'Now I know how the Israelis feel'
By Melissa Radler
NEW YORK (September 12) - An airplane flying too low over downtown Manhattan caught my attention while I was walking to work yesterday morning.
I was standing on a street corner about a kilometer away from the World Trade Center when the first of two aircraft crashed into the north tower. (It turned out to be an American Airlines passenger plane en route from Boston to Los Angeles.)
The boom sounded like a truck hitting a pothole.
Less than an hour later, a truck driver stopped his car on the same street corner. He opened the window and turned the radio up so that crowds fleeing the scene of the worst terrorist attack in US history could hear President George W. Bush observe a moment of silence for the thousands who are feared dead.
But at 8:45 a.m. New York-time yesterday, most people crossing Canal Street on their way to work didn't flinch at the initial boom, until billowing gray smoke and thousands of glass shards started to cloud the skyline. A man on the street thought the airplane's pilot was disoriented and shook his head with concern.
Two women whose family members work in the north tower tried frantically to contact relatives via cellular phone.
With no cellular phone service in the area, I turned around and walked home to call my parents and turn on the TV. I live a 10-minute walk from the WTC with a perfect view of the twin towers. When I was just outside my building, a second airplane hit the south tower with a boom that sounded like rolling thunder and caused people on the street to clutch their hearts and throats and bend over in horror.
Sixteen-year old Tashauna Sanders had just arrived at Murray Bergtaum High School when her school shook from the blast. "It blew up and we felt it. Everybody ran out the door and it blew up again. The whole thing just blew up and it was gone," she said.
Sanders' mother, Evelyn Carroll, was already at work at The Jerusalem Post office yesterday morning when her daughter called to tell her that the WTC had exploded. With most public transportation halted, Sanders had to walk for more than two hours to get home to Brooklyn.
A friend who works on Wall Street said she was bombarded with papers and ash while walking to work. "The first plane had probably just hit," said Talia Nagar, 27. "I looked up and saw black smoke coming out. I thought there was a fire until I turned on the TV."
When I left my building and restarted my daily walk to the office, I was joined by a massive exodus of people fleeing lower Manhattan, many of them with cellular phones in hand that didn't work. Lines were forming outside pay phones and people, crying, were comforting strangers and listening to lists of family members and friends they had yet to track down.
People gathered in small groups next to cars whose radios were switched on. In the elevator on the way up to an office, a man said, "Now I know what Israelis feel like."
City Councilman Noach Dear echoed the thought, and added. "We realize now that terrorism can happen anywhere."
From my apartment, I saw the twin towers burning, with holes gaping and smoke tumbling out. According to witnesses, people were also tumbling out, leaping from as high as 80 stories from their offices to their deaths. My neighborhood was soon evacuated.
"This is just an unimaginable tragedy. There is nothing that I have seen in my lifetime that compares to having to witness the most deliberate evil," said the chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Mortimer Zuckerman, less than two hours later, after the WTC's twin towers had collapsed in a heap of smoke, debris and bodies. Zuckerman called from a Paris hotel room, where he was stuck after the US cancelled all air travel. He said he was watching television images of people in Arab countries taking to the streets to celebrate the attack.
About 50,000 people worked in the towers, a classic New York landmark and tourist attraction.
"We were standing there on West Broadway watching it," said Robert Bernstein, a coworker. "You could see the building start to peel, you could see the windows coming off. The heat of the fire was actually melting the building. I kept thinking, there's an airplane in there!"
"You could see the fire going down floor by floor. You could see it starting to melt. All of a sudden, there was an explosion. Then you saw the tower just go down into the building. The whole building just collapsed into itself," Bernstein said.
Echoing a comment heard on many radio stations and TV sets today, Bernstein said, "This is Pearl Harbor. We're at war. This is war."
Primaries for the New York mayoral and city council elections were immediately cancelled. Councilman Dear said that the Jewish community was rife with rumors of suspicious packages and bombs at synagogues. Israeli consulates and embassies were evacuated. Hatzolah, the Jewish volunteer ambulance corps, was one of many groups helping out with the rescue operation.
"The act of terrorism experienced in New York today is as heinous as it is appalling, but our immediate concerns are for those who were injured and the families of those who were so callously murdered. I can't even verbalize how we feel," said Michael Miller, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York.
Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League had boarded an airplane to Washington, DC when the attacks occurred. Within 10 minutes, his flight had been cancelled and the plane evacuated.
"I think it's a realization of our worst nightmare," Foxman said.
He added: "I had lunch yesterday with [Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor] Elie Wiesel. He said that we have to alert the world to the dangers of terrorism, and maybe we should plan a conference to remind the world that democracy is threatened. How ironic that that's what we talked about. We don't need to alert the world anymore."
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