9A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 2016
Survivors of 9/11 share soul-stirring experiences
Guides relive
horriic day
By VERENA DOBNIK
Associated Press
NEW YORK — For almost
a decade after her brother was
killed on 9/11, Jeanmarie Har-
grave avoided the World Trade
Center. Being there was “too
emotional, too sad.”
But ive years ago, she tried
a different way of grieving. She
joined a group of about 800
people touched personally by
the attacks who now lead tours
of the Sept. 11 memorial plaza.
The guides, who include
attack survivors, rescue and
recovery workers and people
who lost a loved one, give vis-
itors the soul-stirring experi-
encing of walking through the
rebuilt complex with people
who came face to face with the
attack and its aftermath.
And in return, guides like
Hargrave, of Maplewood, New
Jersey, get an emotional outlet.
At irst, she said, “I had a
very dificult time telling my
personal story. I would cry
through the whole thing.” But
that soon changed.
“These people can cry with
you and laugh with you. And
that makes it much easier,” said
Hargrave, whose brother, T.J.
Hargrave, worked in the twin
towers at the inancial services
company Cantor Fitzgerald.
The daily, 75-minute tours
are organized by the 9/11 Trib-
ute Center , a nonproit created
by the September 11 Families
Association, one of the groups
representing people who lost a
relative in the attacks.
After leaving the Tribute
Center’s gallery, which con-
tains artifacts, images and oral
histories of the attacks, the tour
groups visit a memorial to lost
ireighters on the side of a Lib-
erty Street irehouse that was
nearly destroyed in the attacks.
down,” she said, her voice
cracking with emotion. “When
you hear someone’s story, you
really feel it inside, and it’s
totally different from just com-
ing and looking at the buildings
and memorial pools.”
The Tribute Center oper-
ates separately from the oficial
National September 11 Memo-
rial & Museum, which con-
trols the plaza, the two giant
memorial pools and an under-
ground museum. It runs about
six tours a day, at a cost of $25
per person.
Deeply personal detail
Two guides then lead each
group through the World Trade
Center’s tree-illed plaza to the
two memorial pools, explain-
ing — often in deeply personal
detail — what happened on the
day of the attacks.
“We opened the ofice door,
and the hall was a wall of black
smoke,” guide Leokadia Glo-
gowski told a group of two
dozen visitors on one recent
tour. She worked as an engineer
on the 82nd loor of the north
tower, and described how the
building swayed when it was
struck by an airliner.
“Somebody yelled, ‘Get
out, right now! Get out!”’ she
told her group. She said she
prayed before plunging into the
smoke, feeling her way to the
stairwell and walking the 82
stories to the ground.
Rose Starosta, a tourist from
Saskatchewan, said hearing
No scripts
The tours aren’t scripted,
though the guides are trained
in a series of workshops con-
ducted in collaboration with
the storytelling organization
The Moth. Tribute volunteers,
staff and story coaches work to
craft each narration.
Jean Nebbia, a school-
teacher from Oakland, New
Jersey, said that like Hargrave,
she avoided the World Trade
Center site for years before
volunteering as a guide last
June.
Now she tells the story of
her brother Steven Schlag,
who also worked at Cantor
Fitzgerald.
“I had never really done
anything as far as 9/11. I
always had this heavy load that
weighed me down, but I wasn’t
ready till this past spring. I
realized that I need to do some-
AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews
Jean Nebbia, a schoolteacher from Oakland, N.J., talks with
visitors to the Sept. 11 memorial site in New York. Nebbia
serves as a volunteer tour guide, organized by the private
nonprofit 9/11 Tribute Center, to tell tours about her broth-
er Steven Schlag, a partner at Cantor Fitzgerald, who was
killed in the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center.
that irst-person account made
her visit to the site far more
moving and intimate.
“It doesn’t really hit you
until somebody says she was
afraid, but determined to get
thing,” she said. “I don’t want
to stop talking about what hap-
pened that day, and this gives
me a voice. I am just so grate-
ful that I’m meeting these peo-
ple and that they’re willing to
listen.”
Closest to son
Another guide, retired phy-
sician Barry Aron, 75, travels
from Maryland for a day each
month to lead two tours.
He ends each tour at the
spot where the name of his
son, Joshua Todd Aron, is
engraved on the bronze par-
apet surrounding the north
tower memorial pool.
The new World Trade Cen-
ter is “the place where I feel
closest to Josh,” he said.
He also leads his groups to
a more hopeful spot — to the
“Survivor Tree,” a stalwart
pear that emerged from the
iery rubble, clinging to life.
“I point out to people, ‘You
see the burned bark from 9/11?
— and the new growth?”’ he
says. “It’s a symbol of our
perseverance in the face of
adversity.”
Glogowski’s presentation is
tinged with hope, too. She tells
her tour group that as she led
Manhattan after the attack, she
encountered a saving grace: a
girl handing out paper towels
to ash-smeared survivors so
they could wipe their faces.
“Goodness and love always
win,” she said.
After 15 years, the last artifacts of 9/11 are inally put to rest
New York
shared the relics
of terror
By ADAM GELLER
Associated Press
NEW YORK — Behind
the barbed wire, the minivan’s
busted windows and crumpled
roof hint at its story. But fork-
lifted to this windblown spot on
the John F. Kennedy Interna-
tional Airport tarmac, between a
decommissioned 727 and an air-
craft hangar, it’s doubtful pass-
ing drivers notice it at all.
In the long struggle with
the memories of 9/11, though,
the van’s solitary presence here
marks a small but signiicant
transition point.
Tons of wreckage — twisted
steel beams, chunks of concrete
smelling of smoke, a crushed
ire engine, a dust-covered air-
line slipper — were salvaged
from the World Trade Center site
for preservation after the 2001
terrorist attacks. Now, 15 years
later, this van from a govern-
ment agency motor pool likely
sheltered in a garage beneath the
complex, is the last artifact with-
out a resting place.
When the van is claimed
it will fulill a pledge that, to
move beyond 9/11 without los-
ing sight of it, New York would
share relics of that terror, along
with the tales of sacriice and
fear that come with them. The
decision to give away pieces of
wreckage has been praised and
criticized over the years. But its
impact is undeniable.
More than 2,600 artifacts
have gone to 1,585 ire and
police departments, schools and
museums, and other nonproit
organizations in every state and
at least eight other countries.
“They are the relics of the
destruction and they have the
same power in the same way
as medieval relics that have the
power of the saints,” said Har-
riet Senie, author of “Memori-
als to Shattered Myths: Vietnam
to 9/11.”
An architect
combed site
After the attacks, it wasn’t at
all clear what would happen to
the wreckage. The Port Author-
ity of New York & New Jersey,
the Trade Center’s owner, dis-
patched an architect to comb
the site, saving a fraction of
the material, which was sent to
JFK’s empty Hangar 17.
A judge determined the arti-
facts could be donated to those
who promised to care for them.
But where to begin?
“It was piles and piles, prob-
ably my height or higher, of steel
beams,” says Amy Passiak, the
archivist hired to catalog the
Jetta Fraser/The Columbus Dispatch
A beam from the destroyed World Trade Center buildings,
part of the 9/11 Memorial near the Veterans’ Pavilion at the
Fulton County Fair in Wauseon, Ohio.
artifacts, recalling the irst time
she walked into the hangar in
2010. Passiak, a high school
senior in Michigan at the time
of the attacks, had been working
as an intern at New York’s 9/11
museum, but says she was still
unprepared for the scene.
“I remember going home that
day and just being exhausted,
just from being there a few
hours, just being emotionally
exhausted and not being able
to comprehend the amount of
work that was going to go into
the process.”
As word spread that the Port
Authority was giving the mate-
rial away, requests poured in.
Through August, it had distrib-
uted 2,629 artifacts.
BUSIN ESS D IRE CTORY
Many went to ire depart-
ments, local governments and
organizations in the New York
area with direct ties to those who
perished.
“That’s where the DNA is,”
said John Hodge of the Ste-
phen Siller Tunnels to Tow-
ers Foundation, named for his
cousin, a New York ireighter
killed on 9/11. In late July, the
foundation claimed an elevator
motor from the Trade Center,
a piece of the parking struc-
ture, and a portion of a broad-
cast antenna that crowned the
complex.
“Neither my cousin or any-
body else from Squad 1 was
ever found, but it’s in that steel,”
Hodge said.
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Fears of terrorism
But 15 years after Septem-
ber 11, memories of the attacks
are set against continued fears of
terrorism.
“We just don’t know where
the events of 9/11 have led
us,” said Rick Sluder, ire
chief in Wauseon, Ohio, which
obtained a Trade Center beam
and, together with neighboring
departments, built a memorial at
the Fulton County Fairgrounds.
“A lot of people are look-
ing at this as, is this the point of
downfall or the point at which
we rose above the rest, the point
of resiliency?” Sluder said.
By early this year, there was
little left at Hangar 17, Passiak
said. Items like police cruis-
ers, whose purpose that day
were clear, found takers. But
unmarked vehicles, anonymous
but for their place in the wreck-
age, were initially passed over.
When the Port Authority
shuttered the artifact program in
August, oficials moved the only
remaining artifact — a white
Dodge Caravan — to the tar-
mac. It, too, is likely to go soon,
to a group oficials will not iden-
tify until its application has been
approved.
Passiak, who recently moved
to Michigan to start a job at an
art museum, said some day
she’d like to take a road trip,
stopping to see where the arti-
facts have found homes.
GARAGE SALES
Y OU R GU ID E TO LOCAL PROF E SSIONAL S
A RBORIST
Adopted artifacts
But for many of the people
and groups that adopted arti-
facts, the loss was more abstract.
Heath Satow, a sculptor in
California hired to design a 9/11
memorial for the plaza fronting
Rosemead’s city ofices, recalls
awkwardly scanning a digital
catalog showing beams avail-
able from the Trade Center. But
hundreds of hours creating the
memorial — a 10-foot beam
cradled by hands of chrome, the
palms and ingers formed from
2,976 interlocking birds repre-
senting individual victims —
left a deep impression.
“Every individual was
attended to,” said Satow, his
voice breaking. “I just was
totally unprepared for it. But
when you spend all that time
seeing it as individuals it will
just wreck you.”
At Flour Bluff Junior High
School in Corpus Christi, Texas,
students from an oficer training
program stand guard each Sep-
tember alongside Trade Cen-
ter steel displayed near the caf-
eteria. Bruce Chaney, the naval
science instructor who applied
for the artifacts, brings another,
smaller piece to his classes.
The artifact is “twisted
and somewhat burned. It’s not
pretty. I’m hoping it will make
them think as they’re growing
up, that they have to pay atten-
tion to their past,” Chaney said.
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