Harvard lost at least 19 of its alumni and relatives on Sept. 11, and scores of alumni lived through last year’s attacks.

Gene Plotkin ’00 works for Goldman Sachs, whose offices are just a six or seven-minute walk from the World Trade Center.

“On Sept. 11, I woke up a little later than usual,” Plotkin said. “When I was getting ready to go to work, I heard that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center, but it sounded from the news that it was a small plane.”

So Plotkin got on the subway in Brooklyn, where he lives, and headed off to work.

On his walk to work he said he saw people in a bar gathered around a television that was showing an image of the Twin Towers in flames but that he was still not struck by the magnitude of what was happening.

“Right as I got to the building, everyone was going out,” Plotkin said. “I saw someone who seemed very distraught and she said a second plane had hit and they think it’s a terrorist attack.”

He then tracked down his coworkers, with whom he headed to a bar where they watched on television as the events of the day unfolded.

Plotkin was struck by the fact that just five days earlier he had been at the top of the World Trade Center at the Windows on the World restaurant, and he remembered how in awe he had been at the time that “humans are able to construct something so magnificent, so tall, so beautiful.”

And there he was, five days later, sitting in a bar, watching the towers collapse in front of his very eyes, on the television screen.

“At one point we looked outside the bar, and it was like nighttime,” Plotkin said. “Outside, it was a scene like Hiroshima—there was debris everywhere, and people were handing out water and hospital-type masks to cleanse the air.”

But Plotkin said he—like most other New Yorkers—has regained a sense of normalcy in his life.

“I think for most people nobody thinks about it anymore,” he said. “Obviously there will be many events to commemorate the attacks and to remember the sacrifices people made...but New Yorkers are known for being blasé, and maybe this is one case where it’s served them well.”

“The only thing that’s really missing, aside from the people who were lost and can never be replaced, are those monuments you used to see everyday,” Plotkin continued, referring to the Twin Towers.

Jason Whitlow ’99, who created a website last year shortly after the attacks so that alumni living in New York could let their classmates know they were alright, said it is emotionally draining to remember what he went through last year.

His sister and many friends and classmates were living in New York at the time.