...documentaries by Réka Pigniczky

TEN YEARS AFTER 9/11 AT A FALAFEL STAND IN BUDAPEST
On September 11, 2001, I got to work late, and I was wearing a skirt. These two things likely saved my life. 

I should have clocked in around 9am, but news looked slow and I was 6 months pregnant with my first child and felt like I had a right to be late. And to wear a skirt, since I was no longer doing my own filming. 

James Turner, my boss, called around 9:00, saying I should hurry it up, because there’s a big fire at the North Tower of the World Trade Center. A big one, it looks like a plane crashed into it.  He sounded calm and a bit annoyed that there was news. I was still on the subway and hoping that he’d send a freelancer down to check it out.

He called again around 9:15, his voice now uncharacteristically anxious and impatient: “Reka, where ARE you? There’s another fire in the South Tower, another plane. It’s not an accident Reka, you have to get here NOW.”

By then I was jogging from the subway station to our office at Broadway and 63rd St, APTN headquarters for New York. I had my phone to my ear, calling my husband Barnabás, telling him to hop on his bike and bring me a pair of pants and my small DV camera. It was going to be a long day. 

Gustavo, a freelance cameraman, arrived, and we hopped in the car around 9:45 and headed down to the south of Manhattan, toward the twin fires, which by then James and the rest of the news world was calling an act of terrorism since another plane had just crashed into the Pentagon in Washington D.C. It couldn’t all be a coincidence.

Terrorism didn’t really register with us, we didn’t yet feel it belonged to us, but then again we weren’t really thinking about geo-political issues, we were in a car speeding to the scene of something big. Breaking news in all its ‘glory.’

We certainly weren’t thinking about how lucky we were to be slackers and to have left the office as late as we did. In the time it took us to drive down to the bottom of the island, the South Tower collapsed at 10:03, killing and injuring thousands. No one called us because there was no cell phone reception – I know, because I tried to call James to tell him we’re almost there. 

We got to Greenwich St. at Chambers St., and as we got out of the car and started heading toward the towers, we saw groups of people huddled around cars with their radios blaring. – We heard “The South tower of the WTC has collapsed. Over 10 thousand people were inside. Another plane has gone down in a field near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.” Gustavo and I looked at each other, not believing a word – thinking that people had gone nuts and rumors were flying and escalating the news, which is often the case when things break. In fact we couldn’t see the collapsed tower – all we saw was a big white cloud over the entire area. 

So we headed toward it. 

At some point near Vesey St, policemen and firefighters prevented us from going further in, just a few blocks away from the North Tower. By that point, we could see that behind the white cloud, the second tower was gone after all. Gustavo was filming people covered in white debris fleeing past us, and I started filming the remaining North Tower as it burned. 

A shocked man in a torn suit ran past me and yelled, “Goddamn media! Don’t film those poor people!”

That’s when I realized what I was filming – at first I thought it was debris falling out of the windows of the top floors of the tower – but after the man yelled at me, I looked more closely with the zoom and saw that the specks were people. Two and three and a time, holding hands. I ran over to one of the firemen holding us back and asked him if the nets were out. Were they able to catch all those people? 

The officer just looked at me, I realize now that he didn’t want to tell me the truth. 

But he did. 

“What nets? Nets can’t catch people from the 100th floor. They’re jumping because it’s so hot they can’t bear it.”

The second tower was going to come down, and everyone near us knew it. Soon people started running, away from the tower, as a cloud of dust and debris and who knew what else came blasting down Greenwich. I filmed it until I could, and then jumped into the lobby of a hotel. The door was closed shut, and a wave of white debris flew down the street in front of us. I looked around, but Gustavo was not with me. 

No phone reception. I think everyone was pretty hysterical, but I don’t remember much other than my acute claustrophobia. How long will we be in here? How can I call the office? Where is Gustavo? What else is going to come down? How can I get my tapes to the office?

I must have been in there only about 15 minutes or so – in retrospect, I was perfectly fine, and got out quickly, unscathed. I ran outside, into a white snow-like cover that covered Greenwich Street under my feet. I quickly found Gustavo, who had emerged, unhurt, from the building next door, and was filming, capturing firefighters and ambulance rescue operators rushing wounded away from the scene. He himself was covered in white dust (I was relatively clean). I hugged him, he handed me his tape, and I headed uptown. 

There was no way to get a cab so close to what we now call Ground Zero, so I just ran. I kept trying to call someone, anyone, but couldn’t. No reception. Somewhere near 11:15am and on the West Side Highway near midtown I found a cab and hopped in. Unbelievable luck. But still no reception. 

With Gustavo’s tape and my camera clenched under my arm, I jumped out of the cab and flew up the stairs to the office (afraid to take the elevator). As I stepped into the office, I saw James and Barna standing next to each other near the television bank along the wall, staring at the monitors. If I remember well, the second collapse was carried live.  

James’s face was too serious to describe: “Jesus Reka, you made it.” I gave him the tapes, sat down, and, like a real professional newshound: cried desperately into Barna’s shoulder.

After I stopped sobbing, James came out of the editing room, filing our fresh pictures around 11:30am. He yelled at me: “You’re not going back out there. I can’t believe I even sent you. From now on, you’re editing all the material that comes in.” 

This of course, couldn’t be the case. Help (producers, cameramen from all over the AP world) didn’t arrive for a number of days because of the complete air traffic stop, so it was just 5 or 6 of us covering television, and that included the entertainment folks, bless their hearts. Naturally I was sent out to cover the story. 

Poor James: he had a number of freelancers, and a pregnant staffer. I was sent to cover the site on the East side where people where meeting to look for lost loved ones, putting up notices, trying to grab the media’s attention, just looking so … helpless. We thought over 10,000 people had died. I went back to the office and cried, again very professionally, to James: “Next time, send me to ground zero! It’s better than facing those families and children.” 

The next three months until I gave birth to Luca were a blur. We worked non-stop and without complaining. We often slept in the office. Most of us got sick at some point, panicking of course that it was the Anthrax. It was, for us, a war zone, full of bomb threats and building evacuations (like the Empire State, which became the new tallest building in Manhattan, and the object of serious panic). I think even for cool-headed James, who was South African and seen a number of frightening situations all over Africa, it was rough. But everyone stopped what they were doing and tried to help, somehow. 

I spent most of my time tape-editing and writing the news pieces as the material came in. When things calmed down a bit and I was scheduled to pack up and go on maternity leave, an overwhelming feeling to nest overtook me. Most expectant mothers fix up the baby’s bedroom, but I fixed up the APTN editing room – taking the boxes and boxes of tapes that came into our 9-11 operations, putting them in order and making a number of huge clip reels, labeled with exact times and dates, as a library of our 9-11 footage. James told me it wasn’t necessary, just go home already, but I couldn’t stop. 

In just a few days, I re-watched everything that happened from Sept. 11th until December 10th – everything from the amateur footage of the planes crashing into the towers, the towers collapsing and other partially collapsing, the rescue, President Bush and Mayor Rudy Giuliani in the rubble vowing to get even, interviews with families anguished as their loved ones were never found, thousands of volunteers at the Javits Center on the West side of Manhattan, firemen and police from all over the US arriving to the city, constant F-14 fly-bys over the city, security, security and more security. 

When Luca was born, on December 13th, our recovery room at St. Luke Roosevelt’s hospital overlooked downtown Manhattan. At that point, it was no longer smoldering – and no longer unusual that the towers were gone. That said, after Luca was born, I could barely sleep from all the nightmares I was having. I couldn’t sleep because I was afraid to take my eyes off her in NY for one second. My personal shockwave came only after she was born, until then I was able to hold it together, it seems. Post partum, post 9-11. 

One thing I’ll never forget about 9-11 was how in the days following the attacks the French newspaper Liberation ran the headline: “Nous sommes tous Américains.” I also can’t forget that our Middle Eastern APTN producers were sending footage of people in Syria cheering wildly as they watched the towers fall. 

I guess not everyone was feeling American. Not then, and certainly not now.

Just half a year later, Barna, Luca and I left New York and moved to Budapest. We needed to be near family. I went back a few times to cover stories in New York with James, but when he had me cover an exhibit of drawings made by children whose parents died in 9-11 on the 5th anniversary of the terrorist attacks, I wasn’t able to finish the assignment. I sobbed and handed the camera to my colleague Nick. 

10 years on, Barna and I are still in Budapest, with two more children who were born here. We’re planning to move back to the US next year, but not to New York, instead to my childhood turf of northern California. I’m not sure if our moving back to New York is a product of 9-11, or just the practicality of raising kids in Manhattan – in terms of our careers it would clearly be more interesting. But I just can’t bring myself to go back for more than a visit. I know this is not very loyal or brave of me, but I just can’t. I admire those who were able to stay and make it work. 

Recently, I went down to the falafel shop near our place in Budapest to get some lunch, and the owner, a Syrian who’s lived in Hungary for over 24 years, said he’d just heard an interview with me on the radio. It was about 9-11, and he felt important to explain to me why this happened to America. I told him I hope he wasn’t one of the ones cheering on Syrian TV because if so, it would be my last visit to his falafel stand. 

I’m not going to go into his ‘understanding’ of why this happened to the US (suffice it to say it has everything to do with the US’s policy toward Israel), but the exchange is noteworthy for another reason: 10 years on, I’m still not ready to subscribe to anyone’s moral relativism about how the US deserved what it got. 

Terrorism is terrorism. We must condemn it in all forms.

Réka Pigniczky
5-11-2011