Twenty-five years after 9/11
Twenty-five years after the Twin Towers fell, a reporter working on a story about our family’s 9/11 experience told me something that I had never realized: my son Jacob’s first memory was breathing through a wet sleeve on the morning of September 11th. I had not known this. I believed I understood what he had lived through, but I learned of his first conscious memory, formed in ash and panic, from a stranger..
I thought of my mother’s first memory: being seized roughly by the hands of a Nazi soldier, held in the air, and then dropped abruptly to the ground when her father, my Zayde, entered the room.
My mind drifted back to my own children and I did the arithmetic. A chill. My mother, then called Tania Rabinovitch, had just turned 4 when she walked out of the Kovno Ghetto in Lithuania. On 9/11, Jacob and his twin sister, Sarah, were a few weeks away from turning 4. My mother and my children, just over half a century apart, standing at almost precisely the same threshold of life when history reached in and took hold of them.
Jacob called our appearance on 9/11 – blanketed in soot and pulverized concrete and all the microscopic debris that had settled into our hair and clothes and the creases of our hands – “crunchy.” My mother, at the same age, was covered in the ash and grime of the ghetto’s burned rubble, dressed in whatever had survived, a child made visibly, enduringly dirty by inhuman violence.
Smoke found its way into the mouths of the generation after me and the generation before. Sarah huddled with me in the mailroom of our building in Battery Park City, the nearest residential building to the towers, and said “I have smoke in my mouth, Mommy.” My mother, at 4, breathed into sand held over her nose and mouth in one of the ghetto’s malinas — the hidden bunkers people dug beneath floorboards and behind false walls — filtering smoke-choked air during the ghetto’s liquidation. There was no mailroom to stand in, no building to be evacuated from, only the ground itself and whatever her family could carve out of it.
Fire drew all three of my children in before it frightened them. At Ground Zero, in those first days, Jacob, Sarah, and their baby sister, Rachel, were enthralled by the fire trucks, counting them off gleefully as they arrived, the way children count anything bright and loud and important-seeming. Only later did the sight of fire turn on them, becoming something that made their small bodies flinch. My mother’s hair was singed by the flames of the liquidated ghetto — flames that firefighters stood by and watched, not to save the people trapped inside it, but to keep the fire contained. They did not want it to spread past the ghetto walls to the Christian homes beyond them.
Jacob spent a long stretch of his childhood afraid that Osama bin Laden was going to find him. My mother held her own private catalogue of fears from those years, images never fully put into words for me. What both of them shared, across the 50 years between them, was the specific helplessness of being a child inside an adult catastrophe — barefoot, unprotected, dependent on grownups who themselves had no power to guarantee that anyone would be safe.
The lives of innocent children. Their childhoods could not have been more different and yet, for one brief moment, their days seemed to touch, one day folding onto the other, the more than 50 years between them collapsing until the two moments nearly became one – the pain of children stretching across time.
But the moment passed, and what followed for each of them could not have been more different.
We ended up at my sister’s that night, with family who opened their homes without being asked. We had the practical support available to a modern American family: insurance, resources, and most importantly, mobility — the freedom to go anywhere in the country we wanted, to choose a new life rather than accept whatever one we were assigned. The day after the towers fell, my husband went back to his job. There was a job to go back to, a salary that kept arriving, an entire structure of ordinary life that had been shaken but not destroyed.
My mother and her parents had none of that. Every relative who might have taken them in had already been murdered. There was no sister’s home waiting, no extended family absorbing the shock of what had happened — only the three of them, entirely on their own. Their home and everything in it had already been taken, and, worse than losing it, they had to stand and watch the taking happen, rather than returning afterward to find it gone. There was no choosing a new city, no building a life. They lived first under Soviet occupation, dangerous and precarious, before making the decision to leave it behind the only way available to them: crossing the Polish border on foot, at night, walking miles through conditions dangerous enough that the crossing itself could have killed them, with nothing waiting on the other side but the hope of somewhere safer. My Zayde had no job to return to, no income of his own — nothing but the meager stipend of the Joint Distribution Committee, the Jewish relief organization keeping refugee families like his alive in Italy while they waited for some country, any country, to let them in.
After 9/11, we rented a home before we bought one, a small, deliberate, unhurried sequence of choices. My mother and her parents, on the other hand, moved again and again in the three years after they left the ghetto, from one uncertain place to the next, before finally boarding a ship bound for Montreal and crossing the ocean in steerage — a passage that was itself an ordeal — and finally settling in a small apartment in Montreal’s Jewish quarter.
I do not weigh one tragedy against the other. A 4-year-old does not know, in the moment the fire comes, whether the adults around her have insurance, or connections, or a country willing to take her in. The fear is just fear, entire and complete, however differently the world responds to it afterwards. But looking at these two childhoods side by side, 50 years apart and yet somehow touching, I understand something now about what protected my children that never protected my mother: not luck alone, though there was luck in it, but the plain, enormous fact of somewhere safe to land, and someone already standing there, waiting, to catch them.
For my children, it was one terror-filled day. For my mother, the Shoah never quite ended. It engulfed her early years in trauma, blithely robbed her of her entire childhood, and damaged all the years that followed.
And so I stand between these two helpless generations of children, looking backward toward my mother and forward toward my own children, staring into history in both directions. More than 50 years apart, I see them at almost the same age: frightened, breathing smoke, utterly dependent on adults who could not make them safe. Their tragedies were not the same, and the lives that followed could not have been more different. But for that one moment, the distance between them seems to disappear, and all I can see are children—my mother, my son, my daughters—caught inside terrors they did not make, looking to the grownups around them to keep the world from coming apart.
