kellycrull.com - expat life in Spain

Alex Selim is our guest essayist. He’s a close friend of mine, and a friend of the Internaitonal community here in Madrid, having written a few articles for In Madrid newspaper. He also has the perspective of someone who was in New York City when the Twin Towers were attacked and in Madrid when the bombs exploded at Atocha train station. He writes to us today on the third anniversary of September 11th.

As the third anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks and the six-month anniversary of the Madrid bombings nears, it is easy for many of us to think of their political and historical consequences —the war on terrorism, the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime and the surprise victory of a socialist prime minister over the more pro-American government in Spain—rather than on their effect on the lives of the people who experienced them.

But because of my personal experience with both of these events, their human element far outweighs their political and historical elements. Though I grew up in the Bay Area near San Francisco, I finished my last two years of college in New York, where I lived and worked for three more years before moving to Madrid.

So, as the last of three bombs exploded on March 11, I was walking into an office building on the other side of Madrid, where I had been living and teaching English to business professionals for the last nine months.

As some of my students, who arrived at class late because of the resulting traffic and so had heard the first reports on the radio, explained to me what had happened, my stomach tightened in a way that it had for the first time in New York on September 11 and only after whenever I recalled the fear and confusion surrounding that day exactly two and a half years earlier.

I had been walking into my office on 23rd St. in Manhattan when I heard a man say on his cell phone that he could see the flames coming from the World Trade Center. If I had not already been ten minutes late, I would have walked half a block over to Sixth Avenue and caught one last glimpse of the Twin Towers before they unexpectedly collapsed.

After I was told to evacuate my office an hour later, I wandered the streets of Manhattan because the subways had been closed down and I couldn’t get back to my home in Brooklyn. Among a crowd of people walking up Park Avenue in complete silence, I saw a single man, whose suit was completely covered in dust. Apparently still in shock, he appeared to be walking without a specific destination, as if he was just trying to get away from an unimaginable horror.

Six hours later, when the subways began running again, I packed into a train headed to Brooklyn. On the way, it passed through the now ghostly vacant station below where the World Trade Center had been. When the train ascended above ground I could see a pillar of smoke and dust that replaced what had been the skyline’s most dominating feature. The man standing beside me pressed his palm against the window and sobbed.

In Madrid, the nature of my job as an English teacher required me to travel to office building throughout the city and engage in conversation with my students. And so I was able to get a good understanding of how the attacks affected many of the cities residents.

My second class that day was with the Human Resources Director of an IT company. Understandably preoccupied with both his mobile phone and his office phone ringing one after the other, he asked me to help him write a memo in English to his boss reporting that one of his employees had been mildly injured on the train and another was unaccounted for. The next day his assistant canceled his class so that he could attend the second employee’s funeral.

The next week when I resumed my classes I made it a priority to listen to my students’ stories in order to help them recover from the shock they had experienced the week before.

Two of my other students still seemed to be in shock. One of them lived alone across the street from the train station and was walking into the station as the first bomb went off. She ran back home to her apartment but could feel the other bombs shaking her windows. She couldn’t leave her house for the rest of the day and nearly cried as she recounted her story.

The other one student was taking the train into Atocha and was planning to meet her younger sister there at the time the bombs exploded. Luckily both she and her sister had been late. However, the first half hour of separation, not knowing if her sister was safe, deeply affected her. She cried the rest of the weekend. She said she couldn’t imagine how someone would feel who actually lost a family member.

I can still remember the despair in the voice of another student, a middle-aged accountant who had been on the train one station away from Atocha when the bombs exploded, as he told me that he didn’t understand this world anymore. How could anything justify such a crime?

Although I was deeply disappointed by the election that followed three days after the attacks—I felt that the Socialist Party exploited the tragedy by scapegoating the sitting conservative government for supporting the war in Iraq—I could not separate myself from my students on the basis of national or political boundaries, as one of my family members suggested, because “they” chose not to support “us” anymore.

But at that moment, we were all human beings above all and in such situations politics and nationality should not triumph over humanity. Besides, even if I disagreed with choice that many of my students made at the ballot box, I could see the factors that caused them—I had seen the emotional appeal that the left-wing supporters made against the conservative party—better than anyone in the States. Anyway, it’s much easier to criticize if you’ve never lived through a terrorist attack.

But what impressed me about both New York and Madrid in the aftermath of these crimes was their tremendous resilience. Though New Yorkers have a reputation for being cold, the lines of blood donors and the relief volunteers that spontaneously appeared on September 12 told me otherwise. From that day on, I looked beyond New York’s stereotype and into its reality. In a similar way, I discovered the soul of Madrid on March 12, as blood donors waited over three hours to give blood and nearly 3M of city’s 5M residents gathered in the rain to protest the crime committed against them, showing both their defiance and their pain by chanting “Murderers: Motherfuckers!” and a rhyming couplet that said, “It’s not raining/Madrid is crying!”

And so this September 11, as the media coverage recounts the number who perished in each of these attacks, I will also be remembering the courage of my students and the rest of those survivors who suffered through these crimes and so bravely rebuilt their cities.