To this day his parents have not regained their joie de vivre. One, the son of friends, had just enough time to call his brother and say, “Please tell Mom and Dad that I love them a lot as I love you,” before the line went dead. We also heard heartbreaking stories about people we knew who were killed in the towers. Neither he nor his fellow brigade members ever returned. When they heard news of the attack, he decided to join his fellow squad members and went with them to the towers to help in the rescue efforts. But, like on so many other days, he had stayed behind to have breakfast with his colleagues. That day, about an hour before the attack on the Twin Towers, he had finished his shift.

One of the firefighters was a 34 years-old Argentine by the name of Sergio Villanueva. We also learned of the heroic behavior of hundreds of firefighters who risked their lives and of the many other people who lost theirs. An estimated seven percent of those killed in the attack on September 11 did so by jumping into the void from their offices. Richard Drew, who photographed one of the iconic images of that fateful day, the “Falling Man,” the lonely image of a man falling to his death with one of the towers in the background, said recently that for him it was the image of the Unknown Soldier. Soon after, we learned the details of what had happened, and heard stories and saw pictures of those who had thrown themselves voluntarily to their certain death rather than remain trapped inside an inferno. Without fully understanding the significance of events, I felt that a relatively peaceful way of life had been replaced by a darker, more sinister one.

I joined others rushing to the spot when a large group of people came running back shouting: “Go back, go back, for God’s sake, go back!” We rushed back only to discover later that it was a false alarm, that there would be no more attacks on the towers after the second plane hit. I could hear the cries from the street below: “Oh, no, no, no!” “Oh, my God!” I ran downstairs just in time to see the second tower crumble like a sand castle. I was listening to the radio in my apartment, a few blocks from Ground Zero, when the plane hit the first tower. I remember vividly the terrible day when our lives (our world) changed forever.

Memory pictures of 911