Twenty-five years ago, Surry resident Diana Merenda peered out of her office window in lower Manhattan’s Deutsche Bank building, connected by an overpass to the South Tower of the World Trade Center.
What she saw still brings her, and those with whom she shares her story, to tears a quarter of a century later.
“I looked out my window, and I saw the hole in the tower,” Merenda said Friday, recounting the experience for a small group of people at Ellsworth Public Library. “Smoke was everywhere. It was just astonishing. I said, ‘Oh my god, the pilot, how did he miss this building?’”
Merenda spoke at the library on Friday to mark the 25th anniversary of a watershed moment in the United States. The terrorist attacks in New York City and at the Pentagon in Washington D.C. quickly influenced everything from airport security to the country’s invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and U.S.-involved conflicts in other countries — wars and interventions that would kill more than 940,000 people across the Middle East between 2001 and 2003, according to an analysis by researchers at Brown University’s Watson School of International and Public Affairs.
An additional estimated 3.6 to 3.8 million people died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones of the U.S.-led Global War on Terrorism, according to the analysis.
Others who worked in the Deutsche Bank building, and at least one of Merenda’s co-workers, were among the nearly 3,000 people who died in Manhattan on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. Nearly 350 New York City firefighters, and dozens more police officers, were killed in the attack.
Much of Merenda’s Friday talk revolved around the aftermath of 9/11 and the U.S. foreign policy decisions it helped shape for decades to come. For years, she searched for answers for why terrorists associated with al-Qaeda hijacked four commercial airplanes and killed thousands of civilians.
Merenda shared her criticism of U.S. foreign policy, and of Israel, in her library talk. She distributed a pamphlet to attendees that was highly critical of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, and condemned the ongoing U.S. attacks on Iran, arguing they were done at Israel’s behest.
She also spoke Friday about her multiple health challenges since that day, including two cancer diagnoses in the two years following the attacks.
On the day of the World Trade Center attack, Merenda, originally of Brooklyn, was making copies on a bulky Xerox machine in her 17th-floor office when Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower, roughly 14 minutes before 9 a.m. The copier shook, which Merenda, who had spent time in San Francisco, assumed was due to an ongoing earthquake. She ducked into a doorframe, as she’d learned to do in California.
But before the second plane, Flight 175, hit the south tower at 9:03 a.m., Merenda — who managed a team of seven professionals in a “high stress job” that involved designing bid proposals and marketing strategies — was still focused on work. She asked her supervisor if her team could move to the library, where they could isolate themselves from the distraction of the first crash.
But then she looked out her office window.
“By then, it was just after 9, and the second plane went into the number One World Trade,” Merenda said between tears. “I looked and there was just no doubt. This was not a mistake. I called my husband and there was no answer because nothing was really working. I did leave a message to say, ‘Ozzie, I’m not sure I’m going to get out — we’re under attack.’”
Merenda and her husband hosted their wedding reception at Windows on the World — a legendary restaurant with sweeping views of the Statue of Liberty and Hudson River on the 107th floor of the North Tower — just 10 years before she would witness the tragedy. Roughly 170 employees and guests who were at the restaurant died at the time of impact, according to NPR.
“Exquisite food, but every single person was dead,” Merenda said.
It was then that her supervisor determined their office, at 130 Liberty St., would need to be evacuated by stairs, as the elevators had stopped operating. But Merenda, who had recently had surgery on her knees, would struggle to descend the 34 flights of stairs — two for each floor — alone. Two of her coworkers, at her boss’ order, assisted the 52-year-old down to the lobby.
Once in the lobby, Merenda saw the building’s security officer.
“The security guard is there, and he’s not moving,” Merenda said. “He’s going to make sure that each and every person is out of that building. But then, that overpass crumbled and fell on him and killed him.”
One of Merenda’s coworkers also died that day. An equity analyst, who usually worked in Midtown, had a monthly “equity breakfast” hosted at Windows on the World. He, too, perished, she said.
Merenda, unfamiliar with much of her office’s surrounding area, wasn’t sure where to go. She decided to follow a herd of people who were fleeing the scene toward the river, wondering if the survivors thought they needed to escape Manhattan by swimming across the Hudson.
Instead, the New Jersey Transit rail service was evacuating people across the Hudson amid the mayhem. Passengers rode the rail system for free that day, Merenda said, describing an eerie silence that came with the survivors’ shock.
“I looked out the window and there was one field after another of hundreds of cots,” Merenda said. “These cots were in a row, absolutely pristine, with a white sheet and a blanket and a pillow. The thing is, they were all empty. New Jersey felt that they had to be ready to take these wounded people. But nobody came because they were dead.”
Upon arriving in Ridgewood, New Jersey, a roughly 20 minute commute from Manhattan via the train, Merenda’s friend picked her up. It was then that Merenda learned that the towers had collapsed.
Since the attacks, Merenda has survived a total of four cancer diagnoses, three of which required surgery. She still is in treatment at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston for skin cancer on her face.
Merenda’s priority following the attacks was to return to work — like many in the world of finance, she said. City officials at the time misled residents about what was disclosed this week, when New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani released thousands of documents about the toxic air pollution that engulfed the area.
“They lied to us,” Merenda said of city officials in the attack’s aftermath. “There was a lot of money that was at stake. We just had a terrorist attack, we can’t have also have a collapse in the financial markets. To folks in power, with respect to financial markets, that is all they care about.”
Merenda was diagnosed with breast cancer in the year following the attacks and parotid cancer the year after that.
In the years after the attacks, Merenda was also concerned about the safety of her husband, Ozzie, who is Muslim. After the catastrophe, Islamophobia spiked, resulting in hate crimes and discrimination of Muslim people or those who were perceived to be Muslim, as was the case with Sikh Americans.
“I was in this attack, I felt attacked, so not only am I dealing with that, but I have to worry that maybe my husband might be killed out of hatred and ignorance,” Merenda said.
But it wasn’t until an even bigger threat hit New York, when the COVID-19 pandemic killed millions of people worldwide, that Merenda and her husband left and found sanctuary in Surry.