2023 Legacy Award Remarks
Greenwald, Alice M. - Remarks and Video from the VOICES Center for Resilience Never Forget Gala, November 9, 2023, on accepting the 2023 Legacy Award
Thank you, Mary and Frank and the entire VOICES family for this incredibly meaningful honor. And my heartfelt congratulations to Gov. Tom Kean and Congressman Lee Hamilton on their awards this evening – so deserved!
My journey with Mary and Frank goes back a long way, to when I first arrived in New York in 2006 to begin the work of planning the 9/11 Memorial Museum. It was evident from Day One that Frank was exceedingly strategic and Mary was, well, a force of nature! We became great partners and along the way, great friends.
And this gala has always been one of my favorite events … not only because it provides support for an invaluable organization with a great team doing God’s work, but because in 2009, Mary invited me to speak about the evolving plans for the Museum, sandwiching me in-between Bill Clinton and Jon Bon Jovi. So, she had me open for Bon Jovi! Now, who else in the world could make that happen?!
A Commitment to Remembrance
Seriously, what brought us into each other’s orbit was a commitment to remembrance. We supported each other’s work to build out the 9/11 Living Memorial and to develop the In Memoriam exhibition at the Museum, both projects dedicated to restoring humanity to individuals too often reduced to their involuntary status as “victims” or as part of an aggregate number of casualties of an unfathomable terrorist attack.
Our goal with the memorial exhibit was to put a face to every name. But, after years of searching, there was still one photo missing – for a man named Antonio Dorsey Pratt, who had worked in the Cantor Fitzgerald cafeteria, high up in the North Tower.
Barely two months before my retirement, I got a call from Mary. She had found a photo of Mr. Pratt, recently donated to the Living Memorial archive. With that, I could leave my position, knowing that our promise had been kept.
All museums invite an encounter with authenticity… whether in the form of photographic portraits or works of art, archaeological shards, or historical documents… and that encounter provokes fundamental questions: Who are we? What is the human experience?
Memorial museums focus these same questions in the context of the most horrific moments of human experience. But the encounter provided by memorial museums is not solely with “the stuff.” Memorial museums accentuate the void; the encounter they facilitate is with absence.
Typically, memorial museums tell the stories of traumatic events involving mass loss of life. They are meant as testimony, a physical witness to the unimaginable. They are also meant to personalize the anonymity that comes with mass casualty events – to convert the abstraction of numbers into real people with lives, emotions, dreams and aspirations, hurts and frustrations, achievements and failures, families and friendships that are familiar to all of us.
When you accentuate the humanity of the people killed as well as those most closely affected – survivors, family members, first responders, neighbors – it prompts people to think: “These people were just like me. What happened to them could have happened to me. What happened is unacceptable.”
And that’s the point – memorial museums are places that can activate moral conscience rooted in empathy—a recognition of what connects rather than what divides us.
Creating a Space to Contain Loss
Memorial museums also create a space to contain loss, so that we can, both individually and collectively, move forward beyond otherwise incapacitating grief.
At Ground Zero, the impulse to commemorate and the imperative to rebuild were both appropriate responses to the devastation in lower Manhattan. But was it possible to realize both in the same space of profound destruction and loss? Wouldn’t commercial redevelopment be irreverent at a place where so many had been killed? Wouldn’t an emphasis on commemoration and on the dead prevent this once-vibrant place of commerce, residence, and culture from renewing itself… from going forward?
Because of what happened at Ground Zero, the site had been transformed into sacred ground. And what “sacred” literally means is: “set apart,” “separate,” “distinct”. The sanctity of this place had to be acknowledged, and the void created by the enormity of the loss had to be recognized; there needed to be space distinct from the rest of what would be rebuilt at the site. But precisely because it was a redevelopment site, renewal and remembrance would co-exist. In fact, they had to.
The lesson of Ground Zero is somewhat counter-intuitive: in order to achieve renewal, space has to be set aside for remembrance, because, in a place of traumatic violence, you cannot ignore what happened there or the trauma remains unresolved. At Ground Zero, there had to be a designated place to acknowledge the loss in order for redevelopment to succeed. And the 9/11 Memorial and the Museum did just that, providing that space in which to place our grief so that we – as individuals and as family, as a city, a nation, and a global community – could move forward in our lives.
Learning from Loss
But what is the point of moving forward if we learn nothing from loss? How can these two functions of memorial museums – securing a place for grief and activating moral conscience through empathy – change the world for the better? As we’ve experienced only recently with the horrific and heartbreaking events in Israel and Gaza, the world lurches from one experience of atrocity or natural disaster to another, from one profound loss to another profound loss, and we move from shock to outrage to numbness.
In the aftermath of 9/11, for all too brief a time, we moved from shock to empathy. If you were in New York City at that time, you know what I’m talking about. Strangers hugged strangers. We stopped seeing the “otherness” of people. We understood we were all in this together.
We now live in a time of extreme polarization. We are encouraged by our choice of news programs and social media to see mostly the “otherness” of people – people who don’t think like us, who don’t vote like us, who don’t look like us, who don’t behave like us. It is a time of fracture exacerbated by a deficit of empathy.
And so, when I read a few weeks ago the words of a mayor in the village of Londorf, Germany, I took note. At one time, Jews represented 10 percent of the population in Londorf. By May 1945, only one Jewish woman from that village had survived the Holocaust. After the war, the community erected a monument for its residents who had died, but not a single Jewish citizen was listed. As Mayor Langecker observed, “the cloak of silence was laid over history.”
But a class photo from 1934 changed everything for him. In the picture is seven-year-old Ruth Wertheim, who – a mere 11 years later – would alone return from Auschwitz to Londorf. Pictured in the same row is Mayor Langecker’s grandmother. “The history of the Londorf Jews,” he affirmed, “is also part of my own family history.”
Now, it was personal. And, just as the photo of Antonio Dorset Pratt helped us to convey the full range of humanity killed on 9/11, a school photo of his grandmother’s classmate compelled Mayor Langecker to face history as it happened, not as he and his community might have preferred to remember it – or more precisely, to forget it.
A Container of History
Eighty years to the day the Jewish residents of Londorf were deported, on September 14, 2022, the community dedicated a memorial to the Londorf Jewish families decimated by the Holocaust. And that memorial – like VOICE’s 9/11 Living Memorial and like the 9/11 Memorial & Museum – is a presence in their midst, a container of history, an acknowledgment of irretrievable loss, and a prompt to empathy… a reminder that these people were friends and neighbors and classmates… people just like us.
At its core, the Londorf memorial – like all memorials and memorial museums – contains a question: How could this have happened?
In his remarks, the mayor explains that the German word for “responsibility” is “Verantwortung,” which contains within it the word “Antwort,” which means “answer.”
“We can only give the right answer,” he tells us, “if we are fully informed about what has been before.”
This truth is what makes VOICES Center for Resilience so effective and so necessary. Mary and Frank and Beverly Eckert (of blessed memory) and the other members of the Family Steering Committee who advocated forcefully and relentlessly for creation of the 9/11 Commission; my fellow honoree this evening, Governor Kean, his co-chair, Lee Hamilton, and the many people who contributed to the Commission report; the Coalition of 9/11 Families and the members of the Family Advisory Committee who shared their hopes and dreams, their anxieties and their wisdom in helping us shape the 9/11 Memorial Museum; VOICES’ continuing advocacy to secure passage of the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act and to support legislation providing health care and compensation for 9/11 responders and survivors … these are case studies in what taking responsibility looks like.
The stakes could not be higher.
“Without responsibility, there is no humanity,” the Mayor of Londorf warned, adding: “Our answers determine the path to the future.”
Thank you.