath, and staggered to a nearby fire engine, where a firefighter helped her pour water over her face. ‘It was then I saw my flip-flop poking out of the debris and went to get it. He said, “You have more important things to worry about than your flip-flop.”’
She walked, in a daze and bare
‘Any smell of burning and I go into a panic’
foot, to her friend’s house in Manhattan. ‘She said when she saw me coming down the street that I looked like a walking statue.’
Like so many 9/11 survivors, Vanessa divides her life into before that day and after, and even now has difficulty talking about it. She still has ‘episodes’. ‘It will be a windy day, and I will think something is going to fall on me, I will get trapped. Things still trigger it, smells, sounds. Any smell of burning and I go into a sense of panic.’ Tears fall from her eyes. ‘It’s not rational.’
Vanessa moved back to the UK shortly after the attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people in total, and has returned to Manhattan only a couple of times. ‘The last time was difficult,’ she says. ‘I had a meeting in the financial district [where the towers had been] and had to sit down in the street because I felt so claustrophobic.’
Since then she has tried to make sense of it all (‘Why did I make it out? It’s a huge part of who I am’) through her art. She used her lost flip-flop as inspiration for a piece of sculpture, which featured a flip-flop twisting out of plaster. She called it Left Behind, ‘because a part of me was left behind’.
She’s also returned to the painting she was working on that morning, attempting a re-creation. ‘Obviously the original was lost. So I’ve had to work on it from memory.’ It’s unfinished, and perhaps always will be.
Surviving 9/11 is a devastating documentary, intersplicing the minute-byminute events of that day told by witnesses with an examination of what has happened in survivors’ lives since. ‘It didn’t feel enough to make a film purely about the past,’ says director Arthur Cary, who spent more than a year talking to contributors. ‘It’s much more interesting to see the impact of the past on the present.’
That impact can be devastating to witness. We meet Malcolm Campbell, from Northampton, who lost his son Geoff, 31, in the disaster. A risk analyst working in New York, Geoff was at the World Trade Center for a meeting. Malcolm was hillwalking in Wales on the day, and returns to the spot on each anniversary, needing to be alone in his grief. ‘The whole world watched Geoff being killed,’ he says. ‘That’s very strange and very difficult.’ Geoff’s brother Matt has a wholly different way of coping with the loss. He believes there’s been a conspiracy to conceal the truth of what happened on 9/11 and is filmed poring through documents seeking evidence. Father and son have clearly pulled apart on this, grieving in incompatible ways. ‘There is a gap in the family,’ says Malcolm. ‘It doesn’t quite work as well as it did before.’
In the States, Lauren Manning’s son Tyler, 21, is not on any official
‘The whole world saw my son being killed’
list of victims of 9/11. In fact, theoretically, he’s one of the lucky ones. His mother, who was late getting to work at the World Trade Center on that fateful day, did come home again. Granted, it was six months after the attacks, the intervening time spent in hospital after being badly burned when hit by a fireball in the lobby of the North Tower while going to get a lift up to the offices of financial services company Cantor Fitzgerald – 658 of her colleagues died that day.
She was not expected to pull through after suffering third and fourth-degree burns on 82.5 per cent of her body, yet she did. She has said that as she was lying on the ground outside the towers, she knew she must fight because Tyler, aged just ten months at the time, needed her. Lauren has since written books and given motivational talks about her fight for survival. It’s a difficult balance, though. ‘I’ve come to be defined by it,’ she says, of that day. So has her son, it seems.
In the documentary they are filmed watching terrible footage from 2001, with Lauren’s hands so badly damaged they do not even look like hands and part of her ear just melted off. Tyler was brought in to see his mother and did not recognise her. The footage features him pushing his little walkalong along the corridors.
He’s grown up watching her having to learn to walk and talk again, and enduring hundreds of operations. Now, he’s an angry adult, telling the cameras that rather than the authorities killing Osama bin Laden, ‘I wish they had brought him here so I could torture him. Yeah, I’d hurt him.’
Lauren admits questioning whether it would have been better for her son if she’d died that day. The sight of her wounds are, to this day, ‘the cause of such pain to him’. She talks of Tyler growing up with a mother ‘who didn’t look like other moms’, of endless hospital visits, and of scarring – of all types. ‘I’ve asked myself if it would have been better, for him, if I’d died. If there was a perfect picture of us on his bureau, he would have those unblemished memories. Would that have been a better legacy?’
Tyler wouldn’t agree, of course. He’s been treated for post-traumatic stress disorder, and has set up an organisation to help others. On the anniversary this year, the Manning family will join their Cantor Fitzgerald work family – including hundreds of bereaved children – to mourn and remember. Twenty years on, the pain is still palpable.