Tower Stories Page 7

  There was an opening at the railing and I thought that, if we just continued to move forward and stayed right where we were next to the railing, we’d be able to board a ship easily. I’m taller than Daisy and Leslie, so I moved them ahead of me so I could keep an eye on them—like a mother duck does to her ducklings when she moves them from one location to another. Miraculously, we slid into the line and onto the dock where a line of people had queued up to buy tickets.

  Leslie had no money and this worried her—she said she needed to find an ATM machine. I’d never taken the ferry before, but I said, “There’s no way they could possibly be worried about checking tickets today.”

  There were too many people pushing onto the boat, like a bunch of people storming the stage at a rock concert to get an autograph from their favorite musician. I looked around and saw another boat nearby with hardly anyone on it. Someone in the crowd called out that the empty boat was going to Hoboken, New Jersey. I said, “Let’s get on that one.”

  As we approached the boat, I asked one of the ferry workers, “To Hoboken … right?”

  He said, “No, this one’s going to Jersey City. The boat across the way is Hoboken.”

  Thank God I thought to ask. Daisy said she’d take the Jersey City ferry since her daughter lived there; she could stay with her. I said, “Okay, take care.” And Daisy left.

  Then Leslie and I moved across the dock to the other ferry. Again she said she needed to find an ATM machine. I said, “Look. Don’t worry. They’re not checking tickets. Let’s just get on and go.”

  At this point, I started to get a little nervous. The boat was filling up fast in front of us, and I was worried there wouldn’t be enough room. Then a ferry worker yelled to the people on board, “Move back, make more room! Move back!” The next thing we knew, we were on board.

  Leslie was still in front of me. I wanted to get to the upper outside deck so I could continue watching the Towers, but there were three men blocking the way to the stairs—one standing in front of the stairs and two more sitting on the steps. I thought, why are they just watching all these people push their way in? Why won’t they move to allow more people on board?

  The man sitting on the highest step held his head in his hands. He looked disheveled, totally consumed by despair. I stood there for a moment looking at him, wanting to ask if he was okay. He was most likely in shock. But I was still being pushed from behind.

  Leslie and I made our way toward the back of the boat, where there was a covered section. Wooden benches similar to the pews you see in a church ran three across and down the whole section. Leslie suddenly caught sight of a woman she knew who was sitting in one of the middle rows. “I want to go see her,” she said. And off she went.

  I went to the very rear of the boat and sat in the last row next to a window. There was a group of five businessmen hanging around there and I couldn’t help but overhear their conversation. They were talking about what had happened, and I heard one of them say, “Two planes.”

  I turned around and asked, “Was it really two planes?”

  One of the guys said, “Yes.”

  I lowered my head and shook it in disbelief. During the whole ride to Hoboken, I kept looking out the window. Both Towers were smoking. That’s when I realized how utterly numb I felt. I hadn’t had a chance to take stock of it before, but now I was in shock.

  When I got to Hoboken, I hopped a train to Berkeley Heights. I was staying there for the week with my cousin, John, because I had three daytime conferences and three late-evening committee receptions scheduled for the week. Daily commutes to and from my home in upstate New York would have been murderous.

  On the train, I found a seat across from a young Indian woman and sat down. We looked at each other and gently smiled “hello.” We didn’t say anything because words didn’t seem necessary.

  A young man wearing a yarmulke sat on the aisle facing me. We looked at each other, too. Just a blank stare. I watched him bring out this little prayer book. Again, he looked at me and I blinked my eyes, nodding my head up and down, hoping that he’d get my signal to say whatever he was going to say aloud. He must have understood because he started reciting a prayer in Hebrew. The woman in front of him turned in her seat to listen.

  Even though I didn’t understand a word he was saying, I knew that it was a prayer for those poor people in the planes and in the Trade Center. And somewhere during his prayer, I started reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

  He finished. We looked at each other. I smiled a little smile and I knew he understood it for a thank you. I kept reciting the Lord’s Prayer for a long time.

  At one point I remember thinking, all of my shoes are gone. See, I never wore good heels to the office. I commuted in comfortable shoes, like penny loafers or sneakers. I kept about fifteen pairs of shoes in one of my desk drawers, blue shoes and red shoes, purple shoes and tan shoes. Beige shoes. Green shoes. I had sandals with big high heels and sandals with low, short heels. I must have had five pairs of black shoes. All gone.

  Then I realized how stupid it was for me to think about my shoes. What about all our office equipment? We’d finally gotten a great postage machine and now it was gone. All of our computers; all of our membership records; all the paperwork I’d ever generated in sixteen years. Gone.

  Then it hit me. My God. The people.

  And that’s when I knew. I knew that those brave firemen who’d passed me going up the stairs—never came back down.

  And I thought, God bless this country. God bless us all.

  UPDATE

  On September 11, 2006, Nancy Cass wrote a short essay to her family and friends intended to summarize what 9/11 meant to her five years later. She called this piece “What I Lost and What I Have,” and has generously shared excerpts of it for publication:

  On that day I lost my secure life. I would lose my job within fifteen months at a company that I had worked at for sixteen years. I lost contact with people who were part of my everyday life. Life goes on, but the memories of that day have not faded. Five years later, and as I write this essay, the anger of what happened to me is still within. I still cry. I still pray. I still fantasize about how my life would have been had bin Laden and his group, al-Qaeda, never crossed our borders. Yes, I am still angry five years later.

  I still have visions of the people I saw falling or jumping from the building. This haunts me and I pray that the family members of those that jumped will never know that it was their kin. I have a great appreciation for life.

  I have a hatred of radical Muslims that preach death to “the infidels.” I fantasize that somehow they will all be eliminated from the face of this earth and a peace-filled universe will come about. I know that this will never happen. I have a greater appreciation of my faith and pray that the Lord continues to give me the patience and strength needed to get through another day of news about what is happening in our country and abroad.

  I have continuing sorrow for the men and women who lost their spouses on September 11. Their lives turned upside down in turmoil. Not being able to realize a future with their life partner. I have a greater appreciation for my husband and the future that we can share together.

  I have heartfelt sadness for the family members who lost a brother, sister, son, daughter, aunt, uncle, niece, nephew, cousin. Memories of those victims are all that they have. I have a greater love for my family and my ability to reach out to them at any time.

  I have a deep sadness for the people who lost their best friend(s), never to be physically seen again. I have so much appreciation for my friends and the hugs that we can share.

  I have sadness for those people who were physically scarred by the destruction of that day. The daily reminders when they look in a mirror. I truly appreciate my wrinkles and my physical health.

  I have mixed feelings about our government and our news media reporting on the war. I understood about going into Afghanistan to go after the Taliban and bin Laden. I understood about going after Saddam
and eliminating the terrorist network that was supported there. What I don’t get is [how] our country [has been] divided by what the media reports. Who can you or what can you believe? I have the deepest appreciation and gratitude for the men and women in our military who honorably serve our country.

  September 11, 2001, has not gone away. I did lose my life as I once knew it. However, I am alive and I have my health. [I] have my husband. I have my family. I have my friends. I have my faith. I have my home. I have my dog. I am a survivor. I have my life!

  I will not forget.

  JAN DEMCZUR

  Jan Demczur, forty-eight, came to the United States from Poland in 1980 and worked as a window cleaner in the World Trade Center every day for ten and a half years. On September 11, using only his window washing bucket and cleaning tools, Jan helped a group of men escape from a stalled elevator in the North Tower shortly before it collapsed.

  Mr. Demczur speaks in a soft Ukrainian accent, which turns words like “squeegee” into “skveegee.”

  AT MY JOB, I worked 6:00 A.M. to 3:00 in the afternoon, and I had a routine. I knew where to start in the morning since a lot of the floors were closed that early. And I knew a lot of the security guards since I’d worked in the Trade Center so long. They would open the doors with their keys and let me in to do my job.

  That morning, I had already finished a couple of floors: the 48th, the 49th, the 50th. Then I went up to the 92nd and 93rd floors, which was all part of my routine. And then I did the 77th.

  At a quarter after eight, I decided to break for breakfast and took the elevator from the 78th floor Sky Lobby to the one on the 44th. Then an escalator down to the 43rd floor, to the cafeteria to get some coffee and some Danish.

  I was eating and thinking of where I would go next. Usually, by that point in the morning I would start on the upper floors and work my way down. So I decided to go back up to the 70th floor. I finished my breakfast maybe twenty minutes to nine, and went back to work.

  I rode the escalator back to the 44th floor Sky Lobby and took an express elevator to the 70th floor. There were five gentlemen riding in the car with me. They pushed buttons for their own floors: 68, 73, and 74. I didn’t push mine, because someone was standing in front of me.

  The door closed. We were going up, but not so fast. Then, I felt something—the building shook a little bit from side to side. It was a little swing, nothing unusual. Still, I felt that something was wrong and I said, “This elevator’s going down.” Everybody looked at me because I was in uniform.

  We hadn’t reached the 68th floor and now we were starting to go down. The plane had hit the building, but we didn’t know anything about that in the elevator. All we knew is that the elevator was dropping when it should have been going up.

  I moved to the panel and hit each button, thinking that maybe the elevator would stop at different floors. But no, it was still going down. Then I hit the emergency intercom button and heard ringing on the other end, but no one answered. And the elevator was still going down.

  I screamed to the guy on my right side, “Push the red button!” He just stared at me. I screamed it again and he seemed to snap out of it. He pushed the button. The elevator stopped suddenly.

  It was a relief, but we had no idea where we were.

  A few minutes went by before a man started talking on the intercom. He said, “What happened there?”

  I said, “We’re in a car. Something’s wrong, we dropped a couple of floors.”

  “Which floor are you stopped on?”

  I said, “I don’t know, they don’t show it.”

  At the same time, smoke started coming up from the bottom of the car and I thought, this is bad.

  The man on the intercom said, “We have a problem on the 91st floor. That’s what I heard. Something hit the building.”

  And that’s when we started yelling to him, “Are you going to send somebody to help us?”

  Right then the intercom stopped working and we were on our own.

  There were six guys in all. One tall guy, George—I knew him. I’d see him two or three times a week in the cafeteria, on a floor, in a Sky Lobby. He started pounding on the roof to open the hatch, like in the movies when you see someone in an elevator try to jump from one car to the next. George was pounding, but he couldn’t get it open.

  Another guy, John Paczkowski, used his hands to pry open the elevator doors. The doors rolled back and we saw a wall with a big number 50 staring at us.

  Then two of the other guys complained because smoke was coming into the car. They said, “Close the doors, close the doors!”

  I said, “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

  We closed the doors but the smoke still came in. And I said, “Look, we have to open the doors because in fifteen minutes we might pass out here on the floor.”

  So we opened them again. I had my wooden stick with me, it’s like a broomstick. I used it to reach higher windows or inside-the-glass partitions. It’s about four, four and half feet long, between three-quarters to an inch thick, and it fit exactly between the doors—the perfect size. I wedged the stick between the doors to keep them open.

  Then I put one hand on the wall and said, “Wow. This is drywall. That’s not gonna be so bad. Usually this is only three-quarters of an inch thick.”

  So we started kicking it.

  Two guys kicked but we couldn’t break it. I said, “Wait, something is wrong. I can’t believe we can’t break through sheetrock. Usually, you just cut it with a knife and break it like paper.”

  I turned back to the group and said, “Does anybody have a knife?”

  Everybody looked at me. “No, no.”

  Then I looked in my pocket. I said, “Maybe we can work with the squeegee.” I grabbed it and started chopping a hole in the drywall. Just a little hole so we could start to break through. I was trying to figure out how thick the wall was.

  I chopped through a layer of sheetrock one inch thick and said, “Look at that. I don’t usually see a one-inch thickness.” But sometimes they use that in office buildings, I guess. I saw another piece of sheetrock behind the first and I started chopping deeper. We did that second piece of sheetrock, but there was another behind that one. I was surprised at this.

  Three guys switched off with one other, each taking a turn with the squeegee, digging deeper. We made a hole maybe two inches wide and one inch high.

  Finally, I took the squeegee from the third guy and I start banging it. I felt it break through on the other side and I said, “Wow. That’s three layers, each layer’s one-inch thick.” And we started kicking again but the hole we’d made was too small and the wall was strong; it didn’t give up.

  We didn’t panic or get scared because we didn’t know exactly what had happened. We just got busy digging the hole. It was quiet. We got wet with sweat. There was a lot of smoke, and the wind blew powder from the sheetrock into your mouth and eyes and nose.

  The first thing I thought was that our elevator had gone down because of some local building problem. But when the smoke started coming out, I changed my mind a little, though I didn’t expect something as big as what I later learned had happened.

  We cut the hole wider from side to side, maybe twenty-four inches. On both sides of the sheetrock was a metal channel that held together sheets of drywall. Now the gentleman behind me picked up the squeegee’s handle, which I had taken off before, and he started scratching at the wall. He cut through one layer and maybe half of the next.

  While I took a turn cutting, my squeegee fell out and dropped onto the other side. I was very upset with myself. The guys behind me didn’t know that my squeegee fell down and I didn’t tell them. I just looked at the gentleman scratching with the handle. He was exhausted. I grabbed the handle from him and started to cut through another layer in the middle of the wall.

  I turned back to the group and said, “Gentlemen, two men have to kick this wall at the same time. Now we should be able to break it.”

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nbsp; I had on shoes with rubber soles, not very good to kick with. I looked at George; he was a tall guy with a size ten or eleven shoe. I said, “You try to kick. Your shoe is leather, it is better to kick with.”

  He turned around and supported himself with his arms against the other side of the elevator. Then he back-kicked like a horse a couple of times, really hard, with John Paczkowski, also, the two men kicking together.

  After a couple of kicks, George’s foot broke through and we all started kicking around the edges to make the hole bigger and bigger while I grabbed the pieces of sheetrock and pulled them down. Finally, we made a hole big enough for me to look through. But when I did, I said, “It’s dark.”

  Behind the wall, there was a space maybe eight to ten inches deep. And beyond that there was another wall made of corrugated metal two-by-fours and sheetrock.

  I took this new wall to be the inside wall of an office space and said, “Well, there’s usually only one piece for that.” So we kicked the new wall a couple times, and that’s all it took. We felt the sheetrock crack and heard tiles spill out on the other side of the wall. I looked through the hole we’d made and I could see sinks and toilets. I said, “This is a men’s bathroom.”

  We made this second hole in the office wall bigger, and a skinny guy named Alfred said, “Let me get through. Maybe I can get through first.”

  I thought, right. You guys have been standing in the back doing nothing, now you want to go first through the hole. I didn’t want to be mean, but I was tired. I looked at Alfred and said, “Okay. Go ahead.”

  Alfred went halfway through the hole and came out over a sink in a bathroom. At one point, he got stuck. Half of him was in the elevator and half of him was in the bathroom. He started yelling, “Push me! Push me!”