Alejandra Ciappa was in New York on September 11, 2001. An Argentine physician and geneticist, she was then undertaking a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University. That day, confronted with the images of the Twin Towers in flames, she made an almost instinctive decision.
“They’re going to need doctors, I have to go help”, she recalls thinking.
She didn’t know exactly what she would find. Yet a few hours after the attacks, she approached the Red Cross to offer her help and ended up being sent to Ground Zero, the place where the Twin Towers had just stood.
More than two decades later, Ciappa spoke again about that experience in videos she shared on her social networks. Her words help reconstruct not only what she saw at that moment, but also the imprint that 9/11 left on her way of understanding life.
“Things were exploding, glass from forty-five stories was falling”
The scene she found at Ground Zero was chaos beyond imagining.
“Things were exploding, things were exploding, glass from forty-five stories was falling,” she recalled.
Yet, amid that danger, those who were there focused on rescue work seemed not to register the risk.
“It was all chaos, but you didn’t see the danger because you were focused on saving someone,” she explained.
Ciappa had arrived with a clear mission: to help people who might have been trapped. The expectation was to find survivors.
“And you’re there, believing in that moment that you’re going to save lives,” she explained.
But that hope quickly confronted the scale of the tragedy.
“And no survivors appeared,” she said.
In 2007, six years after the attack, Ciappa spoke publicly for the first time about what she had experienced that day. In an interview with Infobae, the outlet recounted how the doctor, who was in New York for her postdoctoral work, had gone to the Red Cross to offer her help and had ended up working at Ground Zero.
That conversation was particularly meaningful because, up to that point, Ciappa had not spoken publicly about the horror she had endured on 9/11.
In that interview, she also uttered a phrase that captured her relationship with that memory: “It doesn’t haunt me: it accompanies me”, according to Infobae.
“I had the privilege of experiencing the Towers”
Over the years, Ciappa’s view of that tragedy took on a new dimension.
In her recent statements, far from speaking only from horror, she asserts that that experience was also decisive in shaping the person she is today.
“The towers, I always say I was privileged to experience them because they brought me to be who I am today, to understand how I understand life today, and I like it,” she reflected.
That phrase may come as a surprise when talking about such a tragedy of immense magnitude. But for her, being there also meant acquiring a different perspective on life and on those who never had the chance to return.
“I began to feel privileged for the life I had and for being able to tell the stories of others who hadn’t had the opportunity,” she explained.
In that sense, her account is not limited to what she saw at Ground Zero. She also speaks about what it meant to continue living afterward.
Three Hours and a Half to Survive
Years after 9/11, Ciappa faced another extreme situation that again brought her to the brink of death.
The building where she lived filled with carbon monoxide and gas seeped into her apartment. According to her account, she became quadriplegic and unconscious.
“You become quadriplegic, you lose the use of a muscle and you become unconscious,” she recalled.
Before losing full control of her body, she had three hours and a half to try to survive and find a way out.
“I had three and a half hours trying to survive, to leave the apartment while conscious, but without a functioning body”, she said.
That experience led her to ask herself a question that, in some way, also resonates with what she had lived on 9/11: what would have changed if she had died.
“And you wonder what you would have done without it, you know? What things would have changed in my life,” she reflected.
The answer was definitive.
“And I remember telling myself, I wouldn’t have changed a thing.”
“Every Day, Life Is Yours”
After enduring that episode, Ciappa says she became even more conscious of the privilege of being alive.
“Well, I’m living the life I have to live,” she stated.
That outlook also emerges when she speaks about the people who died in the Twin Towers and those who never had the chance to tell their own stories.
For her, remembering does not mean getting stuck in the past. It also means recognizing what each day offers.
“But that is life itself, every day,” she said.
And then she summed up that idea in a phrase that seems to condense much of what she learned from her experiences:
“Every day, life is yours.”
Her final reflection points to something as everyday as it is profound: many times people make choices without realizing they have the power to do so.
“Many times we choose, but we’re not aware that we have the power to choose,” she concluded.
Now, 25 years after 9/11, Alejandra Ciappa’s memory is not only that of an Argentine doctor who came to Ground Zero to help. It is also that of a woman who came close to death more than once and transformed those experiences into a distinctive way of looking at the present.
As she said in that 2007 Infobae interview, horror does not haunt her: it accompanies her. And, from that place, she continues to tell the stories of those who could not.
