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Jenna-Ley Harrison/Journal Scene A former FDNY/EMS instructor, Summerville resident Johan Zamoscianyk wears his old department-issued uniform and lanyard with a photo of deceased co-worker Carlos Lillo. He said Lillo died while responding to the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center.
A decade and a half after terrorists attacked the United States and left nearly 3,000 victims dead, tears still roll down the cheeks of former New York firefighter Johan Zamoscianyk when he talks about that day.
The Summerville man will explain how he tried to tune out emergency sirens then later the deafening silence that tormented first responders sifting through World Trade Center rubble looking for friends’ and strangers’ bodies.
A nearly 10-year veteran of the New York Fire Department, Zamoscianyk served as an EMT and teacher for the agency’s training academy at the time of the attacks. He said he can’t believe that in such a short time, “people have started to forget” what happened and lose the fierce patriotism they once felt.
Through his position he met every person who worked there. So when he learned that 343 of his agency’s firefighters lost their lives on 9/11, his heart hung heavier than most.
The victims were colleagues and friends — Carlos Lillo in particular. Lillo was the first close friend Zamoscianyk learned he had lost in the attacks. His name and photo hangs on a lanyard around Zamoscianyk’s neck each year when he participates in the local 9/11 Hero’s Run across Charleston’s Ravenel Bridge.
Zamoscianyk often wondered if he, too, might lose his life among the chaotic cleanup. He said he mentally prepared himself for the possibility and wrote a letter to his family before heading to Ground Zero the hour immediately after the planes hit the towers.
Earlier that morning he had been testing paramedic students, but it was when the group broke for breakfast in the cafeteria that one of the department chiefs rushed into the kitchen asking for a phone. Zamosciaynk said he told them a plane had just crashed in to one of the towers, and they immediately scrambled to turn on the news.
“We all rushed and turned on the TV just in time to see the re-enactment,” Zamoscianyk said. “At first we thought it was a small plane…(that hit) by accident then we saw the replay (and it) deliberately flying in. We all knew something was up.”
He immediately called his wife and three daughters who were more than an hour away at home. They feared for his life, and his wife screamed for him to come home, but he couldn’t. Zamoscianyk had been ordered to the site to help.
“I told her I didn’t know when I was coming home,” he said.
After hanging up the phone, he called his mom in Florida and brother in Pennsylvania. Zamoscianyk said he told him to care for their relatives there and he’d care for their family in New York.
He then suited up in body armor with a crew of other firefighters, waiting to be shipped out to Manhattan. To this day he’s thankful for the crew’s half-hour delay in leaving. The extra time spared his life. Had they left any earlier, Zamoscianyk and his crew might have been inside one of the towers when it collapsed.
During the ride to Ground Zero, the firefighters learned that a plane had also hit the second tower and both buildings had fallen, leaving an unsettling empty space along the city skyline. With most roads leading to the city shut down, the crew had a challenging time making their way to the nearby war zone.
That first night and the next two nights, Zamoscianyk didn’t go home. He stayed close to the city at his mother-in-law’s house, but unable to sleep, he returned to the attack site after only an hour of rest.
“I tossed and turned,” Zamoscianyk said.
“You knew that your friends were missing, and you didn’t want to leave. Our 12-hour shifts turned into 16- and 20-hour shifts,” he said.
Rescue and recovery
During the next three weeks Zamoscianyk completed various challenging tasks at the site, where he worked in a thick cloud of smoke and ash for a time before retrieving a respirator — and only after he said he stole one from a supply room. With more first responders than respirators on scene, they were priceless devices that kept some from respiratory illness in the years that followed. But even Zamoscianyk said he and countless others suffer from a persistent cough and return to New York annually for checkups.
In addition to caring for hurt first responders and their rescue animals, Zamoscianyk answered calls at a phone bank set up for missing people’s friends and family. He said they wanted to know whether loved ones had been found dead or alive, but the answer was usually unknown.
Zamoscianyk also sifted through the rubble looking for bodies — ones he mostly found in parts. Tasked with tagging and labeling each one before taking them to the morgue to be processed, he monotonously filled bucket after bucket with death.
Zamoscianyk said a special honor was given to body parts found belonging to first responders and other rescue crews. They were loaded into large baskets and draped with the American flag. They later received a police escort from the temporary morgue to a more permanent one, Zamoscianyk said.
At the end of each workday, he called home to his family, whose concern and curiosity unintentionally reminded him of the tumultuous scene. He said during each call they asked the same simple question — one that would seem odd in any other circumstance.
“They wanted to know if people were still covered in blood and still jumping from buildings,” Zamoscianyk said.
He also shed light on other efforts going on simultaneous to his jobs. He said carpenters made stretchers, construction crews used heavy equipment to move debris, and steel workers cut metal into smaller sizes lifted by tall cranes. The debris was so substantial that Zamoscianyk said it was forced to go to the Staton Island landfill, where it was continuously sifted for human remains, aircraft parts and any other personal identification items.
Other than the “eerie silence” that eventually fell on the site after all sirens had subsided in the days that followed the attacks, Zamoscianyk said the most memorable sound came from alarms on deceased firefighters’ gear.
“When you stop moving for more than 30 seconds, the alarms go off and continue to go (off) until the battery dies,” he said. “You know exactly what they are and that there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Zamoscianyk described activity later in September as “business as usual” past Ground Zero. Despite the nearby tragedy that had recently occurred, he said people were “sitting in cafes, eating and drinking (and) laughing.”
Moving on, not forgetting
After working through the month’s end, he was given six weeks medical leave due to trouble breathing. In January 2002 he agreed with his family he needed to resign, no longer physically fit to conduct his duties.
“My family was stressed my breathing wasn’t any good. I couldn’t get on an ambulance,” he said.
Each year Zamoscianyk returns to Ground Zero and conducts the same routine.
“I spend the morning at the health center in downtown Brooklyn, and as soon as I’m done I go straight down to the site, and I sit,” he said. Zamoscianyk thinks about the victims, each one memorialized in his mind.
“As long as my friends’ names are remembered, they are always alive to me,” he said.
Before moving to Summerville in 2006 — he now works for MUSC — Zamoscianyk made sure to take two flags that were at Ground Zero during the recovery effort. He said he wants to drape his and a former partner’s coffins in them one day.
In addition to tears, Zamoscianyk said he still gets anxious every fall, feeling the effects of PTSD when the anniversary of the attacks approaches.
“This time of year triggers it,” he said. “Usually it starts for me in June, and as it gets closer to the anniversary, it gets worse. I was doing good for a couple of years, and it started again last night. It’s going to be a rough next couple of days.”
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