Tower Stories Read online

  That’s one question I remember someone asking me in an interview.13 “You weren’t scared? You were halfway in the bathroom and halfway in the elevator? That elevator might have moved down and cut you in half.”

  I don’t know. You don’t think that way when you’re doing something like that.

  We pushed Alfred through and when he was safe on the other side, I said, “There must be another bank of elevators around the corner. Go check them and see that nobody got stuck there.”

  Alfred said, “Okay, okay,” and he left to go into the hallway. I guess he took the elevator down to the 44th floor Sky Lobby, because he returned very soon with a civilian and two firemen.

  But by the time they returned, we had already made a bigger hole and everybody had climbed out of the elevator. I took my bucket with me and John Paczkowski had his laptop.

  When the firemen approached us, they saw five guys standing around, and they were surprised. They said, “Okay, gentlemen, let’s hurry up. We gotta move.”

  We were inside that elevator for like, forty-five minutes, I think. When the plane hit, it was a quarter to nine or something? Now it was probably 9:30. It turns out we were on the 50th floor. Our elevator had dropped down that far, almost twenty stories.

  Some of the guys from our elevator went for the stairway. And I saw a sign that said not to use the elevator when there’s fire or an emergency. But the two firemen hopped back inside an elevator along with the gentleman from the building who carried the elevator key, which you have to use in an emergency, since the elevators won’t operate without it.

  I didn’t want to go back inside another elevator; I wanted to use the stairs. But the fireman was yelling at me, “Move it faster!” and I don’t know what I was thinking, I jumped in the elevator with them.

  They brought us down safe to the 44th floor. I still had water in my bucket and, on the Sky Lobby, there were plants, you know? Lots of flowers. I dumped this water onto the plants because I didn’t want to carry it down. I said, “Let them grow.”

  It was only for one second, a very quick moment. I don’t know what I was thinking there, either. I guess I was thinking, who knows? Beautiful flowers. Don’t want them to dry out.

  On the 44th floor, I went to the stairway and ran into the rest of the guys from the elevator. We started walking down, and at first, we didn’t see anybody on the stairway. Then, two or three floors down, there were a lot of people, so many that you couldn’t move. After that, it was going very slow.

  I just counted floors and wondered, how long is it gonna be until we get down?

  There were people evacuating from the lower floors, that’s what was taking so long. It was foggy and wet in the stairwell. I heard two guys talking about how two planes had hit. One gentleman who worked up on the 68th floor said, “Don’t worry about what happened now, worry later. We’ll find out what happened when we get down.”

  I wasn’t really concerned with what had happened, either. I was thinking that maybe the two planes had hit each other in the air and the parts fell on the building or something.

  We walked down the staircase very slowly.

  On the 17th floor—or maybe it was the 15th—somebody was yelling, “Help! Help!”

  The door to that floor was open off the stairwell, and I saw a nice gentleman in a white shirt with a briefcase. I said, “What happened?”

  He said, “There’s two people over there. I need help.” But it was dark and I was scared. I was already tired. I saw two firemen and said to them, “This guy says two people over there need help.”

  One fireman went over to help. By that point there were a lot of firemen around. As we were going down, a lot of firemen were coming up. And I kept going down.

  When I was on the 12th floor, I heard a very loud noise. Unbelievable. Smoke was coming up the stairwell fast. I got oxygen twice from firemen on the stairway. I’d been carrying my bucket all this time and people were telling me, “Leave it! Leave it!” But I said, “I like this bucket. I’ve had it for nine years. I got this bucket for a purpose.”

  See, the supervisors at my job always told me, “Have two different buckets, a round bucket and a little rectangular bucket.” But before, when I was working with a round bucket, I had to stick both hands down in the water. With this bucket, I just had to stick one hand down. It was very convenient.

  All the guys I worked with learned a lesson from me. I told them, “Take this bucket from me and try working with it today. See how easy it is to wet the glass.” I wanted to keep that bucket for retirement.

  But I saw the smoke coming out the doors and I said, “I guess I have to leave it.” So I took the rag from the bucket and the handle from the squeegee and kept going.

  Then I heard this loud noise on the 12th floor, and it scared me good. I was thinking maybe a transformer had blown up or something. Some fireman started yelling, “Go back up!” and I found myself running from the 12th floor back up to 15.

  The people above me didn’t like that. They screamed, “What are you doing?”

  And I said, “This guy’s yelling to go back up.”

  They said, “No, no, no! It doesn’t matter what happens. Go down! Go down!”

  So I turned around and went back down.

  It was dark. You couldn’t see anything. But then I bumped into a couple of firemen with flashlights who said, “Where is the exit here?” One of them turned to me and said, “You work here, right?”

  I said, “I was working.”

  “Do you know where the exit is?”

  I said, “Move your flashlight on the wall and I will try to recognize which floor this is.”

  He started moving the light from one side down to the middle and I said, “Here is the exit.” Because I saw the door was open and I recognized the slop sink where I usually dumped the water I washed windows with. We were on the 3rd floor.

  We pushed the door open, went through, and kept climbing down to the ground.

  There was powder on the floor maybe two or three inches deep, like snow, and everything was twisted and broken. The big glass walls of the first floor, those large panes that stood sixteen feet high in the lobby, were shattered. There was a lot of falling debris that could hit you on the head. It was crazy. In fact, I only recognized that we were in the lobby after I saw the security gate where we slid our ID cards to enter the building each day.

  I turned right. In the front of the building was a big vestibule. The visibility was low because of all the smoke, but I recognized the direction that the West Side Highway was in. I started calling out, “We’re supposed to go this way, it’s more safe this way. If we go the other way, I think it’s too far to the exit.”

  And we ran from the Towers. I followed two firemen out a revolving door. Another one stood outside and yelled, “Hurry up, hurry up!” There was another fireman there holding a hose who said, “Hey, come over here. Get some water.”

  I washed my mouth and face. Then a medical assistant grabbed my arm and took me maybe ten feet away. He said, “Sit down,” and gave me an oxygen mask to put on.

  There were a lot of people sitting there, getting treated. I didn’t know what was going on. I lifted my head and looked at the building. It was on fire, and I said, “Wow, that’s gonna be bad. The top floors are gonna be burned.” But I also thought, they’re gonna renew it and we’re gonna come back.

  Then I started looking for the other Tower. At first I thought maybe I was at a bad angle, maybe it was behind the Tower I was looking at. I asked another guy with an oxygen mask on if he could see it, but he didn’t say anything.

  So I asked another guy if he could see the South Tower and he said, “The South Tower is down.”

  I said, “What do you say?”

  He repeated, “The building is down.”

  When he told me, my skin froze. And my hair. I was thinking it was gonna go gray right there on the spot. I couldn’t believe it had happened. I still can’t. That big, strong building went down. All 110
stories.

  I had only been sitting there a very short time when the firemen started yelling to the medical assistants, “Take those people far from here! More people are coming in from the buildings and we need the space.”

  I picked myself up and started to move. I saw a big policeman who I knew from the Port Authority. Often, I’d see him in the elevator on the 88th floor, a nice guy. All of a sudden he started yelling like crazy, like someone put a knife in his throat or something. I looked at him and said, “What? What is it? What’s going on?”

  Then I looked behind me and saw the antenna on the top of the North Tower turning upside down. The whole building started to come down, and I wasn’t even two blocks away.

  I ran. I didn’t know—was the building gonna fall on its side? Which side? Where should I go? It was crazy. I turned around and tried to keep my eyes on what was going on behind me. To do that, I took off the mask and left the bottle of oxygen in the street. I saw that the building wasn’t going over on its side, after all; it was collapsing on itself like a stack of pancakes. I ran faster.

  “I lifted my head and looked at the building. It was on fire and I said, ‘Wow, that’s gonna be bad. The top floors are gonna be burned.’ But I also thought, they’re gonna renew it and we’re gonna come back.”

  I tried to go as far as I could, maybe I got four blocks. But I was shaking. I couldn’t walk. I felt as if something had exploded in my head. Everything—my head, my hands, my legs—was shaking. My voice was breaking and I couldn’t talk. Probably … definitely, I was in shock.

  Then some guy came to me and said, “What’s your name?”

  I replied, “Jan.”

  He got closer to me and I said, “What’s your name?” He was real familiar-looking.

  He said, “George.” The same guy who was with me in the elevator.

  It turns out he’d gotten out of the Tower a couple minutes earlier than I had, and he told me what he’d heard from firemen and policemen. That one plane had hit one building, another plane the other. One plane had hit the Pentagon. He told me there were four more hijacked planes in the air, and that F-16s had shot a plane down. He was scared.14

  George had a cell phone with him and he’d called his wife. I said, “Can you call my wife for me?”

  I gave him the number but I screwed it up. I must’ve been in shock. Then he gave me the phone to make the call myself and I held the cell phone to my ear and tried to talk, but I couldn’t get through.

  George said, “Where are you gonna go?”

  I said, “I’m gonna go to my wife. She doesn’t know if I am alive or not.” She was working on 2nd Avenue between 13th and 14th Streets, not far from where I was.

  I’m from New Jersey and so is George. He said, “I heard that ferries are taking people from New York to New Jersey. I’m going there and somebody’s gonna come with a car to take me home.”

  So that was that. He went his way and I went mine.

  I went to my wife’s workplace. She had known what was going on because she had tuned into the television and radio. She was happy I was alive, but still very upset.

  From the TV, I confirmed all the information I hadn’t known before for sure—the two planes, the buildings collapsing, the Pentagon. I was disturbed significantly. The beautiful place where I’d worked for so long had come down. To me, it was a second home. The commute from my house was only twenty-five minutes, and I liked working there because I liked all the friendly people and the many tourists that came to visit.

  I would hear so many different languages on any given day. People would come to me and ask, “Can you translate? Do you speak this language?” I speak very good Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, and English, so I could help a lot of people. And if I didn’t understand them, I always knew someone who could.

  I knew so many people who worked in the Towers. They were my friends. A lot of people were killed, and—at that point—I didn’t know who was alive and who was not.

  After the planes’ impact, emergency first responders administered oxygen, IV drips, and saline eye washes to office workers fleeing the Towers. Over the following days, similar treatments were applied to exhausted rescue workers working on the pile of rubble which the Towers left after their collapse.

  My wife and I took a train and then walked to 12th Avenue, where they were taking people across the Hudson River in ferries to reach New Jersey.

  The boat dropped us in Hoboken, and there were a lot of policemen, firemen, and ambulances where we landed. Right then, I started feeling pains in my chest. I was holding my chest and someone asked, “Sir, are you all right?”

  I said, “Not really.”

  He said, “Come here,” and this man—whoever he was—put me in a wheelchair. He wheeled me to a stretcher and medics checked my blood pressure. They decided to take me to the hospital.

  There were nice people all around me at the hospital who told me that I had low oxygen in my blood. So they put me on oxygen for two and a half hours until my level got normal.

  The doctor was laughing with me, saying, “You’re going to live.”

  I said, “Yeah, but I don’t know for how long.”

  I was in bad shape. I was in shock. I didn’t feel safe. I was scared. I was freezing. I felt pressure in my head, like something had broken inside. But finally, they said I could go home.

  While my wife looked for a taxi, I asked a lady police officer near me, “Were you working at the World Trade Center?”

  She said, “No.”

  Then she asked me where I was from. I said, “I was there.”

  And she said, “What happened?”

  I told her about the elevator and how I got out. Behind her was another man, who was listening as I talked to her. He said, “What’s your name?”

  I said, “Jan.”

  “I’m the chief of the medical supplies for the Hoboken Fire Department. Where do you live?”

  I said, “In Jersey City.”

  “That’s not far away,” he said. “Come on. I’ll take you home.” A very nice guy. He brought us home and was so happy he could help.

  I was home by 9:30 in the evening, and there were a lot of messages on my answering machine. My brother called from Poland after he saw everything happen on television. His message said, “Please call home. We don’t know what happened to you.”

  Long-distance wasn’t working until the next day, so I bought a telephone card and got a connection overseas to my mother and father in Poland.

  When they first picked up the phone, my father couldn’t talk. He was crying. He heard me and handed the phone to my mother. “I’m so happy I’ve heard you,” she said. “I couldn’t sleep all night. My pillow was all wet.”

  Finally, she knew I was alive and the rest of the family called each other with the news.

  How am I doing now? I don’t know. I’m much better. I went to group counseling with other people who worked at the World Trade Center. Everyone had their own story. But after a while, a lot of people dropped out and went to personal counseling.

  I did also. I still go every other week. I also see a psychiatrist once a month and I take pills every day. It helps me.

  The first month, I couldn’t sleep. Maybe an hour or an hour and a half each night. I was so tired, I couldn’t eat. I had no appetite, no energy. Everything was bothering me—like the sounds of ambulances, police, even the sounds of planes in the air. If someone took out their garbage and made a noise with the cans, that would bother me.

  Everywhere I looked, I’d see the faces of my friends, who I learned later on had been killed. Three policemen I knew pretty good; a couple guys from my crew. Altogether, we lost twenty-seven people from my union—I didn’t know them all, but I knew eight or nine real well. Other businessmen and people I knew from the floors, I saw their faces in some pictures in the newspaper.15 I try to close my eyes and sleep, but their faces still come out.

  Right now, I do not work. When will I go back to work? I don’t know. The u
nion is working on it. I hope they find a place for me that’s convenient. Not a dangerous place, not after what’s happened to me. People understand. The bosses? They know life. I don’t need their respect, but they should understand what I’ve been through.

  When will it all get better? As time goes by. For me, it’ll probably take the rest of my life. I was there and I saw this. I know what happened. And now we’re at war, but this is only the beginning. At any time, something could happen; if not here, then somewhere else, in a different state or a different country. The terrorists have a strong connection and their job is not done, not yet.

  This is the blackest day in the history of America.

  UPDATE

  Not long after he was interviewed for this book, Jan Demczur’s story was picked up by nearly every major news agency and broadcast around the world as a story of heroism and perseverance in the face of 9/11’s many adversities.

  Jan is currently listed on the U.S. Department of State’s International Information website as one of the international heroes of 9/11. A year after 9/11, the New York Times reported that Jan’s squeegee, which saved his life and the lives of his companions, was put on display at the Smithsonian Institute.16

  Jan was later honored by over 700 of his colleagues.

  A year after 9/11, he had not returned to work and, as reported by the Christian Science Monitor, he was sometimes overcome with fear and dizziness whenever he ventured outside his home.17

  “I’ll go back,” he told the Ukrainian Weekly. “But when I do go back, I only want to clean windows that I can get to with a ladder.”18