'It was surreal'
For all Americans, today is another anniversary marking the deadliest attacks on U.S. soil.
For some Americans, like Nick and Gale Limansky, who live at Concordia Lutheran Ministries in Jefferson Township, the anniversary hits closer to home — and to the heart.
But Nick, 68, won't be watching the televised memorials.
Chalk it up to a kind of survivor's guilt and emotional scars never completely healed.
'Lucky to survive'
“They take me to a place I don't want to go,” he said of the memorials. “I was very lucky to survive, and I went through a number of years of dealing with the feeling of guilt.”
On Sept. 10, 2001, Nick was at the World Trade Center's North Tower where he worked for global insurance broker Marsh & McLennan.
His office was on the 99th floor near the top of the tower.
But as fate would have it, a month earlier, the company announced Nick's professional development department would be moved to the company's original headquarters on 46th Street in Manhattan.
His 12-person department was the only one to move from the digs at the Twin Towers.
“I think (the company) was trying to open the space on the 99th floor for more brokers,” he recalled, “and to get us out.”
The rest of his co-workers at the Word Trade Center, where he had worked since 1998, remained.
On Sept. 11, 2011, he got to work on 46th Street at around 8:30 a.m. He was expecting to participate in a teleconference at 9 a.m.
While waiting, he continued to unpack his boxes and straighten out his new cubicle.
'I could see the towers'
Then the first wave of terrorists attacks began. The North Tower was hit at 8:46 a.m.
“Somebody started yelling, and I noticed everybody was over by the windows,” he remembered. He went to look, and looked in horror.
“I could see the towers. They were in the distance, but I could see them. And I'm almost sure I saw something sticking out wherever we would have been,” he said, referring to his former office.
That object sticking out of — or into — the building he believed was the first plane — American Airlines Flight 11 — that the terrorists turned into a weapon that day.
That plane hit smack dab in the middle of the seven floors that Marsh & McLennan had at One World Trade Center.
'What's happening?'
“Everybody started to cry,” Nick said, recalling the mood of his 46th Street office. “I was just looking at it, thinking what is it? What's happening?”He thought about his co-workers, now dead. The company lost all 295 employees in the North Tower offices that day. Others of the firm's 1,613 employees, who were elsewhere at WTC, survived.Nick thought of his wife. He tried to call her, but couldn't get a connection by way of the pre-cellphone era landline.Gale, now 70, was at her office of the architecture firm Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates on 57th Street in Manhattan. She could not see the towers from her office — 11 blocks from Nick.Her co-workers let her know something terrible had just occurred.“Everyone started running to the audio/video room to watch what was happening on the TV sets,” she recalled. I heard people yelling, 'A plane just flew into the World Trade Center, Tower One.' ”Gale didn't go to the A/V room. Instead, she tried calling her mother, who was visiting at the Limanskys' home in Yonkers, Westchester County, N.Y.“We hadn't gotten to tell her that Nick's office had been moved to 46th Street,” Gale said. “So she still thought he was working at the World Trade Center. I knew she would be hysterical.”She couldn't immediately reach her mom apparently because the phone lines were tied up. But Gale and Nick eventually made a phone connection, although neither is exactly sure how. They agreed to meet at 57th Street and Fifth Avenue.'It was surreal'Nick walked the 11 blocks to see his wife. By then, it was around 5 p.m., about eight hours after both towers had collapsed.“It was surreal,” Nick said of the trek. “Everybody was so shell-shocked. Everybody kind of looked like zombies. Their eyes were wide open.”Gale remembered that as people walked past, many of them survivors from the World Trade Center, there was little, if any, talking.“Everybody looked dazed,” she said.The couple finally reunited and hugged a little longer than usual.“We were very grateful to be together,” Nick said, “But we were completely mindful of the people who were not together — all the people who were lost.”They made it home to Yonkers once the trains started running again.The next day, Nick was back at work, helping operate the company's crisis center, at a Midtown hotel.“We were helping families of victims,” he said. Gale helped out there, too, for a couple of days.Nick's tenure at Marsh & McLennan ended the following year when his position was eliminated.Finding tranquility at ConcordiaFive months ago, Gale, a Juilliard-trained and internationally recognized opera singer, and Nick, a one-time singer in professional choral groups and an author of books on music, left the turbulence of New York for the tranquility of Concordia.Gale, a native of Natrona Heights, Allegheny County, and Nick, born in New York's Greenwich Village and raised in Baltimore, couldn't be happier.They both came to know — and love — Concordia when Gale's mother briefly lived there before her passing in 2003.And from the peace of their adopted home, they reflected on the passing of another 9/11 anniversary.Unlike some, they don't believe Americans, with the passing of time, are forgetting what happened that day.“I don't think so,” Nick said, “especially now with the political climate and what's happening in Afghanistan. I think people are worried it might happen again.”
