Philippe Reilhac, member of the Java des Gaspards theater company in Limoges, was in New York on the day of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Twenty years later, he recounts this day and the days that followed, which had a profound impact on him.
It was for “a beautiful trip with friends, the year of my thirtieth birthday”, in September, “when the weather is still very nice in New York” that Philippe Reilhac visited the city “which never sleeps”. “We were loaned an apartment, the conditions were excellent for visiting the city, tells this Limougeaud, member of the theater company Java des Gaspards. The apartment was in Central Park, located 5/6 km south of Manhattan and therefore the Twin Towers. We visited the neighborhood on September 10. We had gone to see the line of skyscrapers “, testifies the one who is also a former elected of the town hall of Limoges.
Everything seems to be going for the best for Philippe and his friends, staying in the heart of New York in the apartment of “friend of a friend”, who was then working at the World Trade Center, in one of the Twin Towers. On the morning of September 11, the owner of the home goes to work by bike, later than usual, after spending the evening chatting with those he was staying with. “He saw that the first tower was burning. He said to himself that it was not worth going to work because the tower was going to be evacuated. He warned his collaborators who were all French, well. in any case, who worked for a French company. All this in a very short period of time since the second tower was not long in being hit “, says Philippe.
Rare and exceptional archives … Twenty years after the September 11 attacks, back to this sadly historic day.
The documentary “September 11, in the heart of chaos” is available for replay on https://t.co/yQP3EQYsOu ▶ https://t.co/PBT8ll6ka6 pic.twitter.com/tiE4dkxSVE
– France 3 (@ France3tv) September 11, 2021
Still at the apartment that morning, the songwriter was alerted by sirens and helicopters: “Even if there is always a lot of noise in New York, there was a lot more. This apartment had a rooftop, I went up to the roof. I plugged in the radio, there was no TV, and I couldn’t understand, well I understood but I couldn’t believe it actually. So suddenly I thought I didn’t understand. “
In an attempt to achieve the impossible, Philippe goes down with his friends to the streets of New York: it is there, on the televisions of store windows, that he sees the images: “There we better understood what we heard on the radio.”
We wandered, we saw thousands of people moving up from south to north. There were already no more subways, all taxis were blocked. We saw a lot of people coming back up and us, we wandered like that, not knowing what to do and where to go, what to say … We continued to look at the images. We quickly tried to call France but there were no more networks. We struggled a lot to get a message across to our families.
The day after
The next day, Philippe moves in a New York meutri, as if at war: “From the second day, September 12, the city was filled with soldiers, police, rangers, finally I saw a quantity of different uniforms, and small armored vehicles which were almost in all the streets, it was very impressive.”
This is what I kept thinking about, always. The gaze of parents, husbands, wives of children, who were looking for their relatives.
If the artist explains that he did not immediately realize the scale and horror of the disaster, the relatives of the victims looking for the missing and possible survivors particularly marked him. “Towards the end of our stay, we went as close as possible to Ground Zero. (…) The area was blocked off. On these barriers there were thousands and thousands of photos of missing people and hundreds of people who were there. looking for their relatives. There, it was really overwhelming because it was concrete, it was no longer just numbers. We really became aware of it. It was overwhelming. The gaze of parents, husbands, wives of children, who were looking for their loved ones. There were a lot of people who were in despair. That’s what I kept thinking about. “
The late awareness
It was on his return to France that Limougeaud said he realized what had happened and experienced the aftermath of the attack which left 2,976 dead and 6,000 injured. “I had difficulty sleeping and clearing images when I got home.”
If the trauma is over, Philippe admits to still thinking about it, 20 years later.
I think about it regularly. It no longer haunts my nights but I think about it very often. How can I stop thinking about it? Today there is this anniversary date but in fact we are still talking about September 11th.
As a way to move on Philippe, who has not since returned to New York, plans to go there: “The first ten years I did not consider it and after that I could have but I went to other places in the United States and elsewhere in the world. Today I want to go back to New York , we are considering it. “
The testimony to be found live here, this Saturday September 11, 2021 and in replay here.
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