These images were seen around the world 25 years ago – Beat Reinhart witnessed the attack first-hand.
Keystone
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Swiss citizen Beat Reinhart was working directly opposite the Twin Towers. He witnessed the attacks first-hand. He has never spoken about it – until today. A testimony.
“I always keep the morning of September 11 free. There’s nothing in my diary, and it’s been that way for 25 years.
I never talk about September 11, 2001. Unless I absolutely have to. I had to come to terms with it for myself. It takes an incredible amount of time to come to terms with a trauma like that. It wasn’t just that one day, but the months that followed – the constant smell of smoke, working in a basement.
Beat Reinhart
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For me, the 25th anniversary is an opportunity to finally open up – even to my parents, who were sitting on the terrace of my flat in New Jersey on that day and watched the planes fly into the towers.
I remember the morning of September 11 very clearly. As always, I was in the office at 7am. By 7:10am, you were already running late at the trading desk. I was working for Commerzbank at the time.
I went into my office and thought to myself – this was before we had mobile phones – ‘Oh my God, today would have been the day to bring a camera into the office.’ The visibility was crystal clear; a real picture-perfect day. It’s never been that clear since.
I was working on the 32nd floor when I heard a noise – that’s how I imagine the sound of a rocket. That noise, like an engine. And then it just stopped. We didn’t hear an explosion in the traditional sense, more like an impact, and we felt a shockwave. Then all our phones in the trading floor went dead – including the brokers’ lines.
I knew which direction the sound had come from, so I went over to the east side to look up. I was absolutely stunned. For the second time. Because back in 1993, I’d already experienced a terrorist attack in the very same office – the explosion in the World Trade Center car park. I’d been spared then, too.
I stood at the window for at least a minute, watching a shower of paper pouring out of the building. How could there be so much paper up there? It just kept coming. It made no sense.
On September 11, 2001, terrorists hijacked four passenger aircraft. Two of them were flown into the towers of the World Trade Center in New York; a third struck the Pentagon near Washington. The fourth aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania. Almost 3,000 people died in the attacks.
The Swiss community was also affected. Two Swiss nationals lost their lives in the attacks in New York. In the days that followed, the foreign ministry sought to ascertain the whereabouts of hundreds of Swiss nationals in the US.
At that time, around 20,000 Swiss were living in the greater New York, New Jersey and Connecticut area. Today, over 26,000 Swiss nationals are registered in the region.
My second thought was that we’d never be able to travel freely again for the rest of our lives. They’ve done it again, and our freedom is gone.
Then I looked down – and I saw a person lying on the central reservation of the four-lane road. They weren’t moving. Why isn’t anyone calling an ambulance, I wondered.
I went back into the trading room. Everyone was trying, in one way or another, to get hold of their family members. I was worried about my mother.
My parents were visiting. They’d been living back in Switzerland for almost 20 years by then – they used to come and visit me every two or three years. My mother had said the night before that she wanted to go to the bookshop in the World Trade Center complex that morning.
I couldn’t get through to her on the phone. Shortly afterwards, we heard a massive explosion. The floor beneath me shook. The second plane had struck the South Tower from a different angle. It went deathly quiet. Nobody said a word.
The second aeroplane (United Airlines Flight 175) crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center at 9:03am local time (New York) on September 11, 2001.
Keystone / AP
I stood up and knew: we had to get out of there. I saw the petite Filipino woman in the back office, sitting at her desk, completely paralysed with fear. I took her by the hand and fled the building with her. Nobody said a word.
We ran down the fire escape. The emergency exit opposite the North Tower was closed. We were in the dark for a long time. I remember a long corridor, then we came out at the South Tower.
By then, we were a group of about seven people, and I was responsible for two young female interns from Germany.
Beat Reinhart, 62, has lived in the New York metropolitan area for decades. A dual Swiss-American national, he grew up in the US and Switzerland. His parents are from canton Thurgau and now live in Lausanne. After studying in the US, Germany and Switzerland, Reinhart pursued a career in the financial sector and now works for a major US financial firm. He has been actively involved in Swiss associations in New York for many years. He lives on a historic farm in New Jersey.
We decided to head for the ferry terminal. As luck would have it, the ferry was still running. It was the last crossing. I had to pay for every single person I took onto that boat.
We went to the upper deck. The Winter Garden, situated between the World Financial Center and the Twin Towers, was right in our line of sight. Behind it, the towers were ablaze, shrouded in a huge cloud of paper and smoke.
I wanted to take the people who were with me to my flat in Jersey City. We were walking up Montgomery Street when the chauffeur of a black saloon car asked me where we were coming from. The radio was blaring loudly from the car; the news was on. I replied, ‘From the World Trade Center.’ And he said, ‘They’re attacking everything.’
That was the first indication to me that it wasn’t just the World Trade Center that had been attacked.
We walked to my flat, where I’d been expecting my parents. I unlocked the door, went into the living room – no one was there. My heart stopped. But there was a staircase in the flat leading up to the roof terrace. And up there they all were: my mother, my father and my sister.
From there, we watched the towers collapse.
The sky was empty. Our souls were empty. Nothing but blue sky above the deserted streets.
Later, I heard that the collapse of the towers had blown out the windows of the lower 17 floors of my office block.
Painted in 1989, this picture shows the view of the Twin Towers from Beat Reinhart’s flat in Jersey City.
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It took more than ten years before my parents, who are now 93, even mentioned that day. We never spoke about it. It was only this week, 25 years on, that we had perhaps the most open conversation we’ve ever had about it – and it lasted just two minutes.
They were sitting on my terrace that morning, having breakfast, when they saw the first aeroplane fly in right before their eyes. Just a mile away as the crow flies, with a completely unobstructed view.
It took 25 years for me to find out why my mother wasn’t at the World Trade Center that morning. At the last minute, my sister had said: ‘Oh come on, let’s just have a leisurely breakfast here on the terrace. I’ll pop down and get us some fresh bagels.’
The shock in the days that followed ran deep. Then there was that smell. The smell of fire. It didn’t smell of wood, or paper, or plastic. It was a distinct, acrid odour. Right up until Christmas, several times a week the wind would blow the smoke across the river straight into my flat in Jersey City.
About a month after the attacks, I fell ill – I had a severe case of shingles and was off work for two weeks. During that time, my colleagues attended one, two, three or more funerals every day. We mourned so many people: members of the New York Fire Department, relatives of colleagues and people with whom we had worked closely.
My family and I didn’t suffer the worst of it that day, but so many people around us lost everything.
In the months that followed, I commuted for several hours every day to our emergency operations centre in Connecticut, where we worked in a basement.
Beat Reinhart’s office is now on the 39th floor of One World Trade Center (the tower in the middle).
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Today I work on the 39th floor of the rebuilt One World Trade Center – the so-called Freedom Tower. I followed the reconstruction from afar every day right from the start.
Even so, it took a very long time before I was able to set foot in this area again at all after it was completed. The fact that the Freedom Tower has been built and that life has returned there means more to me than any memorial. It shows that the city is alive.
Now that it’s being reported on everywhere again to mark the anniversary, I switch off the TV and the radio. I can’t bear to listen to it.
I know it’s pure fate, pure timing – whether a chunk of concrete falls on your head or whether someone says: ‘Let’s have a bagel first.’”
Edited by Balz Rigendinger. Translated from German, sub-edited by Thomas Stephens
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