The 9/11 Oral History Project continues telling peoples’ stories 23 years later

LOWER MANHATTAN (PIX11) — Sadly, as September began this year, the FDNY passed a grim 9/11 milestone. It recorded more deaths due to 9/11-related illnesses than from the attack on September 11, 2001.

Due in part to those rates of loss, a vital program at the 9/11 Museum is more important than ever.

The museum’s oral history collection is an active, growing archive of verbal recountings of 9/11 and the months and years afterward. Those accounts are told by people who were in Lower Manhattan, the Pentagon, or Shanksville, Pennsylvania when the attacks took place in 2001 or when the first World Trade Center attack happened in 1993.

Joseph Pfeifer, the first deputy commissioner of the FDNY and retired battalion chief, was the first chief to respond to the Trade Center attack on 9/11. His story is told in part in the Emmy- and Peabody Award-winning documentary “ 9/11 “, but he was able to go into much greater detail in the hours of oral history he shared with the museum.

“Storytelling is an important part of resilience,” Chief Pfeifer, who prefers to be addressed by his uniformed rank, said in an interview.

He recounted his oral history over multiple sessions to the museum’s vice president for oral histories, Amy Weinstein. She also spoke with PIX11 News regarding her role in the overall project.

“People are not done talking,” she said. “For some, they’re only beginning to speak.”

Part of the reason that some 9/11 survivors and their family members are only telling their stories now, more than two decades later, Pfeifer and Weinstein said, is that it’s by no means a simple or easy thing to do.

“There’s a lot of emotions that come to the surface,” Pfeifer said, “but those emotions is what connects to people, and then it’s no longer [just] something you read in a textbook.”

A major part of the 9/11 Museum Oral History Collection’s mission, said Weinstein, has been to record accounts from family members of every person who lost their lives on September 11.

Chief Pfeifer was among that number.

He lost his brother, a fellow firefighter, Lt. Kevin Pfeifer, in the Trade Center.

“I think that the way I convinced him” to talk with the oral history project in the first place, Weinstein said, “was to say, ‘I want to talk with you about Kevin as much as I want to talk to you about 9/11.'”

In the minutes after the planes hit the towers and Chief Pfeifer was tasked with commanding the response, his brother arrived to help rescue people. He’d been trained to do so and had also been ordered by his brother on the morning of September 11.

“We looked at each other without saying a word,” Pfeifer said in an interview with PIX11 News, recounting the day of the attacks, “wondering if each of us was going to be okay.”

The museum committed in 2006 to recording all family members’ accounts of their loved ones. Weinstein said that what has resulted has been a vital part of world history and the histories of the families of the fallen.

“[We] do our best to record at least one remembrance for each and every person who was killed that day,” she said, and she also elaborated on a point that Pfeifer had made.

“It’s not in everybody’s cultural makeup to want to record an oral history,” she said, “but we’ve done our best, and we continue to record.”

As for his oral history, Chief Pfeifer had much to tell. As one of the eyewitnesses to the first plane crashing into the North Tower and as one of the very first people on the emergency scene, he had much to say.

It ended up being the foundation of even more vital storytelling.

“My memoir really started with the oral history, where, instead of writing it, I just spoke,” he said, referring to his New York Times best-selling book, “Ordinary Heroes.”

It’s an account of what Pfeifer and his firefighters did on 9/11. It was published 20 years after the tragedy, and its origins were the descriptions he had told to Weinstein.

Pfeifer said that all of the oral histories connect listeners with what happened during the attacks and with what continues to unfold, in some ways tragically.

“We didn’t realize quite how sick people would become,” Weinstein said, referring to the large and growing list of 9/11-related illnesses that have taken their toll on survivors.

“We get emails sent in on a regular basis,” she said, from people directly affected by the terror attacks, saying, “‘I was not ready to speak before now.'”

Speaking out at any time, said Chief Pfeifer, has a profound effect.

“To support each other in different ways by understanding what the other person has gone through,” he said.

The whole point of capturing actions and emotions from the terror attacks, said Pfeifer, is to emphasize the ways in which they’ve united people and brought out the best in them despite and in opposition to the horror.

“9/11,” the chief said, “gave all victims of terrorism a voice.”

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