I recently came across a website called the 2,996 Project that sought to have at least one blogger sign up to memorialize every one of the 2,996 victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks on their fifth anniversary. I signed up, and I was randomly assigned to memorialize Gina Sztejnberg (pronounced "Steinberg"), a wife and mother of two who perished at the World Trade Center on that grim morning.
I never met Ms. Sztejnberg (who I will take the liberty of calling "Gina") and I've never met anyone who knew her. But I've learned a lot about her, and I'll do my best to memorialize her here, in honor not only of her and her family, but in honor of all those who so senselessly died on this morning five years ago. So here goes:
Gina was born in Wroclaw, Poland, to Jewish parents who had escaped the Holocaust. Her family moved to Russia, then back to Poland, and then emigrated to the United States, moving to Brooklyn in the 1960s when Gina was 15 years old. Gina excelled, earning a degree in mathematics from the City University of New York in 1970.
Gina found her husband-to-be, Michael Sztejnberg, at Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn. They had met once before, when Michael had come to live in Gina's home city of Wroclaw, Poland, as a teenager. They married in New York and moved to Ridgewood, New Jersey, where they raised two daughters, Laura and Julie.
Gina and Michael and their two daughters were avid travellers, visiting many of the fifty states and more than a dozen foreign countries, including China and Thailand. Two years before she died, Gina and Michael took their daughters to Wroclaw to see the city where their mother was born. Gina meticulously planned these trips down to the smallest detail, making sure that the family would be comfortable no matter where they went.
On September 11, 2001, Gina was working as a database architect consultant for Marsh & McLennan on the 96th floor of the North tower of the World Trade Center. As usual, Gina and Michael drove together to lower Manhattan early that morning. Michael dropped Gina off at the WTC at 6:45 a.m. and continued on to his job as Senior Vice President of J.P. Morgan Chase. Michael never saw Gina again.
At 8:46 a.m., approximately two hours after Gina arrived at work, the first plane, United Flight 11, slammed into Gina's tower between the 92nd and 98th floors -- right where Gina worked. Some 27 minutes later, the second plane struck the South tower. The South tower was the first to collapse, at about 10:05 a.m. Some 24 minutes later, at 10:29 a.m., the North Tower -- Gina's tower -- also collapsed. Gina never made it out. She is listed as a "confirmed" victim, meaning that some of her remains were eventually found and identified.
Gina was 52 years old at the time of her death. Her husband Michael was 55, and her daughters were 22 and 26.
I am tempted to vent my anger and frustration toward those who senselessly took Gina's life. But that's not our purpose here.
Our purpose is to remember Gina, and the 2,995 other innocent people who died on this morning five years ago. May they rest in peace, and may our nation never forget them.
On November 19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln dedicated the National Cemetery at Gettysburg, honoring those who had died there fighting to preserve our young nation. Although Gina and the others who died on 9/11 were not solidiers and did not die fighting a war, their deaths and our rememberances of them may still serve to strengthen the great democracy that their murderers sought to destroy. In President Lincoln's [slightly altered] words:
[T]he brave men [and women], living and dead, who struggled [on September 11th], have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did [on September 11th]. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who [struggled and died] [on September 11th] have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
So here's to Gina Sztejnberg, and to all the other heros we lost on that dreadful morning five years ago. They will never be forgotten.
More information about Gina can be found here, here, here, here, here, and here.