The National September 11 Memorial Museum at Ground Zero opened to survivors and victims’ families on Thursday.
"In the years to come the 9/11 memorial museum will take its place along the fields of Gettysburg, the waters of Pearl Harbor and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as a sacred marker of our past and a solemn gathering place."
NYC’s former Mayor Mike Bloomberg at The Dedication of the 911 Memorial Museum.
“This museum built on the site of rubble and ruins is now filled with the faces, stories and memories of our common grief and our common hope.”
“In those awful moments after the south tower was hit, some of the injured huddled in the wreckage of the 78th floor.”
President Barack Obama
“The fires were spreading. The air was filled with smoke. It was dark and they could hardly see. It seemed as if there was no way out.”
Then there came a voice, clear, calm saying he had found the stairs.
“A young man in his twenties, strong, emerged from the smoke and over his nose and his mouth he wore a red handkerchief. He called for fire extinguishers to fight back the flames. He tended to the wounded. He led those survivors down the stairs to safety and carried a woman on his shoulders down 17 flights on his shoulders. Then he went back up bringing more wounded to safety until that moment when the tower fell."
One day the man’s mom, Alison Crowther, was reading a newspaper article about those final moments and the young man in the red bandana. She knew instantly it was her son Welles Crowther. He carried a red handkerchief with him since he was a boy. He worked in the south tower on the 108th floor as an equities trader, but also had been a volunteer firefighter.
One of the young man’s red bandannas hangs at the 911 Memorial Museum.
Give a listen.
