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| by Stuyvesant High School Students, |
Sep 28, 2001 |
—Vlad Isakov, senior
I saw people running toward the bridge, and when I looked out the window, I saw a hole in the World Trade Center. I ran and got my camera, and I decided just to leave it on. I tried to get a little bit of the commotion surrounding the events.... When the second blast happened, I tried to run back into the building. I was scared to death. They wouldn’t let me back in, though. Senior pictures were being taken, and I was banging on the door for them to open it, and the people inside just [shrugged apologetically]. I crawled back to the front of the building and ran up the stairs. Everything was calm inside.... The next day I hurt—the experience had been physically draining. It was painful to me that someone would hurt us like that. I’ve always considered America as very innocent, a very innocent society. I think this was our loss of innocence.
—Elka Gould, technology teacher
Every day since that happened, I’ve cried at least once a day. I don’t really know why. After all, I’m one of the lucky ones. I wasn’t hurt, my family wasn’t hurt and my friends weren’t hurt.
—Gabriela Magda, sophomore
I was a little excited and curious at the fact that our boring normal school day had been interrupted. I didn’t realize how serious it was when I saw the towers on TV during 3rd period. I think the most vivid image I had was before the towers collapsed and still had a thick stream of smoke coming out. It was just so amazing to see something so grand and magnificent just go up in smoke like that.
There was definitely a lot of excitement among the classes, although most people were quiet as they were staring at the TV, shocked and not knowing what to say.
—Justin Ma, junior
When I got into room 407 for math, I saw a lot of people walking away from the Twin Towers. One guy said it looked like a “parade.”… Then Mr. Teitel gave us the horrific news that two planes crashed into the towers and another in Washington.... Everyone was trying to reach their family via cell phones. I tried to reach my dad because he worked a few buildings away, but all the cells were down. It seems like they never work when you need them to.... We finally got to a payphone at West 23rd and 11th to call our parents. All the lines were really long and people talked forever. But I reached my mom and told her I was ok. She told me my dad’s office was evacuated and he’s all right.
—Erin Jou, sophomore
After the North Tower was hit, I was sitting in my second period class and it dawned on me that my brother worked in that building, so I left the classroom to try and call someone.... I soon found out that my cell phone wasn’t working. I ran into two of my closest friends, and I was so frantic that they had to lead me to the phones on the first floor. The lines were long and I couldn’t get through when it got to be my turn. We heard about how some students were using Ms. Levine’s office to make calls. So we rushed up, and eventually I got in touch with him, and the second I started to cry from joy, they all did the same. It made me appreciate how much they helped. It turns out my brother decided to just stay home that day for no good reason. Some luck.
—Kristin Loughran, senior
I felt the building shake, but I couldn’t tell if it was the building shaking because I was shaking.
—Kameli Chow, senior
I really kept my head in the sand. I tried not to look out the windows. I went outside and had a cigarette. I could see the whole tower set against the deep blue sky. It was stunning to see the holes and the fire against such a rich blue background. It was incongruous, almost like it wasn’t real. It was actually beautiful. I had a hard time coping with my initial reaction. I felt guilty about it, smoking my cigarette in awe of this spectacle while people were dying. I went back into the building, and I finally went to look out the window … and saw this dark, roiling cloud of smoke and debris coming at us. We’d been waiting for further instructions, but it seemed that there wouldn’t be any further instructions. My thought was just, Let’s get the hell out of here.
—Robert Floersch, social studies teacher
I thought it must have been an accident and I stood and watched. I saw people jumping out of windows. That’s when I realized people were dying.
—Annie Thoms, English teacher
So this was terrorism. But it’s happened before, right? Oklahoma City in 1998, the Tokyo subways in 1995, WTC in 1993, for goodness’ sake. I spent all summer learning about how rare terrorism was and how exaggerated the fear of it was. It wasn’t something we hadn’t dealt with before, right? Things like this have happened. The country knows how to deal with this.... This was how I consoled myself against the nagging voice that told me something was really wrong.... Then I listened to the news. They talked about how it was an unprecedented shutdown of the city. The attacks on America were unprecedented.... We had never entered a territory so dangerous. We had never been this threatened. Things never looked like it could go so wrong. From here, things could go so wrong we can’t even imagine it.
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