A Decade Later, Children of 9/11 Look Back
If you’re in college today, you were as young as 8, as old as 12. The events of September 11, 2001 hover just at the edge of your memory, though growing up in post-9/11 America is an inescapable fact of life. Here, we present seven brief essays, the personal memories of New Voices contributors about that day.
–David A.M. Wilensky, New Voices Editor
Four of these essays were also published in the September 9 issue of the Forward and online at The Jewish Daily Forward. For more of the Forward‘s 9/11 coverage, go to forward.com.
Laura Cooper: Far from the action
I was in sixth grade on September 11, so I was 10. I remember quite clearly the moment when I first heard about it, because I was in the locker room bathroom. The principal’s voice came on over the intercom, something unintelligible. But our gym teacher must have heard it because she told us all not to panic, and that our next period teachers would tell us what was going on.
Back in history class, the atmosphere was tense. Obviously, everyone but me knew that this was a Big Deal. As for me, I’d been listening to a lot of Billy “Let’s-Sing-About-The-Cold-War” Joel from the late 80s, and I mentioned to someone my genuine sixth grade political opinion, “This is just another Cold War.” What I was meaning to say was that all this nonsense would die down soon. Nothing would end up coming from it. (Needless to say, I didn’t go into politics.)
Everyone else in class, though, seemed really torn up, even though we were in southwestern Virginia, far removed from the action. I had never even heard of the Towers before this, so as far as I was concerned, it was an isolated and unimportant incident. I couldn’t understand what all the worry was about.
In the same class, we would watch the news video on the classroom television and some people mentioned that their so-and-so family member was there and they had to make emergency phone calls. Some had to leave class. And I sat there silently, thinking they were being way too emotional, and wondering why I wasn’t getting it. Even when I got home, my mom exclaimed, “Did you hear about the Towers?!” and I said, “Yeah, I did,” disappointed only that I couldn’t be the one to mention the news first.
Laura was 10 on September 11, 2001. She is now a student at the College of William & Mary.
Geoffrey Edelstein: I remember September 12
People are always surprised when I tell them that I remember 9/11, but I don’t remember anything bad. I went to school in the morning. I went to lunch. I went home. My aunt was up there in one of those towers somewhere. She got out fine, just a little dusty. I don’t remember being scared.
I wasn’t oblivious—I could sense the fear and all the plans being made behind me as I went about my usual routine after school. Maybe they sent us home from school that day—I don’t really remember. I remember they sent us home with a letter to our parents. My teacher told us to put it in our homework folders as soon as we got it. I read it on the bus. I knew what it was saying, but I didn’t understand it.
My mother had it on the TV when I got home. She didn’t say anything to me about it. She waited for my father to come home. He told me and my brother in his office. We sat on the leather sofa. It reminded me of when he told us our grandmother had died. He wasn’t worried. He wasn’t solemn. He was a psychotherapist and knew how to tell fifth and eighth graders that a great tragedy had befallen our nation.
I don’t remember what he said, although I remember school the next day. Nothing really happened. My teacher taught us Math, then History, then Reading. Right before lunch, he handed out maps and pictures. They were photocopies from Time Magazine of the towers burning and crumbling. One that I liked was a graphic that showed in detail the attack. It was a computer-generated illustration with little bullet points saying what each plane did to the building. None of the information registered. All I remember is the image. A little computer generated plane with an arrow in front of it spearing into a big wide building.
They told us how many people died. I don’t remember the number. I was never good with numbers, and I’m bad with math. I don’t remember how many Jews died in the Holocaust. I forget these things.
What I do remember is that on September 10, 2001 I made an interesting observation about a friend of mine. Between Math and History, was snack time. I sat in front of my best friend at the time. He had a coveted snack everyday, Bachman’s Pretzels in a yellow cellophane-rapped box. Everyone wanted them; no one knew to ask their parents. hey were rarer than diamonds, probably as expensive too. He never traded anything so I don’t know why I said it, but on September 10 2001 I said to my friend, “You’re like the World Trade Center.” He took two pretzel sticks and stood them on his desk. They stood for a split moment and fell. This is what I remember.
Geoffrey was 10 on September 11, 2001. He is now a student at Drew University
Simi Lampert: Euphoric over Osama’s demise
When those planes hit the Twin Towers back in 2001, I was in seventh grade and I didn’t know enough about the world to know that this shouldn’t be happening to us. And in some ways, I’ll never know, because I grew up in a world where terrorism is a possibility that has turned into a reality far too often.
I remember when I first realized that terrorism could affect me personally. One of my eighth-grade teachers was Israeli and she warned us, in her blunt Israeli way, “Now you have to be careful of everything you see. I always told my kids in Israel, ‘Don’t pick up anything on the side of the road, because it can be a bomb.’ Now that applies to you girls, too.” Her words were frightening, but her message even more so: No one is safe from this evil called mankind.
Living in a world where no one is trusted, where even carrying a water bottle onto a plane is suspect, may or may not have shaped me. It’s hard to know what would be in a different reality. But I can tell you that my elation the night of Osama bin Laden’s death was real. I wasn’t so much relieved — terrorism is not the creation of a single terrorist so much as the idea of many — as I was uplifted. We needed hope, and that night the American people got it.
My friends and I joined thousands of other euphoric New Yorkers and tourists at Ground Zero to celebrate the news. “Obama got Osama!” we chanted over and over until dawn. Terrorists around the world continue to plan the deaths of innocent civilians, but for one night the rest of the world was united in hope and optimism for the future.
My memories of September 11, 2001 aren’t the stuff of philosophical meditations. I was far too young to understand. But now is the time for the generation that grew up with September 11 to think about what happened that day and what it means. I know enough to recognize that not understanding September 11, or the human capacity for evil, is a universal predicament. I also know that we will never stop searching both for understanding and for the hope and faith necessary to ride out the dark times.
These are the times to remember; these are the times to reflect. And they are also the times in which we gather ourselves for what’s ahead, as we attempt to face the future with the same amount of hope we found in our elation over Osama’s demise.
Simi was 12 on September 11, 2001. She is now a student at Yeshiva University’s Stern College. Her essay was previously published in the Forward.
Naomi Nason: Like a plane crashing through my family
One by one, my classmates were disappearing. My Solomon Schechter Hebrew class had started off like any other, but things had quickly become eerie as the school secretary entered the classroom every few minutes to inform one of my peers that he or she was excused from class for the morning. No one had told us why they were being excused or what was happening — kids were just vanishing.
It took the administration hours to finally hold an assembly and explain the situation. By that point, rumors were circling like vultures. They sat us all in the gymnasium and showed us footage from the news. They explained that we didn’t know anything yet about who was behind this awful event or how many people had been victims. We sat in that gym for the remainder of the day, asking questions and understanding very little about how our world had just changed.
My classmates had been disappearing that morning because most parents felt that such a catastrophic event needed to be shared with family. They wanted to break the news lightly to their 10-year-olds and spend the day watching the coverage together. My father, an executive at American Airlines, was far too busy and stressed out for that. When I think of September 11, 2001, I think of sitting in that gymnasium until the end of the day and coming home to find my father looking different from the way he had ever looked before. I remember being told that for the next couple of weeks — or maybe months — daddy would be very busy and I needed to be extra good and supportive of him. I remember feeling as though the event was so distant and unrelated to my life and then coming home to find that those planes had crashed straight through my family.
Naomi Nason was 10 on September 11, 2001. She is now a student at Northwestern University. Her essay was previously published in the Forward.
Carly Silver: My Dad was in the Garment District that day
Posters torn out of teacher’s manuals plastered the cinderblock walls, depicting famous historical figures, like King Tut and Shi Huangdi. These titans of the past gazed down on meticulously lined-up desks, each containing a sixth grader. At the front of the room, to the right of a stern-faced teacher, an 11-year-old swiveled nervously back and forth on an upholstered chair. He chattered about some recent event in China, but few of his classmates paid attention, ignoring the class’ daily news report in favor of excitement over new jelly roll pens or the latest middle school gossip.
I sat in the back left corner of Ms. Fein’s history class, one ear on the daily news and an eye on my teacher’s slight frown. Suddenly, the white-corded phone rang. Ms. Fein signaled the student to stop, then cast a warning glance over her class before picking up the phone. Curious, we quieted down just enough to hear a few murmured notes of her conversation, none of which were revealing.
Her brow furrowed, she cleared her throat noisily. “Something’s happened. The whole sixth grade’s going to have an assembly in the library. Ms. Ebling will explain more there.” Ms. Fein herded her flock of 25 11-year-olds down the blue-carpeted hallways alongside streams of other sixth graders, who looked alternately happy to be out of class and confused at the reason behind it.
We flooded down the ramps and clustered in between bookshelves and scattered wooden chairs. Near the circulation desk, Ms. Ebling, her closed-cropped blond hair glinting in the library’s dim light, called for quiet. The next 40 minutes were a blur. The administrators didn’t seem to identify what the problem was that had gathered us all here, just that something had happened in New York City and everyone was okay. I departed back to my classroom almost an hour later with an ominous feeling in my gut. My father was working in the Garment District in New York City that day.
As soon as the bell shrilled for the afternoon, I tramped home through the path in my neighbor’s backyard. My heart pounding, I hurried down our driveway and into the house.
“Mom?” I shouted. She sat on our family room couch, wordlessly watching the news. On the TV screen, flames shot up from a pile of rubble, illuminating the ash-covered ruins and tear-streaked faces of people below.
“Is Dad OK?” I asked, sitting down next to her. Thankfully, he was fine—the part of town where he worked was forty-something blocks from the crash site. She proceeded to explain to me what our principal had neglected to tell us: that several planes had been hijacked by terrorists—I can’t remember just what she called them—and crashed into two tall towers in New York City, killing thousands. Shocked into silence, I hugged her tightly as we both watched the fires rage.
Carly was 11 on September 11, 2001. She is now a student at Barnard College, Columbia University.
Joshua Walfish: It still haunts me to this day
What started as a beautiful, sunny day in Rockville, Md. ended with images of darkness that will be etched in my mind for the rest of my life.
It was my second week in the fourth grade, and I was still trying to find my way around my school, which had been redesigned over the summer. An announcement came over the loudspeaker. I never actually heard what our headmaster said in the message, but within 15 minutes I was in the gym listening to him tell us the deeply upsetting news of what had just transpired in New York and in our own backyard, Washington D.C.
My first instinct was to cry, because I had family who lived in New York City, including a cousin not yet 8 months old. I later learned that my aunt had been working next to the Twin Towers and had escaped unharmed just as the second plane hit the South Tower. As my teachers tried to comfort me, I could not express to them what was wrong and why I was so hysterical. The lack of information really disturbed my fourth-grade mind.
The next thing I remember, I was in my house, glued to the television set and watching the worst terrorist attack on United States soil unfold. I saw the South Tower fall and then the North Tower shortly afterward. I saw the chaos that ensued just minutes from my house as people scrambled from the Pentagon and the district. As a fourth-grader, I would never have expected these events to stick with me, but I was glued to that television set by an incident that still haunts me to this day.
Things got worse before they got better at my school. We experienced constant paranoia about whether we would be targeted for attacks because of our size and proximity to Washington. We started having drills to prepare for bomb threats and for the possibility of being taken hostage.
I can’t believe it has been 10 years since those heinous and terrible attacks. I don’t remember much about life prior to them. I don’t remember airport security and I don’t remember not being at war. This is something that is truly terrifying to me. As much as I have memories from the first 9 1/2 years of my life, my life is defined by what unfolded from that day on.
Walfish was 9 on September 11, 2001. He is now a student at Northwestern University. His essay was previously published in the Forward.
David A.M. Wilensky: The revolution will be televised
I was in a science class. I can’t recall the specific subject, but I remember the room clearly. No lights were on in the windowless room. Instead, light poured in from a large skylight in the middle of the ceiling. The school’s small fleet of television sets was deployed throughout the largest classrooms, including mine. A few other classes joined us to watch.
I’m 22 years old now, so my decade-old memories of watching the day’s events unfold at age 12 are unclear at best. I can’t be sure, but I think we watched the second plane hit live. This was half a lifetime ago — literally. I had just discovered Gil Scott-Heron’s famous “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” and I distinctly recall thinking that he should probably revise that statement.
As the day’s events unfolded like some perverse, made-for-TV movie in that classroom in Austin, Texas, some things seemed dangerously up in the air. Planes were unaccounted for and, far worse than that, the villain was unknown.
I’ve always had a hard time empathizing with far-flung news items. What I felt most strongly that day was indignation. My classmates were full of a brand of willful ignorance that seemed unusual to me at the time, but I can now see that it’s become part of the norm in America. I was one of only a few students in the room who had any idea of what the World Trade Center was and I had to explain it to my classmates repeatedly.
Pop culture in 2001 was still feeding off of the Cold War for its evildoers, so the general consensus among the more punditry-inclined students in the room was that the most likely culprits were China or Russia. Even if China or Russia wanted to attack us, they wouldn’t do it with hijacked passenger planes, I pointed out.
Emotionally, the legacy of 9/11 for me is one of anger and fatigue at the atmosphere of prideful ignorance and bombastic proclamations that we Americans created in response. Somewhere, probably the news, I heard someone say that we were letting the attackers win by reacting the way we had. I was 12, but that sounded about right to me. I repeated that idea at school, but no one was interested.
David A.M. Wilensky was 12 on September 11, 2001. He graduated from Drew University in May and is now the editor of New Voices Magazine.
