Yesterday, I was with Steve Assael, my friend of nearly 60 years, retracing, as much as possible, his steps of ten years ago. He worked for Blue Cross Blue Shield on the 25th floor of North Tower of the WTC. The vivid specificity of his memories was moving, from the opening tragedy, the paraplegic colleague who couldn’t escape because the elevators weren’t working and his co worker who decided to stay with him, to the loneliness of direct experience, riding on the subway in Queens along with the daily commuters ten years ago and walking downtown yesterday. We spoke, walked, looked around, remembered 9/11/01 as a day of personal experience and national trauma. I wondered and worried about how the people we saw yesterday remember. I recalled that the U.S. has been implicated consequentially in the suffering of so many others since that day. Steve and I don’t agree on such matters, but political discussion wasn’t on the agenda.
We met in Penn Station at 7:45. The time, more or less, he had arrived on his morning commute from Massapequa, Long Island, ten years ago. We took the express train downtown to Chambers Street, as he did then. Instead of a crowd of office workers, we joined the anniversary memorial ceremony, part of the general public observers (only the relatives of those who died were included in the ceremony). Steve later told me that he had hoped that by chance he would bump into one of the hundreds of people whom he knew when he worked there. But, ironically, we met my friend and colleague Jan Gross, author of Neighbors, one of the most important and troubling books of recent decades.
We passed through a security checkpoint at 8:30. We were a couple of blocks from the memorial, with a clear view of the rising tower. We observed the ceremony on a huge television screen and listened to the reading of the names for a while, and heard the dignitaries’ readings. Our project was to wander, look around, and talk. So we moved on after my friend Mike Asher’s name was read off. My book, The Politics of Small Things, is dedicated to Mike and was an imagined extended conversation with him. Mike worked for Cantor Fitzgerald on the 104th floor of the North Tower.
Steve spoke to me more openly about what he had seen, heard and smelled that day than he has in the past ten years, about feeling the impact of the jet in his office, about the hesitancy to walk down, the crowded stairwell, stopping on the 14th floor. When people lower in the stairwell were warning about the danger of fire and smoke, he and a group of others went into an office suite there.
The phones were working. The room was illuminated (perhaps by sunlight). The assembled people weren’t sure what they should do. They then moved quickly on at the urging of a fireman, who Steve pointed out probably saved his life. The fireman was panting, running up the stairs, warning people, encouraging them to go down. Steve’s gift to the fireman was a glass of water. Steve had intended to use the water to dampen a cloth as he went through anticipated heavy smoke, but he figured the fireman needed it more than he did, and that puddles on the ground would probably work, if water was needed. At first, Steve assumed that the fireman was among the dead, but reading more about the events of the day weeks later, he holds onto the hope that the hero of his story was among the firemen who did turn back and survive.
Steve got out. The stairs were no longer crowded. He had to time his run across the plaza outside the building, avoiding falling objects and people, and the resulting obstacles on the ground. He and a colleague hesitated at the entrance of the Millennium Hotel. They wondered if they could help, watched for a while, saw the towers swaying. A cop shouted to them to get out of there. And they headed uptown. Around Chinatown, they felt the collapse. Steve’s colleague walked to Grand Central Station. Steve walked over the Queensborough Bridge, took a subway to Jamaica and caught his Long Island Railway train home.
Walking uptown and riding out of the city, Steve moved from the scene of the crime into a world that strikingly resembled normal everyday life. He, they, we, were all bewildered and dismayed, not sure what would happen next. We knew something big happened, but unsure about how we would proceed. He experienced the trauma directly. For us, it took time to sink in. And now remembering is a challenge.
As Steve and I walked back to Penn Station, I got to thinking about how we are remembering. I appreciated Gary Alan Fine’s post last week on the need to forget, the normality of it. Forgetting is an important part of remembering. In order to remember some things, we have to forget others. Certainly, we have to forget as thoroughly as we can the purported lessons of The Kids Book of Freedom: The 9/11 Coloring Book. It is clearly destructive, but also is the fear that led to the abuse of fundamental liberties in and by the United States in the past ten years. We need to remember cautiously, avoiding too easy lessons and comfortable myths.
Odd that Steve and I bumped into Jan Gross, as we started our walk uptown away from the memorial, along the promenade by the Hudson River. Jan upset memory in Poland, in his books Neighbors, Fear, and Golden Harvest. Jan has been challenging Poland, and, more broadly, Europe to face up to the degree to which the genocide of Jews in Europe was an active Polish, and European affair, not only a German or Nazi one. They need to forget the self-righteous stories of opposition, and realize the complexities, the degree to which heroism was accompanied by collaboration and active complicity. Not the Nazis, but their Catholic neighbors killed the Jews of Jedwabne, Gross documented. His are tough books, difficult for many to accept. They have changed my view of the world. Remembering accurately is a challenge. It requires forgetting, abandoning satisfying myths.
Walking with Steve yesterday, I realized that this is our challenge as well.
Leave a Reply