now he was trapped on the ninety seventh floor by nine fifteen shimmies loved ones had filled the family's brooklyn apartment the phone passed between them as each offered him consolation and advice we actually on the phone we were trying to find different ways how to calm down and relax some possibly of a different ways of maybe getting out there trying different exits at one point and i was talking to him and he shared a few private things with me and all this time i was able to voice that the situation was becoming a lot worse beer was now fire and dense smoke above the impact zone and those trapped there began to to spend his last moments to the people who are closest to him at the end of your life i would imagine you want some sort of comfort and i hope but it seems from a lot everyone has told me that he was given that that's all i could hope for these final calls is the range of human emotion the terror when talking to a dispatcher who's supposed to rescue him in the focus of giving one message to a loved one i love you and tell the children i love you stephen molder it was a thirty three year old equities trader working for an investment company in the south tower september eleventh as a beautiful beautiful day as every line  know i was very pleased to be going to a yoga class around the corner in the village and at the end of the class i walked down and when i came into this house there was a blinking light on the answering machine and i had six mass attests not the usual thing stephen burton the south tower here on the eighty ninth floor he said that he was going to call me and that he was going to be all right there were messages then from people calling to say am i your children all right and then there was a message from my eyes and and he said promise me you will not turn on the television and family came girl boy girl so there was a little triumvirate at the top and then four boys came in a very quick succession and stephen was the third of that group of four place that has now become the center of all the world's attention and it's a clam of the unfolding in your mind you're trying to place your loved one where are they in relationship to this terrible series of events that's unfolding jim gordon berg a successful real estate executive had recently accepted a promotion at a new company september eleventh was jim's last day working at the world trade center saying good bye  is the last thing i can remember seeing him walking out the door that morning september eleventh jill and jim have been married for seven years were their daughter nicole was three years old i went to work soon after he did and my office is very close to our apartment so i just walked a few blocks when i got there there was a message light blinking and i listened to the machine right away and that was i didn't know what that meant i listen to the message actually several times because i wasn't really sure what he was saying i couldn't believe what he was saying just a minute later i spoke to him unlike the message on the machine which sounded frantic when i first spoke to him he sent a very calm very controlled he said to me i'm going to be ok you know there's a fire but i'm going to be ok and he said he would i said stay down low i mean right what we learned stay down low there's a fire and he stayed down low and he was hiding behind a desk and he was trying to call for help and he had no idea what was going on in chicago jim's closest friend adam had just arrived at work i or turned on c n b c and they said you know we go live to the world trade center and there was smoke coming out of the building the first thing i did was call his office he picked up the phone right away and he had a voice that i'd never heard before and it was you know just utter panic and fear and expletives there's fire there's smoke everywhere there's debris i can't get out you got to get me out of here he had asked what happened and he he didn't know and i didn't know jim was six floors below the point of impact he was trapped by falling debris his comments were then we'll calm ok what are we supposed to do and i told him there's fire and it's going up you need to get down and he said i can't go any where the stairs are blown out below us you know the degrees too heavy we can't move anything at this point  half hour had passed having spoken to his wife jill and best friend adam jim now wanted his predicament to be known to the watching world he managed to make contact with a reporter at the new york  i spoke with him several times that morning and i was trying to understand what his predicament was why he couldn't get to the to the stairs or why he couldn't get to an exit and he said that you know the walls were  cracking and falling over and he couldn't get to where he needed to be mr gartenberg seemed to be very directed very folks i mean he was you know there's a sense of great urgency in his voice but i didn't feel like he was panicking he wanted people to know where he was and that he couldn't leave the building ways been a leader and i think that show through on that day goal that he felt and i first met jim he was the president of the michigan i'm my club in new york i saw the way that he was running this meeting and the way he was interacting with people in his leadership skills there was all these after speaking to the new york times jim's next call was to a new york t v news station at nine thirty to forty five minutes after the first tower was hit jim's voice was heard on national television jim gartenberg joins us he was on the eighty sixth floor all bomb not sure which tower was it the north herself jim it's well trade center one and it's not one i am here and i'm stuck right now now you are you a ball jim or below i have no make clear is that i'm stuck on the eighty sixth floor fire door has trapped debris is gone around and part of the core of the building is blown out how many people went into i'm with one other person and i'm told that people are aware if i'm on the eighty sixth floor on the side of the building they think the east river at what time of the air i want to tell anybody that has a family member that may be in the building that the situation is under control at the moment and the danger has not increased so please all family members take it easy i got a phone call from a friend of mine on my cell phone saying jill jim's going to be ok he was just on national television and he said he's going to be ok she told me what he said in how confident he was about it they broadcast his voice i saw tapes of that and listened to it and it's eerie the the voice that i hear on that is not his and it's just so odd as far as the voice is concerned but his message was unbelievably come and brave and stoic having seen that was just a tremendous tribute i think for a lot of people to be in crisis mode they would just sit there and scream and the kind of regroup to themself it seems like and said ok this is the situation how do i best deal with this and he reached out as many people as he could trying to figure out what resources he had to be helpful in a situation i mean he had the the sense of mind to do that and the danger not increased so please all family members take it easy i think that was wonderful but i knew in my heart  knowing what he might soon face fireman walter hines left a hurried voice message for his wife know this was so serious i could tell from the sound of his voice you know this was something human i could have and i think that he just needed to to let us know that he loved us stone wall to left is still on his business which i kept in his office i've probably listened to the message hundreds of times everybody has told me that that has lost loved ones  this you lose the sound of their voice that you can't remember the sound of people's voices if they've gone and i tend to think that that's true i think it's a good reminder to have walter message for my daughters that they can continue to hear him was with us for thirty three years and we have a choice we can either say we are so mad that he's not here but we can sign we have for thirty three years and we have a feast to return to the feast of the memories stephen worked alongside a group of close college friends all former high school athletes  a peace keeper within the family because we all have very strong personalities and a dinner table we all want to voice our opinion and stephen was the best i think of any of us of listening to all sides of an argument and really keeping the peace in the south tower the second to be hit conditions were now desperate as the fire spread stephen and his colleagues made a collective decision to stick together and try to reach the roof they now faced a grueling twenty one story climb up the stairwells through smoke and dust but once there they discovered that there was no access to the roof they retreated back down the stairwells and took refuge  empty conference room on the eighty eighth floor sharing a single mobile phone each one took turns to say their goodbyes stephen and others passed the phone around and let people get word out to their family members and at this point there was a sense of dread among those people making the calls they were it was a sense that they were doomed and they knew how isolated they were they knew they were in the sky far from the ground and that they were there chances were very slim people use their last minutes of conversation to talk with their families and their loved ones and their friends they said you made my life better you know i watched it take care of someone so i want you to you know know this about the truth of our lives and  it was a kind of a moment of a moment of truth for many people and moment of desperate truth but i'm also transcendant truth an hour after the first plane struck the north tower some people were still trying to make first contact with loved ones but the phone networks were overloaded answering me and then he says we're in a conference room that we can't get out of we're trapped in a conference room and i said well who's with you and he rattles off the names of a couple of guys i know three got use other people and you could hear it in the background you could hear people talking you don't hear panic you heard i remember one guy yelling let's just knock down this damn wall i remember telling him i said you going to get out of there i kept telling him that and that's when he said to me go simply and i you don't understand he says there are people jumping from the floor he said i have to get down on the floor i love you and that's when the i lost the connection at that point there is a great comfort in the fact that i got to talk to him and the funny thing about that comfort is it was not a great comfort that day or even you know weeks later but it was a good it's a great comfort now is a great comfort months later and the reason it was a great comfort is because you know it's not so much for me but i feel that it was for him it was his chance to say goodbye his chance to say take care of kate like you know he said it will be a miracle if we get out of here he knew he knew he was a going to get out a was trapped in the hundred fifty four of the south tower he had called his brother john to come to the site to help their sister michelle but she had already escaped from the north tower now she and john were on the ground looking for james i was trying to separate people and focus i'm seeing james coming through no and we waited and we didn't see him come out for the people on the upper floors they really did have the knowledge that they were that they were going to die which is unusual even when you have disease you have time to reconcile with it but here there was people in the heart of their life young people they started on a sunny day one hundred two minutes later they're confronting really the most basic things in their life and they have just a few things to say and they say it with all their heart james then made a final phone call to another family member he says to my sister maria you know that he was with a lot of people and that was that was comforting to hear that that he wasn't alone and they didn't leave this world alone  said that they were looking for a way down and they couldn't find a way but they were still trying and he turned and he says the last thing he says to my sister he says tell mommy and daddy that i love them tell everybody that i love them and then you know all the debris is for around us but at the same time that both my sister and myself were running for our lives my brother was losing is by ten o'clock the rescue operation had made very little progress the fire department had been plagued by malfunctioning radio receivers within the towers inside on the stairwells firefighters were unable to communicate with each other but that silence was about to be broken someone was able to make the radio receiver work and we have i remarkable the mooning document of that effort to get up to the high floors in the south tower the man who repaired the radio receiver was forty five year old oreo palmer as chief of the talian seven palmer was amongst the first to arrive at the scene as he entered the south tower he single handedly fixed an elevator and took it to the fortieth floor half way to where almost seven hundred people were struggling to stay alive and then he started to climb on five and because he wasn't very very fit man he was able to make tremendous progress he had run marathons he ran half marathon he went twelve floors in ten minutes wearing all the bunker karajan fifty or sixty pounds  on his on on the tape during his ascent palmer discovered that one stairwell the south was still intact all the way to the impact zone for the hundreds of people trapped there this stairwell could have been an escape route the seventy eighth floor in the south tower the bridge point between living in the dead it was a transfer spot in the elevator system and a lot of people had mass there and when the second plane had a lot of them were killed outright a lot of them were injured and waiting for help and or palmer was rising and racing to that point to get to them thanks to this guy who just made it up when i heard the tapes you were watching the screen with all the words on it but with a digital countdown so you knew exactly what was coming you knew what the exact minute that the towers were going to go down and you can't help but feel like you want to jump back if you see it and say hurry up and get out of there you know you have one more minute before they it comes down and that's the hard part that was the har i was not surprised when i heard that oreo had made it to the seventy four and made it up to the point of impact and it's amazing he left a story behind my kids will have it their kids will have it and i just feel that it's to honor his memory and the person seven minutes after oreos last words the south tower would collapse some of the images and sounds you're about to see and hear are graphic in nature if you were discretion is  there is one phone call from the tower that captures the horror of the event it highlights the moral complexity of hearing the suffering of those trapped inside kevin caused rove a vice president at a on insurance company was on the phone to nine one one as the tower began to fall presents are right is there in his children our children it's not that i i can communicate with him at all but i always feel his presence parts of kevin's call were made public when it was played by the prosecution in the trial of a key nine eleven terrorist it was used to illustrate the human suffering on that day his words haunt me i try not to think about it but it's also in a way kind of a comfort to know where he was and what he went through and what he was trying to do kevin was always thinking of his family and he desperately wanted to get out of the building and come home to us he knew how much we needed him we were supposed to have many years together was supposed to grow  together one lady called him the voice from the towers it made it real for her it wasn't just a news story that there were really people in there and it wasn't just kevin would take elizabeth on i think over rides and he took her to a playground and after he died elizabeth said to me mommy can you take me to the secret playground i said i don't know where it is i guess what i would want people to learn from listening to the recording is that life is short that you never know when you're going to lose your loved ones and to spend every minute you can showing them that love that's what's important in life after sixty two minutes the south tower although the second to be hit was the first to fall almost half hours in civilians and uniformed services people died included kevin cause grove oreo palmer the phone rang and it was amy my youngest daughter and the first thing i said who are was where steven and she didn't answer it was just silence i got home and i called my mother and she was so i happy to hear my voice and i told her about steven and i just know she just screamed and that was it y in the days after but i did put aside at a certain point that i would not continue to do that last thinking he had left in his message to me he said i'll be all right and i will call you in the macit that i when it came down with the thunderous collapse it changed the whole narrative of what was going on in the north tower no longer were people saying we're going to rescue it was to get out the firefighters started to leave the police started to leave and even a few people who had been staying waiting for rescue started fleeing down the stairs after the collapse of the south tower those still trapped in the north tower had no idea that their fate was sealed one of them was jim  gartenberg jim gartenberg was sort of a unique case in the twin towers because he had so much communication with the outside world he worked at a real estate firm on the eighty sixth floor but to seven floors below where the crew were the crash was almost everyone else on his floor survived and he talked with his wife he talked with the a b c news station and he reported that the walls had collapsed around i'm stuck right now for jim's family and friends the collapse of the south tower was a terrifying premonition i was on the phone with one of jim's friends when the first tower collapsed although you could hear if you listened in on the call it was just crying and wailing and then this after about five or ten minutes of that this sense of calm that await that's not his tower it feel strange to report on the events of that day that we just isolated jimmy safety and how we could distance ourselves from the horrific event and the casualties that everybody else faced but my father was counting the floors to see because he saw he saw it on television he was trying to figure out if jim was above or below where the plane had hit the first thing my father said to me was he was such a great father you know and i said that makes it real because for me to think he's not going to make it out is one thing but for my father to say that because if it's in the past at ten twenty eight a m one hundred two minutes after it was hit the north tower fell almost three thousand civilians and uniformed services people died that day i saw the tower fa melissa harrington hughes a thirty one year old business executive from san francisco was in new york for just one day she had been attending a breakfast meeting near the top of the north tower harrington hughes position was very precarious from the beginning the smoke would have immediately started coming up to the floor because she was so close to the explosion she would have been in peril almost from the moment that eight forty six m when the plane hit the building shortly after the first plane had hit her building melissa had called her father when we stopped our conversation i thought she shall get control of herself and knowing my daughter melissa the way i knew her i didn't think she would have any problem getting out of the building but fifty five minutes had passed while melissa's father watched the events unfold on the television melissa's husband sean was asleep on the west coast they had been married only a year mostly met john at a junior club dance he was a very nice young man and they were extremely attractive couple i could tell when she introduced me to on her i just kind of glowed and diane clark at last talked to her husband twenty five minutes before his tower collapsed now she feared the worst i'd lost him at that point we left everybody here and i walked outside and i paced and i just was by myself for a long time pacing on the patio amazingly brian clark was one of only four people to escape from the floors above the impact zone in the south tower he and stanley praying naf got out with only seconds to spare it took eight or ten seconds for the it to dissolve in front of us but in this cloud of dust and we just stared not understanding really what had happened trinity church between us and the south tower almost acted like a sea wall and so the white cloud hit that church and exploded upwards and it was almost above us when we realized we had to run stanley and i were in forty two broadway for about forty five minutes we waited for dust to settle we learned a little bit about each other's families and stanley gave me his personal business card and i tucked it in my shirt pocket at the time and as we walked down through this snow it wasn't particularly crowded but somehow we got separated and i thought for a moment there was no stanley that was just a guardian angel sent to get me and i reached in my pocket and pulled out a business card so there was a stairway i would say that would be a very interesting story if there was no business card there but i've kept that business card until that day you know i put my wallet there and i mean it's it's still there i was the last one on the ferry so as the first went off ran down the dock now but eleven fifteen so an hour and fifteen minutes after our tower had collapsed and i first one eventually i came inside and as i passed the phone it rang i answered it and i heard bryant's voice on the end of my apparently i  diane had an entirely different experience that day than i diane and all my family at home and especially diane sawyer oath something horrible happened at nine o three and then relief at nine thirty five and then death again at ten o'clock and then relief an hour and fifteen minutes later so the emotional swing up and down for her was something i did not experience at all dealing with that underlying fear has come back on the anniversary of nine eleven each time i have had to kind of work through that terror that day sixty one of brian's colleagues were killed later brian helped create a relief fund for the families of those lost from his company your broker charley character also had a lucky escape that day he was one of the last people to make it out of the south tower alive when i got outside from every direction you just heard sirens coming it seemed like everything with a in new york was headed down to the trade center over the course of next month i just you know started retelling my story to anyone who would listen and i really do feel at h in the aftermath of nine eleven charlie left his work as a computer analyst and retrained to be a nurse first for the bereaved families the shock of september eleventh may never receive but now that several years have passed they are beginning to understand the profound legacy of their loved ones final words the world doesn't stop for every tragic loss of life and you know i kind of wish the world the world gets to pity and i understand you can't you've been constant grieving it's too easy for me to fall into a place where life is only about in e and i think that's a poor way it's it's ignoring all the gifts you're given and i didn't want to be that way i didn't want to be that way and you know i can't say that i don't think i  the sunday before nine eleven we went to church together and we were just you know talking in you know after mass and he was just that day was telling me like how much he loved working at the trade center that he said you know it was twenty six single young men and he says that it was hard for him to concentrate on working because a lot of the floors were occupied floors and he said one girl's pretty of the next you know  in jackson heights queens the street where james carter you used to play as a child has been re it was where we grew up it's where my brothers and sisters and i all played games with the neighbors kids i was the last one from the outside world to talk to melissa so we were able to say how much we loved each other and i think of it constantly all the time ever since most his passing i don't want to put a good spin on it but it's change him it's made him more aware of things i should say he's more of a loving man now than it was before didn't show his feelings as much before and now it goes like with my son who is coincidently which was kind of fate i would have to say was born on september eleventh and you leave this faces earth all you leave are your children that your legacy melissa brought a lot of joy into our lives my gaiter peace with melissa's death might come from the fact that i spoke to or i find a lot of pleasure knowing that lissa called me knowing that we were able to say our last goodbyes basically i want to tell anybody that has a family member that may be in the building that the situation is under control at the moment so please all i am we members take it easy nice some last memories when jim passed away i was three months pregnant you know here i am with this special gift as far as i'm concerned that he left me with and to me that's so important that we have that she has his personality and she's quick witted in her sense of humor is just like him i mean you watch television you go to an airport any time you travel so much has changed since nine eleven every talks about nine eleven it's in the newspapers probably every day and all i think about when i hear that nine eleven is i am so proud that my husband did what he could that morning the question really about the trade center is what are our memories made out of what they made out of images and myths are they made out of hard facts  double record of that day is essential because if history is going to be a tool for the living if memory is going to be something that we can rely on and you can't blank you can't turn away you have to say this is what happened this is how it