I have relived the horror and heroism of 9/11 through my children’s eyes
IIt was important they heard the stories of courage and kindness
vividly remember reporting on 9/11. I was a year into my job as a trainee reporter on the Hemel Hempstead Gazette
when the Twin Towers were attacked on that bright and sunny Tuesday morning in New York. We were due to go to press that afternoon but tore the whole edition up and started again. It was a stark lesson in how some stories are so historically significant that even a local paper like ours had no choice but to splash it.
Twenty years on and I have found myself revisiting the atrocity through my children’s eyes. My 12 and 11-year-old knew little of what happened before we sat down together to watch National Geographic’s phenomenal 9/11: One Day in America.
A harrowing series that tells the definitive story of the day the world watched in horror, I did at times question whether it would be too disturbing for their young minds but felt it was important that they heard the extraordinary stories of courage and kindness that go beyond the endlessly replayed footage of the sickening plunge of the planes into buildings full of people.
The series is entirely archive led, tied together by new interviews with survivors and relatives of the victims. The approach allows not only the horror to sink in, but also the humanity. My children emerged from the final episode speaking not of the terrorists but the extraordinary efforts of the first responders, as well as the ordinary people who became heroes that day.
People like Ron Clifford, the Irish-born software executive who somehow managed to rescue a badly burned woman. It was only when he got home that he found out that his beloved sister Ruth, and her four-year-old daughter, Juliana, were on the plane that had flown into the South Tower at the very moment that he was reciting the Lord’s Prayer with the woman he saved 90 floors below. It is important that these extraordinary stories not only continue to be told – but also continue to be heard by generations to come.