13 Mr. Demczur was interviewed at length by many news organizations following September 11.
14 Various accounts from this time show that rumors had already begun to spread through the streets of Lower Manhattan. These rumors listed the number of attacks in wildly varying numbers, locations, and degrees of severity.
15 The New York Times ran a daily section for many weeks called Portraits of Grief, which presented a dignified memorial to the people lost in the Towers. The page shared photos alongside well-written short pieces celebrating the lives and personalities of the deceased.
16 Anthony DePalma, “Jan Demczur; He Is Alive, and What’s Left of His Squeegee Is in the Smithsonian,” New York Times, September 11, 2002.
17 Harry Bruinius, “A Stunning Tale of Escape Traps Its Hero in Replay,” Christian Science Monitor, September 9, 2002.
18 Andrew Nynka, “World Trade Center Hero: Ukranian with a Squeegee,” Ukranian Weekly, June 30, 2002.
ARLENE CHARLES
Arlene Charles, forty-six, came to the U.S. from the island of Grenada over thirty years ago. She worked as an elevator starter on the 78th floor of Tower 1, a few floors below where the first plane slammed into the building at 8:45 A.M. on September 11.19
Arlene speaks with a lyrical island accent. Occasionally, she exhales a spirited “hooooo!” before plunging into a difficult memory. She gives the impression of a practical and able woman.
I WENT TO WORK at six o’clock that morning on the 78th floor. That wasn’t my normal spot, but one of the other ladies called in because she was on vacation and I said I’d take up the slack. My friend, Carmen Griffith, was with me, along with my friend James Rutherford.
Everything was going well until we heard that explosion. Boooom! Like everything in the building started shattering. I didn’t know what had happened. And I don’t know if it was like whiplash or what, but the strength just left my body and I went down, lying down flat on my face. I was scared.
I heard this lady screaming and I thought to myself, damn. Who is that screaming like that?
Then the woman’s voice screamed out, “Arlene! Please help me!”
I said, “Who is this?”
She said, “It’s Carmen! Can you help me?”
I said, “Carmen, I’m scared. But let’s talk to each other. We’ll talk to each other and follow each other’s voices.”
We had to follow each other’s voices because we wouldn’t have found each other any other way. When I looked up and opened my eyes, everything around me was black smoke. You couldn’t see anything on the 78th floor, not nothing at all. Hoooooo!
Now all of us elevator starters have a radio, you know? So while all this was going on, people were calling me on my walkie-talkie from downstairs and all over the place. I couldn’t answer at the time because I was so scared, and I guess they thought I was dead because I wasn’t responding. But when I finally answered they told me to get out of the building. I told them I was trying to find Carmen and I couldn’t leave her. As if I could see anything.
Well, the air began to clear out a little, and then I was able to see that the windows that faced Church Street and West Street had popped open. Shattered. We were open to the air seventy-eight stories up.
Then someone stumbled right into me and she was screaming and bawling. I turned to look and it was Carmen. She was on fire.
Over the walkie-talkie, they told me again to leave the building and I said, “I can’t do that, Carmen’s on fire.”
See, what had happened to her … she said she was in the elevator, taking people up to the Windows on the World. The explosion happened at the same time she closed the door. The car couldn’t move anywhere; everything was standing still. But she’s an elevator operator, so she knows how to take her hand and open the door, and that’s when she got burned. She had six people in the car with her, and she turned around to make sure they were okay when a ball of fire flew right up in her face and burned her.
She didn’t know what happened to the people in the car. She didn’t know whether they got out or not. Everything happened so fast, she said.
She had crawled right over to me, with me calling to her and all and saying, “Follow my voice.” Well. She was literally on fire when she reached me. Her face was all red. Her fingers were peeled back. No skin left. Hooooo, it was awful.
Now I was so scared. I led Carmen around, and we came upon this security guard for the floor.
I said to him, “Can you help me with Carmen, please?” But I think he was scared himself because he just turned around and disappeared, and I don’t know which way he went. I don’t know if he made it out of the building or what. I never saw him or heard from him again. He was a new guy and I didn’t really know him.
Then this man came and started helping me with Carmen. He told us to come to his office. Meanwhile, I’m trying to call downstairs on my walkie-talkie to find out what’s going on and the people on the radio kept repeating, “Arlene, just get out of the building!”
I said, “Well, I have Carmen here with me and she’s not too good, so I can’t get out.”
They asked me, “Where’s Rutherford?”
Rutherford was on the 106th floor. He had gone to bring some people up there before the explosion. He didn’t make it.
I kept on calling downstairs, but I couldn’t get no answer.
Then Carmen told me, “Arlene, I don’t want to die like this. Let’s get out of here, please.”
And I said, “Okay.”
Right about now, this woman showed up who worked for the Port Authority on the 88th floor. Her name is Audrey. And I asked her, “How did you know where we were?”
She said she had just passed Carmen and me on the floor right before the attack, and she said she’d heard Carmen screaming after the attack and she didn’t want to leave us. She had followed the noise until she found the office where me and Carmen were.
Well, Carmen kept screaming and screaming that she was burning and Audrey helped me put water on her skin, but it was all … it was all … it didn’t look good.
Then Audrey helped me get Carmen to the stairs and we climbed all the way down to the 30-something floor. I don’t really know which number it was we got down to, but it was a long way, I want to tell you that.
These two guys passed us in the stairwell—they were going up while we were coming down—and one of them gave me his shirt and wet it with some water. We applied it to Carmen’s face and the rest of her. She was still crying out that she was burning—she wanted the water to cool her off. Then some firemen passed us—they were on their way up, as well—and they opened their hose and wet us down.
Then a man saw us, two ladies struggling to help one another down the stairs, and he asked us if we needed help.
I said, “Yes. Thank you. Very much.”
They kept calling me on my radio and I kept on telling them what floor we were on. It was ridiculous. At that time, I didn’t know a second plane had hit. I didn’t even really know about the first plane, I just knew we were in big trouble. We were just trying to get out, that’s all.
Finally, we reached the concourse, having walked all the way down from the 78th floor, and I couldn’t walk anymore. Hooooo! I threw myself down and some lady said, “Oh my God, somebody give her some water.”
One of my co-workers, Alan Stephano, came over and gave me some water. He and a guy named Vito picked me up and brought me outside to an ambulance.
They asked me if I wanted to go to a hospital and I said no. All I was thinking was that I wanted to get home to my family, to my kids. They’d been calling me on my cell phone—for some reason it was working, don’t ask me why.
My little cousin had been at work and she kept calling me in particular. I said to her, “Alhana, I’m getting out, I’m trying to get out. Stop calling me. Just go tell my father, my aunt, and everybody that I’m okay.”
But she kept calling, wanting to make sure I was out of the building.
I got out of
the ambulance and started trying to get home just as Building 2 started crumbling down. I had to start running for my life again. I ran inside a building and I felt like the whole city was falling apart.
I didn’t see nobody I knew in there. I saw this guy and I begged him, “Please don’t leave me,” because I was so scared.
“No,” he said. “I’m not leaving you. I’m not leaving you.”
It turns out I walked all the way to the Brooklyn Bridge and across. I walked so far, my legs wouldn’t work the next day, all the way to Dean Street and 3rd Avenue, which is my neighborhood. Hooooo!
I found a phone and called my aunt. She told me to stay where I was and a cousin would come to pick me up. He came all right, but it took him almost an hour what with the traffic and all.
I didn’t have my pocketbook on me. I didn’t have no money. Everything vanished in the fire. My cousin took me to my aunt’s house, and I got a shower. I didn’t have a house key—that was gone, too—so I had to wait for my kids to come home.
My thirteen-year-old son, Jamahl, ran away from school when he heard about the Towers. He knew I worked in the building, and he thought I’d died. At lunchtime, he’d left the school and they couldn’t find him. The administrators were really worried. They knew I worked in the Trade Center, too.
The school kept on calling my house and they couldn’t find me, they couldn’t find my son’s sister or my stepdaughter, Sharon. She’s a cop and had to go in to work. When they finally got hold of me, it was nine o’clock at night. I answered the phone and someone asked to speak to Jamahl.
“Jamahl?” I said. “Who wants to talk to Jamahl? Who’s speaking?”
It was the principal at the school. And when I told him who I was he was so happy. They’d been worried about Jamahl since he’d left, knowing why he’d gone, knowing that he thought he’d lost me.
Sometimes, when I tell people that I made it down from the 78th floor, they can’t believe it. And Carmen, the fact that she made it down with me is a miracle.
They took her to Long Island Hospital. Her husband was in the building during the attack, too, and they couldn’t find each other during all the confusion. But they eventually transported him to the same hospital, and that’s where they found each other. Imagine that.
It was so funny. The same day they moved Carmen’s husband to that hospital, the Maury Povich show came and picked me up. They took me to see Carmen. I hadn’t seen her since the eleventh, and it was good to see her again.
Right now, I’m on workers’ compensation. Our union is helping us out a lot; the company is trying hard to get everybody back to work. A lot of people are back already. We’ve got good people in our union, a good president and a good vice president, thank God for that. If we didn’t have the union, I don’t know what I’d be doing right now. We never expected this to happen.
We knew everybody in that building, you know. To us, they were like a family. Since we were in charge of the elevators, we’d say good morning or good night to nearly everyone we came across, and we saw them every day. The people in Cantor Fitzgerald?20 We saw them every day.
This is something I’ll never get over. Never. I came to this country thirty years ago, and I love this country, I really do. But this wasn’t what I expected, you know?
19 An elevator starter monitors the elevators in a building. If someone gets stuck in a car, the elevator starter tracks where the car has stopped, coordinates the efforts to free anyone trapped inside, and ultimately greets the people once the car doors are finally opened.
20 Cantor Fitzgerald, one of the strongest bond trading firms in the world, lost approximately 700 of its 1,000 employees in the attack. By September 19, 2001, the firm’s management had made a pledge to distribute 25 percent of the firm’s profits each quarter for five years. They further committed themselves to paying for ten years of health care and benefits for those families and loved ones who had lost family in the attack.
GABRIEL TORRES
Gabriel Torres, thirty, is a security officer who manned lobby entrances and various checkpoints throughout the Trade Center complex. Part of his job was to monitor the traffic of office workers passing by. His usual post was in Building 5.
Of the World Trade Center, Gabriel says: “It was a high risk place. We used to get bomb threats all the time. Anytime an anniversary of the 1993 bombing passed, for instance, somebody would call and say they had a bomb.”
Gabriel goes on to say that this complacency—the fact that people became somewhat inured to threats that never coalesced—became a factor in how people initially responded to the attacks on September 11. He speaks with a rapid-fire, streetwise cadence when he tells his story.
SEPTEMBER 11 STARTED like a normal day. I used to get to work at 5:00 A.M. for the 5:30 roll call. Then at 6:00, they dispatched me to the concourse level of 5 World Trade.
I saw the people I normally saw and said hi, talked to them. I knew a lot of people by name. Where my post was, they had a newsstand right in front of the E train—they had a Mrs. Fields cookies shop. The lady there used to give me chocolate chip cookies.
The morning went by, and everything was quiet. Then, around 8:45, I was talking to a co-worker and we heard a loud bang, but we didn’t pay no mind to it. It wasn’t close to us; it was more like a faraway bang. We thought it came from construction outside. You know how they have those big metal plates that cover the ground during road repairs? We thought somebody had dropped one of those.
Seconds later, people came running down the hallways of the concourse and I thought, what the hell’s going on? I tried to ask somebody and I could have sworn I heard somebody say, “Gun!” So right then I was thinking that some madman was running around with a weapon in the concourse. I told people, “Come over here! Come over here!”
A couple minutes went by and I still didn’t know what was going on. Then I saw one of my co-workers who worked in the lobby of Tower 1 stagger around the corner. He was holding his arm and he was real busted up, bleeding from a wound on the back of his head.
I yelled at him, “What the hell happened?”
And he said, “I don’t know, an explosion.” So now I thought this was a bomb.
I sat him down and tried to talk to him. I called on my walkie-talkie, but the radio was buzzing with mass confusion. Everybody was calling each other at once, and I heard a lot of screaming.
Someone said, “Get off the radio!” But I said, “No, I got a guard over here that’s hurt. He’s a mess. I need help.” So they sent the EMS.
EMS came quick and my supervisor was with them. She told me, “Look, we gotta start evacuating these people. A plane just hit the building.”
While EMS was working on the co-worker of mine from Building 1, he told me this: He’d been at the turnstiles where people swipe their security cards to enter the Towers. Then there’d been a big crash, which we now knew was when the plane had hit the building. When that happened, some elevators must’ve ripped loose from their cables and shot down their shafts to the main floor, because they broke through the wall he was standing right in front of. The wall exploded and the pieces went flying, hitting his arm and head.
I said, “Oh my God,” and I told the people at Mrs. Fields and the newsstand that a plane had hit the building. I started to get them out.
Then I said to myself, hold on, let me run off and call my mom. I’d tried using my cell phone, but that wasn’t working, so I went to the pay phones. After a while, I finally got through. I called my mom at her job and said, “Mom. Yo, there’s something going on here, a plane hit the building.”
She was like, “I know. We’re watching it on TV. You gotta be careful. Get outta there.”
I said, “Mom, I’m here doin’ my job. I gotta do what I gotta do. But God forbid—if I don’t make it—call my wife and tell her I love her. Tell my son.”
At that point, my mom went crazy on the phone. And then the line went dead.
Then the F and D20 got on the loudspeaker a
nd, for some reason, told the people in Building 2 that everything was okay. I guess they thought it was just an accident. Hearing that, a lot of people went back up to their offices. Minutes after that, the second plane hit. I didn’t hear it, though. I was in the concourse, evacuating people.
Right about then, I saw people coming toward me with skin missing, bleeding, smoke filling up the place, ba ba ba ba, you know? And I was like, “Awww, shit.” You know what I mean? I started talking to myself, saying, “This is crazy.” Thinking it must all be some kind of dream.
Then one of my co-workers, a tall African guy name of Ajalah Godwin, he decided to walk over to Building 2 to evacuate people and see what was what. A lot of my supervisors and coworkers had been in that area before the buildings came down, trying to figure out what was going on. I watched Ajalah go, and right then someone told me that another plane had just hit the Pentagon. So I ran over to Ajalah, told him the news, and said, “Be careful.”
He looked at me and said, “What’s going on?”
I didn’t know, and that’s what I told him. Not a clue. I thought about staying with him but instead I ran back to Building 5 and kept evacuating people. Must’ve been a couple of minutes later … that’s when Building 2 started coming down.
It was like something out of a movie, you know? All I heard was the noise: Whhhhhhoooooooooouuuuuuu. Then the wind and the pressure coming for you. From a distance, I could see all the lights in the concourse cutting off, one by one as the darkness rolled toward me. I thought it was another plane coming through the building, right over me.
“Holy shit.”
I dove under the pay phones in the concourse. As soon as I did, everything flew past me. People. Debris. A hurricane. I was balled up with my head down, screaming, “Oh my God, what’s going on?” It was the wind caused by the pressure of the building coming down, and it was blowing everything and everybody away. Windows blew out from the stores around me. I kept on screaming.
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