I’ve seen this over and over again, both at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and now with the commemoration of 9/11. We learn that, in our worst moments, in the most egregious examples of inhumanity, we also see people acting their best. Yes, it’s true that, sometimes, heroism comes to us via instinctual courage. But many other times, it’s simply a choice.
That’s a big part of what you experience at the 9/11 Memorial Museum. We put these stark choices in front of people. Of course, you encounter the horrific story of that day. You may find yourself devastated by the unjust, indefensible loss of human life. But also, I think, you’ll be ennobled by stories of justness, generosity, and incredible spirit. By the people who went out of their way to do whatever they could to help each other. We’ve seen incredible resilience come out of those kinds of responses. And they were all choices.
That’s why I think we remember. We’re essentially asking ourselves, “What choices are we going to make when presented with our own challenging circumstances?”
Grief requires that we find a place to put our grief, or else we can’t function. That’s why we have cemeteries, why we have monuments and memorials.
It’s like Gettysburg. I wasn’t alive during the Civil War. But Gettysburg is the container for that experience. It allows our country to acknowledge what’s happened, but also to move beyond it. And we had to go on. To rebuild and renew. We had to do that in order to be resilient.
I see the 9/11 Memorial and Museum as the container for the nation’s grief. It’s a very important function. In normal times, we welcome three million people a year from all over the world.98
How do they react to their visit? Obviously, experiences are different for everyone. If you’d asked me that when the museum first opened in 2014, or even when the memorial opened in 2011, I would have given a different answer than how I respond today. Because at that point, the majority of visitors came with their own 9/11 narrative imprinted in their memories.
If we’re making gross generalizations, I think the museum experience is definitely different for people who lived through the event. They have a memory of it, and they’re coming back maybe with some hesitation. They don’t want to re-experience this horrible day.
We found this with New Yorkers in particular. The local audience only tends to come when relatives come in from out of town and say, “Take me there, I want to go. The museum’s got such a great reputation. That’s the one attraction we want to see.”
For people who lived through 9/11 but were not so closely affected by it, either through loss or experience, there’s a real desire to come. It’s a pilgrimage of sorts. The event is ingrained in their consciousness, and they come to pay respects. For those people, I think—for the most part—the Memorial and Museum provides an elevating experience.
But the event was very personal for New Yorkers; 9/11 is still very much on their minds. It’s a prism through which we still view the world.
For myself, I’ll look up and, if it’s a crystal-clear blue sky, I’ll still say, “Oh, it’s a 9/11 sky.” It’s just so much in my head.
I think New Yorkers still have a bit of anxiety below the surface. Maybe less so now than five years ago. Certainly, less now than ten years ago.
For instance, a couple of years ago there was a flyover of the Statue of Liberty, and people here freaked out because they heard that sound of a plane flying way too low. There hadn’t been enough notification, and people thought it was another terrorist attack.
People in other cities understand this. In Boston, certainly. Areas around Washington, D.C., L.A., San Francisco, and so on. But I don’t think that reaction happens to people in other places around the country. It’s not as visceral.
Still, as I say, if they lived it, they remember it. And the museum affects them, too.
One of the funny things about 9/11 is the way the event cut straight across different sectors of society.
We have all the blue-collar service workers for whom 9/11 is very much their story—law enforcement and firefighters. First responders. Construction workers. All the civic organizations. But 9/11 was also deeply personal to people in different economic positions.
Think of all the financial services organizations that were at the World Trade Center. The banks and the brokerages, the bond traders. 9/11 was just as personal for these people.
The fact that people of every denomination and persuasion were killed on 9/11 is what makes the event so universal, what allows it to transcend.
We have to remember that, while 9/11 happened to us, on our soil, it was experienced as a global tragedy and a global loss. A lot of Americans come to pay their respects, but people from over ninety nations were killed that day. Every year, we have heads of state who come during the United Nations General Assembly to pay their respects. Prior to COVID, about thirty percent of our visitors were international.
Another important point is that 9/11 was an unprecedented moment of collective global witness. An estimated one-third of the world’s population witnessed the attacks in 2001. People watched it happen literally around the world, in real time or in the news broadcasts that ran endlessly throughout the day. It was a shared experience. A universal wound. And a wound that united us as human beings, beyond boundaries of nationality, region, and ethnicity.
Here in the United States, we know it as a watershed event. Certainly, the world order has shifted in interesting ways in the aftermath of 9/11. But it was also a watershed event for people around the world. What I’ve learned is that, even in countries like India, for example—which has some of the highest, if not the highest rates of terrorist incidents in the world—they were as shocked and unprepared for what happened on 9/11 as we Americans were.
People have told me that, “Here in our country, we never know when the next event is going to happen. We feel vulnerable all the time. But America was safe. For us, it was the last best place.”
That was taken away from everybody on 9/11.
That’s one of the things we thought about a lot when creating the museum experience: this sense that all these people would be coming with their own 9/11 story. We knew we couldn’t be a conventional museum, an expert voice telling people what they already knew. Instead, we designed the museum as it is. It takes in all those voices.
For instance, when you walk into our memorial exhibit, you see that all four walls, floor to ceiling, are covered with nearly 3,000 faces. Right away, you see that every ethnicity is there. Every faith tradition. People two and a half years old to eighty-five are represented. And you can tell by the names, they’re not all from one place. It’s an immediate experience of the scale of the tragedy.
We worked very hard not to politicize the event. It’s a fine line. We talk about the rationale of al-Qaeda; we give you that background. But our goal is to communicate the human experience of a historical event. It’s always about what happened to people. Because if you get at what happened to people, you transcend the politics, you transcend the differences, and you start seeing yourself in the story.
When you look at those 3,000 faces, right away you understand: “This happened to all of these people? This could have happened to me.”
It’s about seeing yourself in the history and building up a fundamental intolerance for the use of terrorism as a tool of grievance.
So the people who were alive during 9/11 and remember it—that’s one group of people with one set of reactions we tried to consider. But it’s now twenty years after the event. We have a large number of visitors who didn’t live through 9/11. They have no personal memory of these events.
I call them “young people,” but some of them aren’t that young now. Some are in their twenties. They may have been three or four years old when 9/11 happened, so they don’t have a memory of it. And of course, this group includes anyone younger than that.
We find that many students who come to the museum know very little about 9/11. When I speak to young people, they begin to tell me their
parents’ story! I’ve talked to our educators about this. It’s fascinating!
The young people didn’t live it. But because 9/11 was such a moment of rupture for so many people, their parents will say, “Well, this is what happened to me on 9/11. This is my story. This is where I was, this is what I was doing.” So these young people tell you their parents’ story as if it’s their story. I just think that’s a fascinating transmission of family history through a historical event.
And young people certainly have no context for the changes that came after 9/11.
“Of course, you always take your shoes off when you go to the airport! Isn’t that what always happened?”
No. That didn’t always happen.
“Well, of course when I go to a museum or a library or a public space, I open my pocketbook or my book bag and they have to rifle through it!”
No! That didn’t used to happen!
People in this age group have no counterpoint for what’s going on now. So that’s where we focus a lot of our educational resources.
We speak to a lot of people in this generation as they enter the service professions. Police officers. Firefighters. The military. Intelligence agencies. A while back, several of these agencies came to us (the FBI is a case in point) and they said, “We need these young analysts and young agents to know about what happened, so they understand the agency they work for.”
We were unprepared when they first made that request. But over the years, we’ve developed many wonderful professional training programs that help young recruits appreciate the agencies and organizations they’ve chosen to join. To have a deeper understanding of the role they play in society, but also the role that members of their organization played on 9/11.
They’re the ones taking responsibility for our security and safety in a world that, in so many ways, was engendered by 9/11. And yet they have very little understanding of it. And each year, the people we talk to get younger and younger!
I’ll never forget this. It moves me so much just thinking about it.
We were training a new group of detectives with the NYPD. And we had a former NYPD detective, a man by the name of Jimmy Luongo.
Jimmy got up and talked about how, when 9/11 happened, he was deployed immediately to the site and that afternoon was assigned to be the Incident Commander at Fresh Kills (in Dutch, that means “fresh water”), a recently closed landfill in Staten Island that was reopened for the massive forensic operation of shifting through millions of tons of debris from the World Trade Center site.
Now remember, there were 1.8 million tons of debris at Ground Zero. Huge pieces of steel. Pulverized concrete. Molten building materials. Tangled rebar. And you had the rescue operation going on. They were searching every iota of material to recover personal property, and because human remains were in there. People, too, had been pulverized. And there was a deep dedication to try and return some part of them to their families.
Jimmy was ordered to set up the operation at Fresh Kills so that the wreckage at Ground Zero could be transported by truck and barge over to Staten Island. His supervisor said, “Oh, and we need this to start tomorrow morning.”
Jimmy was flabbergasted. He didn’t know where to begin! He expressed his concern to his supervisor, who ordered him to “just figure it out!”
So Jimmy was telling these young detectives his own story from a moment of duress. He was telling them, “Be prepared to go beyond what you think you can do, because it’s going to happen in this line of work.”
And then he said something like this: “At some time in your career, somebody is going to give you an order to do something you’re going to think you can’t do. But you know what? You’re going to just do it. You are going to just figure it out. Because you don’t have a choice. The situation demands it. The moment demands it. And in that moment, you will rise.”
It was a very personal story, and it came right out of a personal 9/11 experience. But it transcends that history to become an educational guidepost for another generation of service.
Here’s another story that took my breath away. It taught me so much.
When I first came to the project, I met a woman who’s since died, Marilynn Rosenthal. She was a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan.
Marilynn lost her son on 9/11. He was a passenger on hijacked United Airlines Flight 175, which was crashed into the South Tower. And she wanted to meet the family of a young man who was one of the hijackers, Marwan al-Shehhi.
Somehow, she was able to get in touch with Marwan’s family. She flew to Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates and was met at the airport by a cousin who basically said, “We’re honored to have you with us. We’re so sorry for your loss. But our Marwan wasn’t one of the hijackers. Our Marwan could never have done such a thing.”
They took Marilynn to see the family, who were very hospitable. She had a whole conversation with them, and she asked, “Is Marwan around?”
“No,” they said. “We haven’t seen him in years.”
This was a few years after 9/11. In their minds, there was no connection between their relative, Marwan, and the Marwan al-Shehhi who was a hijacker on the airplane.
“Something terrible must have happened to him,” they said. “Marwan’s passport must have been stolen. Maybe he was kidnapped or killed.”
The family admitted they didn’t know what had happened to him. But they kept insisting, “He would never have done that. This is not the person you’re looking for.”
When it was time for Marilynn to leave, the same cousin took her to the airport. This time, when he looked at Marilynn, he said, “Why would he have done it?”
And so it began. That person, and that family perhaps, began to think … could this be possible?
Now, Marilynn Rosenthal was a sociologist. She had this innate sense of “you talk to people as people.” You know? Because politics is one thing. Journalism is another. But Marilynn functioned from a standpoint of “I’m a mother who lost her son. You are people who also lost someone close to you. so I want to talk to you. I want to understand, because we are connected profoundly by the loss of our sons.”99
It comes down to seeing each other as human beings. This is what we strive for at the Memorial and Museum when we communicate both what happened on 9/11 and the human response to it.
What allows people to commit mass murder is that they stop seeing human beings as human beings. Now they’re targets, right? They’re expendable, collateral damage, whatever you want to call it. They’re not people anymore. That’s where atrocities always begin.
Right now, there’s a fundamental absence of empathy in this crazy, messed up world. But if we can get to empathy, if we can get to connection, there’s a kernel of possibility that we can make change.
A few years ago, we had Justice Sonia Sotomayor in to speak. She’s a New Yorker and a real teacher.
There were a number of young people in the audience, and she went right over to them. Drove her Secret Service crazy because she literally got off the stage to talk to these kids! She wanted them to know her 9/11 story, but the story she told wasn’t about 9/11 at all. It took place about a day or so afterward.
She said she was on the street somewhere and she saw somebody, a stranger, who appeared to be in emotional distress. Maybe they’d lost somebody. Maybe they were just still in shock or whatever. So Justice Sotomayor crossed the street to give this person a hug.
That story said everything to me. Transcending differences by recognizing the common wound.
But somehow we didn’t hold on to that. After 9/11 … you remember? We had this coming together of our society, our country, the world. Everybody said, “We are there for you!” “Nous sommes tous américains” was the headline of Le Monde on September 12. “We are all Americans.”
You had this sense of people caring for each other. This acknowledgement that we’re all in this together. That our wounds would bind us to each other, make us more compassionate to
ward one another.
It was too short-lived. Whether that was because of political decisions or whether that was just because you can’t sustain that level of caring? I don’t know.
For me, the question remains: Why does it take an event like 9/11 for people to show what they’re capable of as compassionate, caring human beings?
It seems to take something, some event, that breaks the dream most of us find ourselves in most of the time. To remind us what actually matters.
For many people who lived through 9/11, they’re shocked that it’s been twenty years. The twentieth anniversary has a great deal of resonance for these people. Certainly, this is true of people like first responders who lost so many of their colleagues and family members. Sometimes they have a hard time coming in. And, as I said, New Yorkers in general have this built-in reaction of, “Well, we lived it! Why do we need to go? We already know what happened!”
I think a lot of people from these groups come to the museum bearing this worry about: What am I going to experience? Is it going to be painful? Is it going to re-traumatize me? Will I be able to handle it? But many times, I think they’re … how should I put it? Surprised. Shocked, maybe. By their reaction to being in the museum’s physical space.
I don’t want to be overly ambitious about our project. But I think it’s an almost therapeutic experience. You know how they say in psychology that, when you re-encounter trauma, that’s the only way you can actually get beyond it?
We did not want to create a museum that was a three-dimensional version of a history textbook. The museum provides a safe space for re-encountering the events of that day and for commemorating people in the fullness of their lives, not as victims of mass murder. The historical exhibition takes you through the narrative of the day. Every moment, including its antecedents. What led up to the 9/11 and the world we found after 9/11.
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