9/11: An American Requiem Screening at the Staller Center Commemorates 25 Years Since 9/11

September 11, 2001 is a day burned into the memory of anyone who was old enough to comprehend what was happening. Like everyone else, the Stony Brook community was greatly affected by the tragic and world-changing events that unfolded that day.

On September 10, the Stony Brook WTC Health & Wellness Program and the Staller Center for the Arts held a special encore screening of 9/11: An American Requiem. The film, which originally premiered at the 2011 Stony Brook Film Festival, tells the story of 9/11 through the voices of those who responded: firefighters, police officers, construction workers, medical personnel, volunteers and others whose lives were profoundly changed by what they witnessed and experienced.

"For more than two decades, our work at the Stony Brook WTC Health and Wellness Program has allowed us to care for thousands of these responders and to study the long-term physical and psychological consequences of their service," said program director Benjamin Luft, MD. "But we also came to understand that caring for this community meant preserving their stories.

That effort became the Remembering 9/11 Oral History Project. Nearly 500 interviews with responders, family members, medical personnel, and advocates have now been preserved and made publicly available online through the Library of Congress. Together, the film and the archive encourage people to do something that gets increasingly important as 9/11 passes from lived experience into history - listen to those who were there.

Fifteen years after its premier, Luft shared thoughts with attendees as to what the essence of the movie means now, 25 years after September 11.

"We speak a great deal about memory, and we promise we will 'never forget.' But memory and witnessing are not quite the same thing," Luft said. "Memory is what remains with us. It is personal, selective, and inevitably altered by time. Witnessing asks something more of us. A witness says, 'I was there. I saw what happened, and because I saw it, I have a responsibility to tell you.' "

Luft said the firefighters, police officers, construction workers, emergency medical personnel and ordinary people who responded to this unimaginable event are witnesses. "They did not experience September 11 as history, they experienced it as dust and darkness, fear and confusion, courage and fellowship, and ultimately as something they would carry within them for the rest of their lives."

After the screening, a panel of first responders took questions from the audience about their experiences.

One audience member asked the panel what they wished people would remember about that day.

"For me, it's how everybody came together," said Bill Fischer, NYPD officer, Emergency Services Unit. "It took that catastrophe for people to put aside whatever prejudices they had. You can see in the film there are people from all walks of life. Not everybody's a fireman or a cop. Everybody just bonded together, as bad as the situation was and how dangerous it was. If I could make it come true, I wish we could have stayed like that as a people. We were all brothers and sisters. It didn't matter where you came from."

Another attendee asked about the long-term psychological repercussions of working at Ground Zero.

"The attitude was 'keep your mouth shut, don't talk about it, suck it up," said Rob Weisberg, a volunteer firefighter in the Commack Fire Department on Long Island, who helped FDNY after 9/11. "I can tell you that doesn't work. I kept it quiet for a long time. My best friends had no idea what I was going through, but by 2022, I had my suicide planned out."

Instead, Weisberg decided to hike the Appalachian Trail.

"I said to my family, 'I'm going away. I need to do this. I'll be gone for about six months. But at least I won't be gone forever.'"

Weisberg returned and authored From The Grey Tunnel To The Green Tunnel: A 9/11 Firefighter's Journey From Despair To Hope.

"I decided that my mission was to break the negative stigma," he said. "I made my situation very public and I now do a lot of public speaking on the subject."

"As responders, we come into the worst 10 minutes of your life," said Carol Paukner, NYC Transit police officer. "You're having a crisis, and we try to fix what we can. But on 9/11, there was no book written on what we were supposed to do, where we were supposed to be. It was chaotic. We just did whatever we could to save as many people as we could, and it took me a very long time to realize, wow, I was in the tower."

Paukner noted the importance of Luft's and Stony Brook's efforts to track 9/11 illnesses.

"Now we have the federal government and NIOSH (National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health) overlooking that," she said. "There are so many different illnesses and a lot of stuff is not covered right now. I had three surgeries immediately following from my injuries. I kind of pushed off my experience. Then just one day I was like, wow, I survived that, thank God. I met all these nice people, and had the support from my friends and my family. And yes, we're all sick in some way. And every day that I wake up, I try to do something good for other people."

Luft, who executive produced 9/11: An American Requiem, also authored a book, We're Not Leaving. The movie and book are part of a larger Stony Brook project that includes the development of School of Medicine courses designed to inspire and train aspiring physicians on specific patient care related to disaster and aftermath medicine.

"As the years pass, history inevitably begins to replace live experience," said Luft. "We were not there with them, but we can become witnesses to their witnessing. And that becomes a responsibility of our own to preserve what they saw, to resist its distortion, and to carry their testimony forward after they can no longer tell the story themselves. That ultimately is what 9/11: An American Requiem asks of us; not simply to remember, but to bear witness."

- Robert Emproto