Fifteen years after planes flew into the World Trade Center and thousands lost their lives, students at Nazareth Academy in La Grange Park were riveted by a first-hand account of the events of the horrific day by a parent who lived through it.
Stuart Breslow, who lives in Clarendon Hills, was working for the financial firm Lehman Brothers in 2001, when a plane flew into Tower One.
“It was just a regular, normal day until this happened,” said Breslow as a video played behind him showing flames and black smoke that erupted as a plane struck the tower.
“I didn’t hear it, but I felt it,” said Breslow who was working on the 40th floor. “The desk started to rock and I jumped out of my chair.”
The walls of his office cracked and debris flaked from the ceiling.
“It was clear that something very unnatural was happening,” he said.
Breslow and others gathered in a hallway and wondered what to do. Breslow’s instinct was to leave and he headed for the staircase.
“There was no mass hysteria,” he said. “No one knew what was going on. It was pure calm.”
Before he lost cell service, he called his wife, Cindy, who was working across the Hudson River in New Jersey. He left her a voice message telling her he loved her and their 2-year-old son, Brendan.
The staircase grew crowded and Breslow’s descent was slowed as another plane flew into Tower Two. News alerts received by pager provided a little bit of information. People, who had been calm, began to whimper.
“By this time it was clear that the city was under attack,” Breslow said.
Firefighters and other emergency personnel, weighed down by a tremendous amount of gear, were going up the staircase.
“We all kind of crept to the side as the firefighters came up,” he recalled. “These poor guys were going up as I was going down. They were reassuring us that we were going to be OK.”
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Breslow heard whistling sounds and thuds that he later learned was the sound of people jumping from the buildings. When he reached the bottom floor, he was directed into a basement shopping mall and then went up an escalator and exited the building where he looked skyward.
“I saw the two towering infernos and then I ran,” he said.
As he was fleeing, “I heard a really loud rumble behind me.”
He passed a synagogue where a rabbi urged him to take refuge.
“I asked a passerby what that sound was and he said one of the World Trade Center buildings fell.”
Because it was no longer safe, the rabbi told those gathered in the synagogue to leave.
“I walked out into a big cloud. Dust enveloped the area. We were all covered in ash,” Breslow said.
Breslow kept going and after an hour and 45 minutes, he got to a pay phone and let his loved ones know he was OK. His wife had been watching destruction of the towers from across the Hudson River and had no idea if he was alive.
“For an hour and 45 minutes she was wondering what life was going to be like without me,” said Breslow, who eventually reached a ferry that took him and about 500 others to safety in New Jersey.
“There were 500 people on that boat with me. No one made a sound,” he said.
Junior Liam Gram of Franklin Park and other students were just as still as Breslow spoke for about 45 minutes. Gram was just a year old when 9/11 occurred and has no first-hand memory of it.
“It doesn’t seem like it could be real, but it happened to us,” he said.
Katie Uphues of Berwyn, a senior, was moved knowing that first-responders went into the towers to try to save others.
“I’m sure the firefighters knew this wasn’t going to end well,” she said. “And they still went up.”
Even as Breslow remembered a day when a total of 2,977 people lost their lives in attacks on the towers, the Pentagon and on another airplane downed in Shanksville, Pa., he asked the students to be hopeful. He recounted how thousand of volunteers flocked to the site to try to help in the rescue effort and how the site of the towers has been rebuilt and turned into a museum and memorial. He asked the students to be proud to be Americans and to be resilient.
“When you are knocked down. Bounce back up again,” he said.
He also asked them to never forget Sept. 11.
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