Today is always a difficult day for me.

My office was on the 82nd floor of One World Trade Center.
That day I had stayed home to drive my Mom to Newark Airport as she had about a 1 o'clock flight back to Florida.
So I watched the horror on TV after my son called me when they heard a large boom in Jersey City when the first plane hit.
I spent the day calling people's homes and checking them off the staff chart.
It turned out that 3 people of my staff did not make it out- 2 that worked directly for me.
From the accounts later on, we determined that one of the three had hurt his leg and the others stayed with him as the Port Authority police told them to wait and they would be rescued.

I attribute my Mom's timing to my still being here as I probably would have stayed with the injured person.
During the 1993 WTC bombing, I was saved by my father as I was with him just before he passed in a hospital in Florida.
I always went to lunch early around 12 and that was when the bomb destroyed a good part of the Concourse.
So I got to watch that on TV also.

My parents were both Holocaust Survivors, originally from Poland. My father was in camps and my mother escaped to Russia during the war. Both were lucky to be alive. I was born in a Displaced Persons Camp in Stuttgart, Germany in 1949 and my parents came to the United States when I was 3 months old.

I am lucky to still be here, but it is a difficult day for me.