It was Wednesday in the warm morning light. His hand solemnly rested on one of the 3,000 names engraved in the metal around the fountains of the monument commemorating the September 11 attacks, built at the exact location of the twin towers which were swept away by hatred and two airliners in this morning of 2001.
His gaze was sad. As it has now been every September for two decades.
Shaw Escoffery says he made the trip from Los Angeles to pay tribute to his childhood friend, Dominique. He also came to spend some time, as he does every year, with the one who, 20 years ago, lost her only child in this vile tragedy.
“It’s very hard for [la mère de Dominique], September 11. I have been thinking of Dominique every day for 20 years, ”said the man in his forties while emphasizing the absurdity of this disappearance. “She didn’t even work there. She had just landed a new job in the regional office of an insurance company. That day, she had come for a simple training ”, in the offices of Marsh McLennan, at 99e floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center. At the precise location of the first impact.
Her name was Dominique Pandolfo. She was 25 years old.
This week, the emotion was still very strong in the south of Manhattan, at the foot of the new One World Trade Center where, under high military and police protection, preparations were well underway for the commemorations of this tragedy which, 20 years ago , has deeply bruised a city and shattered thousands of destinies. Fates some of which are just beginning to take advantage of the time that has passed to rebuild themselves.
“Twenty years is a beautiful slice of life that I have not seen pass”, drops Bruno Dellinger, one of the survivors of September 11, returned to New York this week for the first time in 12 years, with his children aged 18 and 16 to whom he wanted to transmit fervor, respect, sadness as well as the values of heroism and resilience carried by this anniversary. He also wants to share with them, at the scene of the attacks, the memory of a tragedy that he has lived, he, in the front row, since the 47e floor of his office in the north tower.
“This day will never be erased from my memory, but the wound is healing,” said the man, who at the time managed an art consulting firm responsible for forging links between the United States and France, the country where he went to live in 2009.
He evokes images, sensations, that of the plane at low altitude that he saw arriving towards the tower from his window, that of the shock, of the building which began to shake, of the debris falling before his eyes, then the vision of “his” tower on fire, once he managed to get out of it, after long minutes on the emergency stairs, and that of this “mineral monster” made of ash, metal, debris that left it. engulfed after the first collapse.
“Everything has become dark, sinister and silent. The air was so thick that sound no longer circulated. At that moment, my body believed he was dead. “
Mr Dellinger packed the suit he wore that day, which he had cleaned in the days following the tragedy and which he has never dared to put back on since. “I’m going to decide on Saturday morning if it’s the one I’m going to wear for the commemorations. Twenty years is an important time marker which offers the possibility of looking at things differently. “
He adds: “In the aftermath of the attacks, I hated all of humanity, but especially the people who perpetrated these acts. I still can’t forgive. I still don’t understand why this event happened. But the time has come to move away a little from the negative feelings that he animated, to understand the tragedy from another angle, to take the full measure of its magnitude, its insanity, its human consequences and see what positive lessons we can now draw from it. “
A fading memory
From his office in the heart of “Ground Zero”, Clifford Chanin, deputy director of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, also believes it. “After 20 years, it’s time to look back to see that the memory is fading, yes, but the country and the world are forever marked by this event,” he says. We cannot close the door like that on this tragedy, even two decades later. But we must find ways now to tell it to those who were not there at the time so that this memory continues. “
Since September 11, 2001, 75 million Americans have been born, arriving in the after without having known before. The same goes for those who, on the day of the attacks, were too young to understand, like Dina Peña, 23, met Thursday in Amsterdam Street on the Upper West Side. “It is a pivotal event in history that suddenly stopped the movement of the city, and that of the country, to make it aware that the worst could strike anytime. They say the world has not been the same since that date. But for me, it’s the same, since it’s the only world I’ve known. “
“These attacks mark the beginning of a new era from which we still have not emerged,” says Azad Mahmound, a 25-year-old New Yorker who remembers his day at daycare, cut short 20 years ago by the commotion caused. by the attacks, and the TV image of the second plane hitting one of the twin towers. An era of militarization, of racism, which I experienced throughout my youth, of creating surveillance agencies that amplified government interference in countless areas of our daily lives. I haven’t known the world before, but the world after wasn’t built on what’s best. “
“On September 11, it was not just two towers that collapsed, it was also the spirit of New York, its lightness of being and its frivolity that disappeared, says Pasquale Marcotullio, a young retiree, sitting on a bench at the entrance to the pedestrian bridge of the Brooklyn Bridge where, in 2001, thousands of dazed, injured and traumatized New Yorkers rushed to flee southern Manhattan after the sudden closure of the network of public transport. People today are more fearful, more careful. The trauma of the first years is perhaps less there, but the memory of the drama remains, especially in this 20e birthday. It is also important to remember, but it is also important to forget. Because we must also look ahead to continue to move forward. “
A distance that brings you closer
That’s kind of what New York would be doing, according to French writer Marc Levy, who has lived here for over 20 years and has seen New Yorkers transform over time and time. distance necessarily taken with the shock. “Acts of gratuitous violence induce trauma that takes a long time to fade, as they expose the worst that humans are capable of,” he says, sitting on the terrace of a Greenwich Village cafe. But the city’s center of gravity has shifted in recent years. People talk about it less and especially no longer register the temporality of the city or theirs in a before and after September 11, as they did before. “
This other new normality undoubtedly explains why, in recent days, several New Yorkers, directly or indirectly affected by the attacks, are now approaching the commemorative monument, on the eve of the commemorations, when they did not have it. never done in the previous 20 years.
“I always felt it was a place for tourists,” says Michael Minogue, who stopped by this week for the first time when he lives a few streets up, “on 14e », He specifies, and that he often comes to work here, in the Financial District where the twin towers were located. “But I realize today that it’s more than that. It is a place of remembrance for the country, such as the WWII Memorial at Pearl Harbor. A place that recalls an event that shaped the identity of the country. “
“We’re going to have to deal with the reminiscence of this tragedy forever,” said Cesar Hernandez, 45, another New Yorker who first came to the scene of the tragedy. Over time, the meaning of this attack has evolved in people’s minds. The scale of the victims strikes me and especially the fact that these victims were only people who, that day, did nothing other than go to work and who found themselves caught in the middle of ‘a geopolitics over which they had no control. “
It is moreover this memory of the victims that the Museum and the Memorial of September 11 are now seeking to cultivate, for the years to come, in order to explain the tragedy a little by the factual information that composes it, but above all through the experience of loss experienced by thousands of families in the years that followed. “We are in a place of sadness, but also a place of gathering,” says Clifford Chanin. People also come here with their families to become aware of the fragile ties that unite them to each other, of a tragedy that has caused the destruction of entire families, solid friendships… ”, what Shaw Escoffery, 20 years later, still lives deep inside him.
“Time goes by, yes, but the feeling that inhabits me has not changed,” said the man, moving away, his gaze dark, from the plaque where the name of his friend Dominique was engraved for eternity. . I still live today and I will still live tomorrow with the pain of an unnecessary death. “
This report was partly funded with support from the Transat International Journalism Fund –The duty.
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