9/11 witnesses recall dust and loss in New York

Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, architect Silke Rapelius and former German consulate press officer Werner Schmidt recall the chaos and human suffering they witnessed in New York, BR reports.

Rapelius had already worked for three years at a large architecture firm in New York when the attacks took place. On the morning of September 11, 2001, she was at a construction site in Manhattan. After colleagues heard about the first impact, they went to the roof, where they had a clear view towards Lower Manhattan.

Rapelius saw one of the World Trade Center towers collapse. “It was truly horrific,” she recalled. The event seemed abstract because a building was collapsing in the distance, she said, but she also knew that people were inside.

Nineteen members of the Islamist terrorist network al-Qaida hijacked four passenger planes that morning. Two were flown into the World Trade Center towers, one crashed into the Pentagon near Washington and the fourth went down in Pennsylvania after passengers and crew tried to overpower the hijackers. A total of 2,977 people were killed, not including the 19 attackers.

After the towers collapsed, huge clouds of dust moved through Lower Manhattan. People fled on foot from downtown towards the north. “It was so eerily quiet,” Rapelius said. The air smelled of ash and burned cables. More and more people came towards her, walking silently or almost apathetically towards uptown Manhattan. Many were covered in dust. Roads were closed and telephone networks were overloaded as people tried to contact relatives and friends.

Schmidt, who was from Upper Franconia, was working as press officer at the German Consulate in New York. While the nearby United Nations headquarters was evacuated, the consulate offices remained staffed.

“I think we were one of the few foreign missions in this area that continued working because we knew there were Germans who depended on us,” Schmidt recalled. He had every missing person from Germany added to a list and provided the German press with information from New York.

Rapelius eventually made her way home to Brooklyn. The windows of her apartment had been open, and a thick layer of dust covered the furniture and floor. She took a bucket and sponge and began cleaning. Then she stopped and began to cry.

That was when she realised what the dust meant to her. “It is not just building dust. These are things that have to be buried somewhere,” she recalled.

Today, two large pools mark the footprints of the former twin towers in New York. The names of the victims are inscribed into their bronze edges. The One World Trade Center stands beside them. Rapelius has remained in New York and continues to help shape the city as an architect, in a place that has changed without forgetting what happened there 25 years ago.