As Americans pause Friday to mark 25 years since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Kathleen Palladino will recall the tragedy as she first experienced it: as a 6-year-old in New York City, too young to fully grasp the horror unfolding around her.
Palladino was in kindergarten in Brooklyn when the school day abruptly changed, with students’ names being announced over the PA system as parents arrived to take them home.
Her mother eventually came for Palladino and her older sister, and during the walk home, the young girl turned her eyes toward Manhattan.
“It was like a dividing line,” Palladino recently told News Outlet. “From the bridge backwards was just blackness.”
Rubble from the World Trade Center and the Winter Garden is seen in New York City in 2001, shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. (MediaNews Group via Getty Images, File)
On the other side, she remembers, the afternoon sky was still a clear, brilliant blue.
“Mommy, why is the sky black?” Palladino recalled asking. “She just kept squeezing my hand, and we just kept going,” she said.
Now, 25 years later, Palladino is a nursery school teacher at St. Patrick Catholic Academy in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, guiding 3-year-olds who were born more than two decades after the attacks that left such a lasting imprint on her childhood.
She is among several teachers at the academy whose recollections of Sept. 11 reach back to their own years as students.
As the country reflects on the anniversary Friday, those educators are helping young children understand an event that is deeply personal for them, but one their students encounter only as history.
A boy points toward the center of the reflecting pool at the National September 11 Memorial Museum in New York City. (Bonnie Cash/UPI/Bloomberg via Getty Images, File)
Their principal, Kathy Curatolo, has an even closer tie to that day. From a school roof that morning, she watched one of the towers fall, not yet knowing that her youngest brother, 31-year-old FDNY firefighter Robert Curatolo, was beneath it.
For Palladino’s young students, the lessons begin simply.
“I don’t go into the events of 9/11,” she said. “They are too young, and the scope of what happened is just beyond their understanding right now.”
Instead, she teaches them what they can do when someone is hurting.
“Can we clean up our toys without being asked? Can we go give them a hug?” she said. “Anything to show the ones that we love that we’re here for them.”
FDNY Firefighter Robert Curatolo was killed at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, after surviving the first tower collapse and returning to help others, according to his sister, Kathy Curatolo. (Courtesy Kathy Curatolo)
For fourth-grade teacher Elizabeth Giacchino, 9/11 begins in her memory with a ringing telephone.
Giacchino was a sixth grader at Our Lady of Guadalupe School in Brooklyn when her teacher answered a call and told the class something had happened involving the Twin Towers.
“So many of my classmates around me just started screaming and crying because they had family members that were working in the city,” she said.
Outside the window, Giacchino could see smoke. Parents began arriving, but Giacchino and her older sister remained because their mother worked at the school.
“All I wanted to do was just be with my family at that time,” she said.
Flowers are left by mourners at the 9/11 Memorial, offering gifts to remember those killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York City. (Getty Images, File)
Years later, after becoming a teacher herself, another memory took on new meaning. Giacchino remembered how calm her own teacher had remained while children cried around her.
“I don’t even know if she was feeling some type of way or if there was any personal situation she was going through, because all she thought about was us,” Giacchino said. “So that’s what I always make sure to do with my students too.”
Nikki Fregara, now a third-grade teacher at St. Patrick, was a high school senior when a phone call interrupted her first class of the day, history.
“I hate to tell you all this, but I’m afraid that the Twin Towers got hit,” she remembers her teacher saying.
The students went to the window.
“We saw the smoke,” Fregara said.
New York City Firefighter Gerard McGibbon, of Engine 283 in Brownsville, Brooklyn, prays after the World Trade Center buildings collapsed Sept. 11, 2001. (Mario Tama/Getty Images, File)
She remembers crying and screaming in the hallway and students gathering in the auditorium around a small box television to watch the news. Fregara worried about her father, whose work took him to buildings around the city, and her sister and brother-in-law, who worked nearby.
Today, she steers her third-graders away from the graphic details and toward the first responders who ran toward danger.
“Helping others is so important, especially when they are in need,” Fregara said.
Her message to them is simple: “Never forget to be an everyday hero.”
For Curatolo, however, the hero she tells students about was her younger brother.
Curatolo was headed to a principals’ meeting on Sept. 11, 2001, when she heard on the radio that a plane had struck the World Trade Center.
At the meeting, she and the other principals watched the second plane strike on TV before returning to their schools.
American flags flutter on a fence in front of Lower Manhattan and One World Trade Center at the Tear Drop 9/11 Memorial at sunset in Bayonne, N.J. (Gary Hershorn/Getty Images, File)
Curatolo had four brothers, three firefighters and a police officer, and her mother initially called with reassuring news: all four were OK.
Curatolo turned her attention to her students and eventually went onto the school roof.
“I saw the second tower fall, not realizing that tower killed my brother,” she said.
Robert Curatolo had been an FDNY firefighter for six years and was assigned to Ladder 16 in Manhattan.
Kathy said Robert had just gotten off duty when the attacks began and headed toward the World Trade Center with two other firefighters in a police car. One survived, allowing the family to later learn some of what Robert did that morning.
Robert Curatolo, the youngest of eight siblings, is pictured with his brothers and sisters as children. His sister Kathy Curatolo now shares his story with students 25 years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. (Courtesy Kathy Curatolo)
Robert began directing dazed people away from falling debris, Kathy said. When the first building collapsed, he was in a walkway between the towers. Curatolo survived and then returned to the rubble.
Kathy said her family learned that Robert pulled a man with two broken legs through the debris and into the street. When the second tower collapsed, Robert dove beneath a fire truck, she said, but it could not withstand the collapse.
People have asked Kathy why he didn’t leave after surviving once. “That’s not who he was,” she said. “That’s not how we were raised.”
Yet that is not the only Robert she wants her students to know. The youngest of eight siblings, Robert was funny, easygoing and athletic. He loved movies and traveling and was, Kathy remembers, almost always late.
“So he actually ended up at the Trade Center on time, where we’re like, the only thing you ever got to on time,” she said.
Olga Colon, 65, blows a kiss as she finds the name of her brother, Carlos Rey Lillo, a paramedic killed when the South Tower collapsed, at the south reflecting pool during the annual 9/11 Commemoration Ceremony at the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum in New York City. (Adam Gray/Getty Images, File)
Robert had married at Disney World just three weeks before 9/11. The wedding was the last time Kathy saw him, though she spoke to him by phone the day before he died.
“I want them to know that Robert was — he was a regular kid growing up just like them,” she said.
Curatolo remembers realizing around the 10th anniversary that students increasingly had no memory of 9/11.
“These kids have no idea what I’m talking about unless they learn it from us in school or their parents who had experienced something,” she said.
Today, she said, children accustomed to smartphones and instantaneous communication are astonished to learn survivors sometimes couldn’t contact their families.
She tells them about grounded planes, postponed baseball games and packed churches and remembers that after the attacks, “people were kinder to each other.”
Families visit the South Memorial Pool during 10th anniversary ceremonies at the World Trade Center site in New York City. (Robert Deutsch/Pool via Reuters, File)
Twenty-five years later, Curatolo said she also wants students to understand that remembering tragedy does not mean allowing it to define a life.
“My brother is always with me, but I don’t let 9/11 define me,” she said. “You can survive a tragedy and still live a good life because the people who were lost don’t want you to stop living your life.”
Her family continues to honor Robert through a scholarship foundation, charitable work and support for Tunnel to Towers.
Kathy still counts him among the eight Curatolo siblings.
“There are eight of us,” she said. “Four live in Florida, three live on Staten Island, and one’s in heaven.”
