BY Cara Tabachnick
Newsday (New York)
Copyright 2006 Newsday, Inc.
Suzanne Oelschlager knelt beside her daughters, Kayla and Brittany, and pressed a white piece of paper against the first memorial in lower Manhattan dedicated to the memory of 343 firefighters who perished on Sept. 11, 2001. Holding a chalk-sized piece of charcoal, she rubbed certain raised letters.
Slowly, one by one, the letters appeared: “D-O-U-G-L-A-S O-E-L-S-C-H-L-A-G-E-R.”
“They never found my husband. I had no place to sit and grieve after they closed the site,” the former St. James resident said, referring to the barren hole where the World Trade Center used to stand. “Now I can go into the city on that date, and I have somewhere to go sit and pray.”
A mammoth memorial depicting the heroic response to the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center was unveiled yesterday at “10 House” — the station house of Engine Company 10 and Ladder Company 10 at 124 Liberty St., just south of the trade center site.
Scores of firefighters and family members of those lost that day turned out to see the bronze bas-relief, which took three years to complete. The memorial was donated by the Manhattan law firm Holland & Knight.
“Every day is a hard day. There is not a day that goes by that every family member, fire department or civilian, doesn’t think about what happened,” said Diane Miller, 58, of North Woodmere, whose husband, Henry Miller Jr. of Ladder Company 105, perished at the trade center. “It’s something that doesn’t go away.”
“They were doing a job,” she said of the first responders, “and they didn’t run away from doing their job. Their job was to get out as many people as they could, and that’s what they did.”
Firefighters in dress uniform sat flanking families as they listened to Chief Peter Hayden, who will soon retire, recall his experiences that day.
“I gave them difficult assignments to go to upper floors,” Hayden said. “As I looked them in the eyes, I knew they had a sense that some of them were not going to return.”
Hayden said the Fire Department has fulfilled its promise by successfully erecting a memorial to honor the fallen — unlike “empty promises from empty suits” and the nearby trade center site still a gaping hole.
“It’s sad that it took a private enterprise to put up a memorial that the city should have put up, as opposed to looking at a hole in the ground where a lot of my friends still are,” Lt. Peter Sapienza said.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-Manhattan) spoke about not abandoning firefighters who may have fallen ill while working in toxic conditions during recovery work at Ground Zero.
“It is my hope that as we consecrate this memorial today, we rededicate ourselves to care for those who were sickened in service to us,” Nadler said.
Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani said the terrorists who hijacked jetliners and flew them into the World Trade Center were trying to show that Americans were weak. But firefighters “stood their ground, defended their city and defended America, restoring honor and dignity to our country,” he said.
Barbara Hetzel of Garden City, whose firefighter son, Thomas Hetzel, 33, of Ladder Company 13 on the Upper East Side, was killed on Sept. 11, said she was just glad to finally see a tribute to him.
“It’s for our children and grandchildren,” she said. “It’s a memorial to life.”