What has been an annual remembrance across the nation’s high schools about the events of September 11, 2001 is now turning into a history lesson.
At Greenwich High School, students are accustomed to the yearly tradition of bringing in a non-perishable food item on Sept. 11 in order to reach their goal of 3,000 food items in a symbolic gesture to the roughly 3,000 lives lost on that day.
But the majority of the students that fit into the new MISA auditorium on Monday morning had no memory of that tragic day 15 years ago.
“Some of you watched the events of the dreadful day unfold on TV,” said Demi Wasilko Ferraris, a 1995 GHS grad and cousin of 9/11 victim Teddy Maloney. “Most of you were just infants, and fortunately did not witness the largest loss of life in history from a foreign attack on American soil. I still remember that day like it was yesterday.”
Maloney was working on the 104th floor of the North Tower for Cantor Fitzgerald when a hijacked airliner struck at 8:46 a.m.
At this year’s memorial service at Cos Cob Park’s 9/11 Memorial Greenwich, Maloney’s sister, Sally, read the names of the Greenwich victims lost on that tragic day.
“Greenwich lost more lives than any other town in Connecticut,” said Ferraris to the crowd of high schoolers.
Students were shown a short preview to a 9/11 documentary from filmmaker Jules Naudet, who shared the rare footage of the plane hitting the North Tower, the first of the Twin Towers to be hit.
Naudet had been following and filming a first-year firefighter in New York City that day; his recordings remain among the most powerful moments captured on camera in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. Jules, along with his brother Gedeon, then went on to create the documentary “9/11.”
“Everything changed on that morning,” said Jules Naudet. “It was a routine, beautiful morning.”
“As I’m filming firefighters at a gas leak, I heard a louder than normal plane flying above,” Naudet recalled. “I just had time to turn my camera on and I captured it going into the World Trade Center.”
More than just an invited speaker or a moment of silence, the French-born filmmaker brought his first-person perspective of how events unfolded on that morning.
“I think a high school crowd can resonate more with a documentary because, in a way, it’s very prone to their generation, which is so visual,” said Naudet. “We don’t have commentary from historians. It’s really what the firefighters lived.”
As the day went on, Naudet says, his personal safety and emotions took over and it wasn’t until later when he realized the magnitude of the attacks.
“It was only later on, about a couple months later, when I started watching the footage,” said Naudet. “It was about two months later when we realized what we had filmed and that we had to be very careful. It’s not just being a filmmaker, it was not just a film. It was our friends and people we knew. The first thing we did was identify every single firefighter who passed away in the film. We then contacted their families. It was a very big responsibility that we were given that we take very seriously.”
For Ferraris, the documentary shows just a piece of that day that will remain with her in remembrance of her cousin.
“You see, in 2001, cell phones with camera devices did not exist,” Ferraris said to GHS students. “Therefore the events of that day could not be captured by the thousands of New Yorkers who experienced that horror. I feel like it’s my mission to never forget what happened.”
