The Woman Who Wasn’t There (6 page)

“The part of the day that I really liked was just being able to talk about 9/11 without worrying about making other people uncomfortable,” he wrote. “For too long, I have felt like I have to keep my mouth shut whenever I am with other people because any talk about 9/11 is a sure conversation killer. But yesterday we all talked about our experiences, how it affected us, how we have been dealing with it, etc. At any time during the day, anybody could bring up what they were feeling, and sometimes we would just stop where we were and start talking about it.”

An inherent tension existed between the survivors and the families of the men and women who’d lost their lives on 9/11. Family members were placed at the top of the hierarchy of grief, and some questioned the veracity of the survivors’ distress—and even their right to grieve what had happened to them. After all, they were alive. They were the chosen ones. The survivors, on the other hand, were growing bitter about being misunderstood and overlooked. Because the survivors’ forum was part of the World Trade Center United Families Group, an organization that had been formed first for families, and
could be viewed by family members, the survivors who used it didn’t feel comfortable with opening up about their suffering. But that restraint cracked in September of that year, on the second anniversary of the attack, when some of them were turned away from ground zero ceremonies.

For many of the survivors, the second anniversary memorial service was their first venture back to ground zero, and it had taken all of the courage they could muster to return. Yet when survivors were refused admission for not having the proper credentials to the invitation-only ceremony, the perceived slight unleashed a torrent of bitterness on the forum. As one survivor wrote:

Yesterday morning early, I went down to the Trade Center site with my husband, and it was so sad, but what really got me was that of course the place was all barricaded, and there were people arriving for the memorial service who were being admitted, but, of course, not me. That always makes me feel both angry and very ashamed to be excluded like that. Like I committed some crime by surviving, and now I’m being punished by banishment. Like the authorities are saying to me, “You made your choice; you chose to survive, so now you forfeit all your claims to this place, to this event.” It makes me positively suicidal. I feel like I just want to be erased, like I really deserve to be obliterated from the earth.

It was a sentiment shared by many of the other survivors: that in the expansive, complex dialogue of the September 11 story, they had been made invisible. “We are forgotten, and it’s disgraceful,” another survivor wrote. “I think we addressed this topic last year at the same time. I also wrote a letter to the
Daily News
editorial page about how we’re forgotten and that we have to go along our merry way as if nothing ever happened! It’s almost like cruel punishment, as you guys have said, for ‘exiting the buildings alive.’ They mourn the passing of their loved one(s) and can move on (which is the natural order of
things) . . . We can’t mourn any passing because we haven’t physically lost someone, and if you haven’t lost someone, you have no right to be at the Trade Center site and have no say as to what is built there. WE ARE LIVING VICTIMS.”

After so many months of conceding their right to express grief, the survivors were prepared to claim their rightful place in the hierarchal order of suffering.

In late October Tania suggested that they split off from the United Families organization and start their own online support group, a place where they would be free to express even their rawest emotions without fear of judgment or rejection. “It’s very easy to set up, and we could configure it as a private group so membership has to be approved by one of us,” she posted on the morning of October 24. “All those in favor???????? I think it’s important that we stick together.”

Others in the group agreed that it was a good idea. At 12:59 p.m. that same afternoon, the World Trade Center Survivors Forum debuted online. The postings on the new site were immediately more intimate and revealing. People let down their guard, and real friendships formed quickly. The survivors could at last begin to purge themselves of the resentments they’d felt over being discounted, and even shunned, and bare their souls to one another.

The new group seemed to give Tania the impetus to begin finally opening up about herself, and, little by little, she shared snippets of her story. Then, late on a Saturday night in early November, she responded to another survivor’s details of his experience in the south tower by recounting her harrowing moments in the seventy-eighth-floor sky lobby just before the plane plowed through it, and her long descent to safety.

She wrote:

I had started my way out and was on the sky lobby of the 78th floor waiting for the elevator when the plane hit. It was so crowded there. The elevators only took 60 secs down to the lobby, but that day, whether true or not, they seemed to be running too slow. Everybody
was pushing trying to get into the elevators. I remember this one guy who yelled, “Ladies, this is not the
Titanic
. It’s not women and children first.” Shortly after that, someone yelled that there was a plane coming. We heard the roaring noise from the jet, then there was a deafening explosion, and a fireball ripped through the lobby. I find it very hard to talk about what happened afterward.

“Do you remember any injured women walking down past you on the stairs?” she asked the other survivor. “I wonder if we crossed paths that day.”

Two days later, Tania shared more details of her story. She wrote about grabbing the shirts of people who no longer needed them and wrapping them around her burned and bleeding arms and legs, and crawling over dead people and through pools of blood looking for an escape. “Others around me were getting quiet, I knew they were dying, and I didn’t want to be one of them,” she wrote. “The fire conditions were getting worse, and air was getting scarce. My lungs were burning inside. I kept thinking about my life, my family, my fiancé, about our wedding.”

She told of stumbling upon the dying man who put his wedding ring in her hand and asked her to give it to his wife, and of being rescued by the man with the red bandanna covering his mouth. “He said he had found the stairs.” And she revealed the tragic loss of her beloved Dave. She said that she never would have made it out of the building if it hadn’t been for her thoughts of him and their impending wedding at the Plaza.

“I wanted to wear that white dress and swear my love for him in front of friends and family. I wanted to have his children,” she wrote. “He was in the other tower . . . I didn’t know then that he would not survive. I believe today that he stopped to give me the strength to get out of there on his way to heaven. . . . I was one of the last people out of tower 2.”

Her story was jaw dropping. Not only had she miraculously escaped from what looked like a certain and terrible death but she had
also lost the man she loved. Within days, word of the new survivor and her unparalleled account of survival and loss had spread throughout the survivor community.

The unknown blogger had taken her first steps to becoming the face of one of the most tragic chapters in the history of the United States.

G
erry Bogacz lived through the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and he was on the eighty-second floor of the north tower on September 11 when American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the building. A private, guarded man, Bogacz shared the dramatic details of what he went through that day only with his wife and daughter, his closest friends, and a handful of survivors he had come to know in the two years since the attack. Indeed, when he finally put pen to paper to write down his memories of that life-changing time, he preceded the thirty-six-page narrative with a note:

This is an account of my experiences during the attack and its aftermath, which I’ve written so that family and friends will have a sense of what happened. Recording my experiences and sharing them on a limited basis will help me and those closest to me to better comprehend what transpired. In addition, this information will hopefully shed some light on the experiences of the others who were in the buildings that day. I offer this account for them also, so that any readers will know a little more about what happened to them and to me in the buildings and afterward.

As planning director for the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council, Bogacz had been facing a typically hectic schedule when he arrived at the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11. He had gotten to his office early to catch up on phone calls and emails before the first of a series of scheduled meetings began. By eight thirty, he was sitting at his computer, reading and responding
to emails from the day before. At one point, a member of his staff popped in with the agenda for the nine o’clock meeting. After he left, Bogacz put the finishing touches on a letter to a local newspaper, and then walked down the hall to visit another associate.

The coworker’s office offered a spectacular view to the north, and, on that cloudless morning, Bogacz could see well past the Empire State Building in midtown, all the way up the Hudson River to the Bronx and into Westchester and Rockland counties. As he stood there, admiring the panorama and chatting with his colleague, he sensed a sudden, subtle change in the air pressure—“as if air were being forced into the building,” he would say later.

The pressure change was accompanied by a high-pitched whirring sound. Bogacz stopped talking, and he could see from his colleague’s crinkled brow that he, too, had sensed something curious. Before either of them could say anything, the building was rocked by what Bogacz described as “a titanic explosion.” The north tower lurched violently toward the southern end of the island and then fiercely snapped back in place. People in the office grabbed desktops, chairs—anything they could hang onto—to keep from falling over.

After a moment of terrified silence, Bogacz saw an enormous chunk of debris plunge past the eighty-second-floor windows. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he thought that the huge, falling mass could be a missile. That was when the urgency of the situation kicked in.

Bogacz’s mind raced back to February 26, 1993, when terrorists exploded a truck bomb in the basement of the building. Back then, he had evacuated into a smoke-filled stairwell, and more than half of the trip down had been made in complete darkness. It had taken nearly four hours to get out of the building that day, and the stress had taken its toll. This time seemed far worse, and he wondered if the tower was stable enough to withstand whatever had happened. Or was it about to fall down?

“Hit the stairs!” Bogacz shouted to his coworkers. What he remembered happening next was a group of them moving through the office suite toward the main corridor. In his haste to get out of the office, he
stumbled on a colleague who was crawling out of his cubicle and mechanically jumped over him. The impulse to escape was overpowering, absolute. Looking back over his shoulder, Bogacz saw others from his office beginning to move, and he picked up his step. The fear of being trapped in a crowded stairwell, as he had been eight years before, was all-consuming. When he finally reached the door leading out to the corridor, he stopped short. The hallway was thick with heavy, black smoke. “Don’t go out there,” he told himself. “You don’t know what that smoke means.” But the hall was the only route to the stairs.

The sound of a colleague’s voice snapped Bogacz out of his indecisiveness. “Get to the stairwell now!” the man shouted. Impulsively, Bogacz pushed frantically through the office door and dove into the smoky hall. Whatever was out there was certain to be in his office soon, so what was there to lose? The entrance to stairway A was only a few feet away. As he turned into the stairway, he was showered with a surge of radiant heat. An oily, burning electrical smell filled the air. At least this time, unlike in 1993, only trickles of people were on the stairs, and the lights were still working.

Bogacz headed down the stairs with a few of his colleagues trailing him. “Everybody stay calm and keep moving!” he shouted, more out of his growing anxiety than a nudge to the people going down. But they did need to move fast, away from the fire burning above them, before the building fell. A few flights down, Bogacz overheard someone in the stairwell say that a plane had crashed into the building. He had often seen planes flying over the towers from his office. An accident certainly wasn’t out of the question.

With each floor, more people entered the stairwell, but they still moved at a decent pace. Bogacz had gone down thirty floors when he felt heaviness in his chest and his legs go rubbery. He feared he was having a heart attack, but he forced himself to focus on one step at a time. Smoke was creeping into the stairwell from underneath the doors, and with every floor, the temperature seemed to rise. He began to feel trapped, the way he had in the suffocating stairwell after the 1993 bombing.

At the forty-third floor, a man wearing street clothes was holding
open the door, wordlessly beckoning Bogacz and the others to leave the stairs. Like soldiers following a command, they all filtered into the forty-third-floor lobby and joined a crowd waiting to get into the emergency stairwell on the opposite side of the building. With so many bodies jockeying for position, Bogacz found himself caught in a bottleneck. Perhaps the man holding the door knew something they didn’t, but the stairway they had just come from seemed like a better choice. His anxiety swelled.

Standing there, he noticed a small bank of elevators. Smoke leached out from behind their closed doors. It was too much. Without a word, he broke away from the line and bolted back across the lobby to stairway A. Maybe it was a dead end, but he had to keep moving. Some of his colleagues followed, and soon they were back in the original stairway, headed down. But their progress was short lived.

A few floors down, they hit a logjam of people. As had happened in 1993, the narrow stairwell was clogged, and every movement forward was interrupted by agonizing periods of standing still. Only people with injuries were allowed to pass, and most of them were badly burned. Someone would yell “Injured!” and everyone moved to the right to let them get by. It had been that way with the wounded the last time too. Bogacz remembered how troubled he had been afterward, when he’d read accounts of people assisting each other down the stairs and questioned why he had been too focused on his own escape to help anyone else. Now he knew the answer. The urge to get out of the building was overpowering. He looked up the stairs and saw a burned woman slowly making her way down. Her face was red and swollen, and she was moaning in pain. Someone shouted, “Injured person!” and everyone moved to the side to let the woman and her escort squeeze past. The brief delay was agonizing and Bogacz struggled not to panic. Time seemed to stand still until the procession finally began to move again. With a clear path ahead, he was able to descend past the fortieth floor and through the thirties fairly quickly. Somewhere in the twenties, he encountered a group of firefighters making its way up the stairs. The firefighters stepped aside, allowing civilians to go by. The stairwell was getting hotter, and Bogacz felt
sweat dripping into his eyes. He pushed closer to the person ahead of him, as if by doing so he could get out of the building faster. His skin prickled with fear. Finally, after what had seemed like an eternity, he was down.