Survivors Rooted In Common Ground

By Carl Glassman
POSTED OCTOBER 1, 2007

Two days before the families of World Trade Center victims gathered by the hundreds last month to mark another year, a ceremony of a different sort took place several blocks away.

The quiet gathering was attended by a few dozen people in the shady triangle park beside the entrance ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge. They were not there to revisit the pain of loss so much as to bear witness, as survivors, to what they call “the weight of memory.”

 “Who else holds these vital pieces of history in their minds every day; recalls them every day?” Dot Hill told the gathering. “Survivors live with their memories and are part of a club no one asked to join.”

The history that Hill holds is not of burning towers but of the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, where she was working on April 19, 1995, the day of the attack that killed 169 people.

Hill is one of a small group from Oklahoma City who lived through the bombing and three years ago reached out to their counterparts in New York, the World Trade Center Survivors Network. Since then the groups have exchanged visits, formed friendships and provided one another with mutual support.

“They’re my family now,” said Charlie Kaczorowski, who was a site supervisor for the city’s Department of Design and Construction during the cleanup.

Seated in the park, the survivors faced a young tree, heavy with the symbolism of that bond. The elm is a sapling taken from the tree in Oklahoma City that miraculously survived the blast. It was planted last year in a grove of transplanted survivor trees that had stood at the World Trade Center site. In a finale to the ceremony of songs and speeches, the New Yorkers and Oklahomans scattered 3,148 rose petals around the tree, one for each life lost to terrorism in the United States, beginning with the World Trade Center bombing in 1993.

“They say when the student is ready the teacher will appear,” Elia Zedeno, a Port Authority financial analyst who survived both terrorist attacks on the Trade Center, told the group. “To the members of the World Trade Center Survivors Network, the teachers appeared in the form of those whose lives were changed forever on April 19, 1995.”

Zedeno had been trapped in an elevator during the 1993 attack, and only barely escaped the collapse of the south tower in 2001. She later talked about what those connections to the Oklahoma survivors means to her. “There’s a time when you feel you’re never going to get over it and you see people who are moving on. They say, ‘We did it, and you can do it, too.’”

One of them, Joanne Hutchison, was 75 feet from the blast at the federal building. A support column, standing between her and the devastation, saved her.

“I kept trying to figure out why, why I survived when people I felt were much better than me, more religious and spiritual, did not,” she said. “Then along comes 9/11.”

Hutchison said the pictures on TV of people walking the streets with photos of loved ones reminded her of the scenes in Oklahoma City after the bombing.

“I told my husband we have to do something. We had nobody to help us, we didn’t understand what we were going through emotionally or personally. All the feelings and fears I had, I thought I was losing my mind.”

Having moved “further down the healing road” as she puts it, Hutchison joined the outreach group and formed friendships—in person and by e-mail—with the New York survivors. Sometimes the e-mails would come late at night, from a sleep-deprived WTC survivor battling feelings he or she did not understand. And she could write back to them that their feelings were normal.

“You could hear the sigh of relief, actually on the computer,” Hutchison said. “And that’s what it’s all about. To know that someone who’s been there before understands."

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