“We thought it was a fire drill because the only thing we could hear over the public address system was: we have to evacuate, we have to evacuate,” says José Ramón (Jochi) Jiménez, a Madrid lawyer, who then worked for an American firm. His office was eight kilometers away, in Midtown, but on 9/11 he had to give a conference in Tower 7 of the World Trade Center and he was there when the alert was raised. In the middle of the confusion, he walked down more than 40 floors and, once on the street, he witnessed one of those Dantesque scenes that are hard to forget. “I realize that something is happening, Gordo. Because you saw people jump from the tower and no one jumps from a height of 100 stories thinking they are going to survive.”
From then on, all he remembers is chaos and lack of coordination: “the Americans were in a total state of shock. People were on their knees. People were like zombies. Because they didn’t really know what to do. When the telecommunications failed, they couldn’t activate the protocols. In the following days, Manhattan was isolated, with bridges and tunnels closed and only the National Guard entered. For a few days Manhattan was a total and absolute war zone. The American lived in a bubble and the Twin Towers punctured,” he says.
The American lived in a bubble and the Twin Towers punctured it
Unlike other survivors, Jochi did not suffer personal losses, purely by chance. Since they had just arrived in the city, he had suggested that his wife take their two children, then small, to visit the World Trade Center, but there was no way. “I lost the fight and thank God they are still alive. That would have changed my life.” Fortunately, this was not the case and, in the year they still remained in New York, their routines did not change. “On the 12th I was already in the office working,” he says, although for New Yorkers, he points out, “they were a few months of shock,” glued to the radio and television wondering what could happen from then on.
He did not return to ground zero until many years later, with his children already teenagers. “The oldest must have been 15 or 16 years old…and the youngest, 13 or 14. I returned with my children to New York to see the house where we lived, to see the park where they played. And my daughter told me: Hey, let’s go see it! And I: is it necessary? And the truth is that it did move me a lot to see it,” she admits, because the “monument is very well done: those holes with the waterfall, the names, like the emptiness that remains after all the people who died and for their families.
A city devoted to the victims
The most emotional thing about that whole experience, he remembers, were the attempts to reactivate the city’s economy as soon as possible and the solidarity with those affected. In his own office, he says, they set up four of the ten floors to accommodate lawyers from other firms so they could work.
And the same thing happened in other parts of the city, as if the desire to help was also a balm for the trauma. The psychologist Laura Rojas, raised in New York and still living in the city at the time, narrates how “queues formed in hospitals to donate blood, from people who were willing and in need, demanding to give a part of them to be able to contribute their grain of sand in such a terrible tragedy. She herself collaborated in several projects of psychological assistance to the victims while dealing with her own grief. “For those of us who experienced it more closely or lost loved ones, it has left a mark in memory. “emotional.”
He confesses that, sometimes, it is still difficult to tell it. Because 9/11 caught her visiting friends in Miami and returning home was quite an odyssey, not to mention the suffering and uncertainty during the hours without news from loved ones. “I didn’t hear from my father until 10:30 p.m..” His father is the psychiatrist Luis Rojas Marcos, director of the New York public hospital network. “I didn’t know if he had survived, if he had died.” That is why, for her, even today, 9/11 continues to be synonymous with anguish: “it is one of the worst days of my life and I think I will never forget it,” despite the time that has passed and the fact that, after overcoming post-traumatic stress, “research has shown,” she concludes, that the vast majority of those who lived through that have been able, I would say, to return to normality, to overcome it without forgetting it.”
Memory in the new generations
Marcos López is the son of Spaniards, who was born and has lived most of his life in New York. That day he was 12 years old and he has a memory that is “a little strange because at that age you don’t understand the seriousness of the situation.” At school, they were separated into groups and taken to the gym. There, the Mathematics teacher explained what had happened and the Science teacher began to cry. Once at home, Marcos keeps the image of his mother watching the news very excited. “If I have learned anything,” he reflects, “I would say it is the strength of New Yorkers to move forward and to accept diversity.” And he gives as an example the fact that today the city has a Muslim mayor and from his same generation, Zohran Mamdani.
