© Walter Goralski 2011
Made with Xara
Walter’s Story:
On Sunday, October 7, 2001, Walter Goralski and his son Alex made their way to lower Manhattan. As soon as they came up
from the City Hall subway station, they could smell it, even four weeks later. It was an odor, Walter said on the video, halfway
between the wet and charred remains of a barbecue and the faint ozone aroma from an electrical short. It stung his eyes. Some
plants along the fence surrounding City Hall, the last flourish of the year, were dead and still dusted with white powder, even after
several rains. It settled out of the air, all around.
Walter had flown up the Hudson River the day before, right over Ground Zero. He was surprised they let the plane go to
LaGuardia that way, so surprised he never took a picture. The pit still smoldered, the pieces of metal poking up this way and that.
Looking straight down into it, it looked like the entrance to hell.
Cops kept traffic moving; there was little parking anywhere. Whole neighborhoods had been cordoned off with military-style
checkpoints, turning lower Manhattan into Berlin and Checkpoint Charlie. The only ones allowed entry were wearing red or green or
blue photo passes on lanyards. Everywhere troops with M-16s strolled, serious, watching. Until this weekend, even more of the area
had been off-limits, but now for the first time people could get close enough to peer at the twisted steel remains from a block or two
away through the chain link fences strung around the site. The streets were packed, the memories raw, a giant question marked
WHY hanging over everything.
Buildings all around were draped with red netting to keep debris close if they fell. Many were empty, condemned or deemed
structurally suspect. The falling towers had the impact of a 6.0 earthquake and were picked up all over the world. Many of the
windows on stores at ground level were shattered, their contents taken away to safety. There had been very little looting that
morning, everyone said. Looting is the luxury of survivors, and no one was sure who they would be.
A constant parade of people shuffled along an informal circuit: quiet, reverent, subdued. It wound down Broadway past Saint
Paul's toward Trinity Church, up a block, then back around north. Between the chasms at the end of the blocks you could see the
twisted steel, just like on TV. It was still sticking surprisingly far up into the air, still smoldering, still a tomb for many. Some gasped at
the sight, others wept. Nobody was especially angry, except if you got in the way of a picture or started horsing around like an idiot.
Walter was surprised to see a few Arabs along with Hasidic Jews and Amish, who all stood out in the crowd. No one said a word to
them. This was not a place to desecrate through anger or hatred. All were welcome to pay their respects, and everyone was grateful
for the attention the site had attracted.
Walter thought no more about 9/11 for years until an electrician named Joe came to run a new conduit and replace a faulty
circuit-breaker on his hot tub.
The first thing Walter noticed about Joe was the way he talked. "New York?" Walter asked.
"Long Island," said Joe, saying Lawn Guyland. "You?"
"Westchester," said Walter. Of course, he said Wes-chesta. "What are you doing down here in Phoenix?"
"Ah," he said. "I'm down here for treatment at the Mayo Clinic for throat cancer. I'm lucky my brother and his family are in
Glendale."
"Throat cancer? That's terrible."
"Yeah. A lot of guys got sick after 9/11."
Walter told him the story about his son Alex and his trip in October 2001.
"Someday the truth will come out," said Joe. "I don't like to talk, but those bastards haven't done anything to help the first
responders. You'd think they'd at least pay my medical bills."
"Are you one of the people who think the government plotted the whole thing?"
Joe laughed. "Are you kidding? The government couldn't plan a family picnic, let alone a conspiracy. But I'll tell you one thing:
they were damn lucky the planes hit around nine in the morning. Nobody gets to work down there until after ten. If they had waited
until noon, we would have twenty thousand gone, at least."
"I've heard that."
"Well, I can tell you shit you ain't heard. Because I was an on-site electrician from a few days later right through winter.
There's stuff they don't want people to know right now, and you might never hear it."
Camille came out with cool drinks for Joe and the crew. While they worked, Joe talked to Camille and Walter openly. What he said
was incredible.
"They were trying to find survivors, or recover bodies and body parts, in the wreckage. I was there to rig lights when they
opened up a pocket in the rubble. It was dark as shit in there, under the pile. A real mess. The first day, they brought all of us into
this big war room, just like in the movies, with one of those big glass tables lit up from below, with the site plans on them. They
pointed out places marked off in red. 'Don't go here, or here, or here,' they told us."
"Why not?"
"Because they had army snipers placed with orders to kill anyone went into those areas. That was the whole Federal
Reserve for freaking New York that was in there, under the towers and the other building that collapsed. They were afraid someone
would get the gold out. And they were serious. They told us a guy had been shot the day before for getting curious. In the papers,
they said he fell. These guys were not fucking around."
Walter and Camille looked at each other.
"Lots of the pockets we opened had survivors in them. People trapped, some badly hurt, but still alive under tons of steel. Of
course, by the time we got to them they were all dead, either of injuries or starvation. But I had to rig lights so they could photograph
everything. Almost all of them had writing on the walls and steel beams and stuff."
"What did they write with?" asked Walter, a writer.
"They wrote with their blood," said Joe.
Walter and Camille weren't thirsty anymore.
"I saw what they all wrote. Really heartbreaking stuff, mostly. Love notes. People sorry that they were mad at somebody in
the family and never had a chance to make up. They took pictures of it all and said they would make sure the messages got
delivered. They said it would be fifty years, maybe a hundred, before anyone else would even know about this. Because it's really
private, you know, and they didn't want anyone to accuse them of not doing all they could to save people. But they really couldn't,
you know. It was just so overwhelming."
“I was there that October," Walter said. "I know. But now it's 2007. What do you think about all that's gone on since then?"
"Don't matter what I think."
"It does to me."
"You know what I think? I think if they make us like they are, they win. And I learned a lot about life, but more about death.
How you die is just as important as the way you live. Maybe more. Those people on 9/11, on the ground and in the plane, they died
a glorious death. They will live forever, like soldiers who die in combat. But what about us, and guys like your son, who carried on
and did what we had to do to make life go on? While a lot of people were wringing their hands and crying, we were busting our
humps to clean all the shit up, the little shreds of flesh, the dusty powder like the surface of the moon…aw, hell, why am I even
talking? Nobody is going to put my name on a fucking wall. And maybe that ain't right."
The work was done and Joe left. Walter hoped he would be well. He never knew his last name. You can read about the of the
9/11 first responders here and at other places.
© Walter Goralski 2011
Made with Xara
Walter’s Story:
On Sunday, October 7, 2001, Walter Goralski and his son Alex made their way to lower Manhattan. As soon as they came up
from the City Hall subway station, they could smell it, even four weeks later. It was an odor, Walter said on the video, halfway
between the wet and charred remains of a barbecue and the faint ozone aroma from an electrical short. It stung his eyes. Some
plants along the fence surrounding City Hall, the last flourish of the year, were dead and still dusted with white powder, even after
several rains. It settled out of the air, all around.
Walter had flown up the Hudson River the day before, right over Ground Zero. He was surprised they let the plane go to
LaGuardia that way, so surprised he never took a picture. The pit still smoldered, the pieces of metal poking up this way and that.
Looking straight down into it, it looked like the entrance to hell.
Cops kept traffic moving; there was little parking anywhere. Whole neighborhoods had been cordoned off with military-style
checkpoints, turning lower Manhattan into Berlin and Checkpoint Charlie. The only ones allowed entry were wearing red or green or
blue photo passes on lanyards. Everywhere troops with M-16s strolled, serious, watching. Until this weekend, even more of the area
had been off-limits, but now for the first time people could get close enough to peer at the twisted steel remains from a block or two
away through the chain link fences strung around the site. The streets were packed, the memories raw, a giant question marked
WHY hanging over everything.
Buildings all around were draped with red netting to keep debris close if they fell. Many were empty, condemned or deemed
structurally suspect. The falling towers had the impact of a 6.0 earthquake and were picked up all over the world. Many of the
windows on stores at ground level were shattered, their contents taken away to safety. There had been very little looting that
morning, everyone said. Looting is the luxury of survivors, and no one was sure who they would be.
A constant parade of people shuffled along an informal circuit: quiet, reverent, subdued. It wound down Broadway past Saint
Paul's toward Trinity Church, up a block, then back around north. Between the chasms at the end of the blocks you could see the
twisted steel, just like on TV. It was still sticking surprisingly far up into the air, still smoldering, still a tomb for many. Some gasped at
the sight, others wept. Nobody was especially angry, except if you got in the way of a picture or started horsing around like an idiot.
Walter was surprised to see a few Arabs along with Hasidic Jews and Amish, who all stood out in the crowd. No one said a word to
them. This was not a place to desecrate through anger or hatred. All were welcome to pay their respects, and everyone was grateful
for the attention the site had attracted.
Walter thought no more about 9/11 for years until an electrician named Joe came to run a new conduit and replace a faulty
circuit-breaker on his hot tub.
The first thing Walter noticed about Joe was the way he talked. "New York?" Walter asked.
"Long Island," said Joe, saying Lawn Guyland. "You?"
"Westchester," said Walter. Of course, he said Wes-chesta. "What are you doing down here in Phoenix?"
"Ah," he said. "I'm down here for treatment at the Mayo Clinic for throat cancer. I'm lucky my brother and his family are in
Glendale."
"Throat cancer? That's terrible."
"Yeah. A lot of guys got sick after 9/11."
Walter told him the story about his son Alex and his trip in October 2001.
"Someday the truth will come out," said Joe. "I don't like to talk, but those bastards haven't done anything to help the first
responders. You'd think they'd at least pay my medical bills."
"Are you one of the people who think the government plotted the whole thing?"
Joe laughed. "Are you kidding? The government couldn't plan a family picnic, let alone a conspiracy. But I'll tell you one thing:
they were damn lucky the planes hit around nine in the morning. Nobody gets to work down there until after ten. If they had waited
until noon, we would have twenty thousand gone, at least."
"I've heard that."
"Well, I can tell you shit you ain't heard. Because I was an on-site electrician from a few days later right through winter.
There's stuff they don't want people to know right now, and you might never hear it."
Camille came out with cool drinks for Joe and the crew. While they worked, Joe talked to Camille and Walter openly. What he said
was incredible.
"They were trying to find survivors, or recover bodies and body parts, in the wreckage. I was there to rig lights when they
opened up a pocket in the rubble. It was dark as shit in there, under the pile. A real mess. The first day, they brought all of us into
this big war room, just like in the movies, with one of those big glass tables lit up from below, with the site plans on them. They
pointed out places marked off in red. 'Don't go here, or here, or here,' they told us."
"Why not?"
"Because they had army snipers placed with orders to kill anyone went into those areas. That was the whole Federal
Reserve for freaking New York that was in there, under the towers and the other building that collapsed. They were afraid someone
would get the gold out. And they were serious. They told us a guy had been shot the day before for getting curious. In the papers,
they said he fell. These guys were not fucking around."
Walter and Camille looked at each other.
"Lots of the pockets we opened had survivors in them. People trapped, some badly hurt, but still alive under tons of steel. Of
course, by the time we got to them they were all dead, either of injuries or starvation. But I had to rig lights so they could photograph
everything. Almost all of them had writing on the walls and steel beams and stuff."
"What did they write with?" asked Walter, a writer.
"They wrote with their blood," said Joe.
Walter and Camille weren't thirsty anymore.
"I saw what they all wrote. Really heartbreaking stuff, mostly. Love notes. People sorry that they were mad at somebody in
the family and never had a chance to make up. They took pictures of it all and said they would make sure the messages got
delivered. They said it would be fifty years, maybe a hundred, before anyone else would even know about this. Because it's really
private, you know, and they didn't want anyone to accuse them of not doing all they could to save people. But they really couldn't,
you know. It was just so overwhelming."
“I was there that October," Walter said. "I know. But now it's 2007. What do you think about all that's gone on since then?"
"Don't matter what I think."
"It does to me."
"You know what I think? I think if they make us like they are, they win. And I learned a lot about life, but more about death.
How you die is just as important as the way you live. Maybe more. Those people on 9/11, on the ground and in the plane, they died
a glorious death. They will live forever, like soldiers who die in combat. But what about us, and guys like your son, who carried on
and did what we had to do to make life go on? While a lot of people were wringing their hands and crying, we were busting our
humps to clean all the shit up, the little shreds of flesh, the dusty powder like the surface of the moon…aw, hell, why am I even
talking? Nobody is going to put my name on a fucking wall. And maybe that ain't right."
The work was done and Joe left. Walter hoped he would be well. He never knew his last name. You can read about the of the
9/11 first responders here and at other places.
