“I had a quite decent job as a chemist, but they tried to put me into the slammer,” Mike recalls. Only one other period in Mike’s and Jindra’s lives had been as long and as anguished as September 2001 would prove to be: a stretch in the late 1970s when they were stripped of their Czech citizenship, forced onto a plane, and eventually allowed to immigrate to America. “I suddenly got a feeling that Luke’s gone. (Ota would later be decorated by President Ronald Reagan “for his outstanding patriotism.”) Having faced down both the Nazis and the Communists, Ota encouraged his son and grandsons, Luke and his older brother, Martin, to take challenges head-on, and to stand up for their principles. Following the Soviet crackdown that year, he escaped to Italy, then to the States. He would later take part in the reform movement during the Prague Spring, of 1968. Ota, who had taken part in the Prague uprising against the Nazis, in 1945, had been jailed after the war on charges of spying for the U.S. Both revered Mike’s father, Ota, a virulent anti-Communist, now in his 80s and living in Prague. Both worked in the World Trade Center-Mike during the 1990s, Luke starting in early 2001. Both were enamored of electronics Mike, now 59 and retired, had been a computer-systems engineer. I’ll go pick him up and bring him lunch.” Mike assumed that the office would dismiss Luke after a plane accident, so he packed the usual-pepper steak and diced watermelon-and planned on sharing a meal near the towers, to be followed by a “walkabout,” as Mike called it, a ritual stroll around the nearby streets that father and son had enjoyed for years. I called Luke’s office and the phones were ringing. The day before, says Rambousek, “I saw the picture at nine o’clock.
#WINDOWS ON TOP OF THE WORLD WTC WINDOWS#
He fiddles with a file on the desktop and clicks on a photo, the one that he says is “not a bit pleasant.” It shows people standing in the windows of the north tower of the World Trade Center a few minutes prior to the building’s collapse.īefore discussing the picture, though, he stops to talk about waking up on September 12, after the longest day of his life. Mike Rambousek sits in front of his Hewlett-Packard computer, pulling up a chair for a visitor. Rambousek, oddly enough, was able to channel Luke’s memory through the power of a single, horrific picture. The following is the tale of one man, Mike Rambousek, who lost his son Luke that morning, five years ago this month. The 9/11 attacks, in fact, were the most widely observed breaking-news event in human history, seen that day in still photos, on the Internet, or on television by an estimated two billion people, nearly a third of the human race.
But I take comfort in knowing that the Sun will rise again each day, as it has done a trillion times before.The world was able to witness, understand, and respond to the horrors of September 11 largely through the medium of photography. New York City’s twin towers have lost the Sun forever. In either case, at that moment you’d lose the Sun for the night, as it set gently below your horizon. Alas, you’d eventually have run out of breath or run out of floors. If you could have run up the stairs at one flight per second, you would literally have stopped the sunset. This distance was far enough along Earth’s curved surface for the Sun to set two minutes later for the person on the observation deck than it did for someone on the ground floor. The towers were so tall that for someone on the observation deck, the horizon was forty-five miles away. On the top floor, you could type greetings into a computer that would transmit your message into space via the north tower’s radio antenna, for all eavesdropping extraterrestrials to decode. When I look hard for a peaceful way to remember the towers, I cannot help but think of them as observatories. I think of all those who lost their lives.
I think about the people who worked in the towers, the tourists who visited the observation deck, the diners at Windows on the World. The World Trade Center was a veritable vertical universe. From that same window, blue sky now appears where the twin towers used to be. All from my dining-room window, which, within ten seconds of each tower’s collapse, offered less than one inch of visibility while the opaque dust cloud of pulverized concrete rolled by. I live four blocks from where they stood. Rising a quarter of a mile into the sky, the World Trade Center’s twin towers were about five blocks tall.
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