Twenty years later, the memory is still very much alive for the Belgians present there.
This Saturday, it’s been 20 years since the towers of the World Trade Center collapsed in a terrorist attack that no one could have imagined. A Télé-Bruxelles team is in the United States to follow an economic mission. Marie-Noëlle Dinant and Béatrice Broutout then joined New York, it was the first Belgian television team that was there. Our team collects the testimony of several Belgians on site. We found them twenty years later.
Alain, Katya and Kurt were in New York on September 11, 2001. The first works for a large Belgian investment bank, the second for the Chamber of Commerce and the third is a professor in a Flemish management school. All of them experienced these attacks as closely as possible.
“I think about the life I had”
“I was at a seminar 200 meters from the towers. I didn’t see it, but I heard the second crash. At that moment everyone panicked, because we understood that it was not normal“, remember Kurt.
Katya as for it remains marked 20 years later by the solidarity between New Yorkers. “We lined up near our home in hospitals to donate blood“, She recalls.
Alain, he measures the chance he had to escape the tragedy. “I think about the life I had and how lucky I was not to have been in the towers. Because you should know that many banks were in this corner“.
For all in any case, September 11 remains a special date in the calendar.
■ Report from Marie-Noëlle Dinant, Beatrice Broutout, Frédéric De Henau and Pierre Delmee
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