At Ground Zero, a new generation is helping keep the light of remembrance alive on America’s darkest day.
On Friday, young people who were not yet alive on Sept. 11, 2001, joined families and survivors in reading the names of nearly 3,000 victims, honoring those lost in the terror attacks 25 years later.
One by one, the young speakers gave voice to grief they inherited but never witnessed firsthand, reflecting on the birthdays, conversations and family memories stolen when hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center on a clear blue morning that soon disappeared beneath smoke and ash.
“Grandma, I never got to meet you, but you’ve been with me my entire life,” said the granddaughter of Barbara Walsh, an administrative assistant at Marsh & McLennan whose office was in the North Tower when Flight 11 hit.
Addressing a solemn crowd of victims’ families, survivors, first responders and dignitaries, the young woman said she knows her grandmother mostly through a name engraved beside the memorial’s reflecting pool — yet the weight of that loss has shaped her life through the people who loved Walsh.
“I’m just begging to scratch the surface of understanding the magnitude of what it must have felt like,” she said of the tragedy.
She recalled once asking her uncle whether people her age might someday forget Sept. 11. “He said it was our job to make sure they never did,” she told the crowd.
“To my family and everyone born after 9/11 who grew up carrying a loss that they never personally experienced, but still feel the sinking pain in their stomach at the mention of 9/11, I promise you, we promise we will remember.”
Her words reflected a growing reality across New York and the nation: more Americans now carry the legacy of 9/11 as history passed down, rather than memory lived.
According to the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, roughly one-third of Americans alive today had not yet been born when the Sept. 11 attacks stunned the world and reshaped the country.
Among them is Manuel Damota, who was only a four-month-old embryo in his mother’s womb when his father, whose name he carries, was killed at the World Trade Center.
Now 24, Damota described a quarter-century of absence in the simplest and most painful terms: an “empty chair, empty plate” at the family dinner table.
“A lifetime of wondering what you would think, what you would say, what kind of father he would have been and who I would have become if I had the chance to know him. I spent my whole life knowing my father in the memories of others,” said Damota, saying he even wonders what kind of arguments he would have had with his dad.
“So many of us have empty chairs of our own. We carry their memories and their love.”
Damota, Sr. was a carpenter who went to the Windows of the World for a meeting that morning on upcoming work planned for the restaurant.
He had an 11-year-old son and another on the way.
“My son never got a chance to meet his father, to do anything with his father,” his widow, Barbara, told The Post after the ceremony.
“He and his brother are very close. He and his father are exactly alike. In every way,” she said, chuckling.
Youths increasing took center stage as the terror attack’s quarter-century anniversary approached, with 28 readers during last year’s ceremonies being born after the attacks.
Representatives with the 9/11 Memorial & Museum couldn’t immediately confirm whether this year’s number of readers surpassed those in 2025, but said the tally was “significant.”
Outreach to youthful New Yorkers also ramped up during this year’s anniversary.
City Council members invested $1 million to educate the next generation on 9/11.
“Forrest Gump” actor Gary Sinise likewise joined the Sept. 11 education mission by providing free trips to Ground Zero, the Pentagon and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, as well as providing his voice to a new documentary “The Heroism and Resiliency of 9/11: From Tragedy to Triumph.”
Those students’ Millennial predecessors looked back at the day they watched the tragedy unfold on classroom television screens or even from Lower Manhattan playgrounds that were buried in clouds of white smoke.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani was a 9-year-old student at the time – 25 years later, he attended the memorial for the first time as head of City Hall, along with other dignitaries, including Vice President JD Vance and former Presidents Bill Clinton, George Bush and Barack Obama.
Three former mayors — Rudy Giuliani Michael Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio — also looked on during the poignant name-reading ceremony, which included a young girl who delivered an emotional tribute to a grandfather who never lived to meet her.
The girl read the name of Kevin Patrick Conners, a 55-year-old military veteran who was working as a senior vice president of Euro Brokers, Inc., a brokerage firm with offices in the World Trade Center.
“Not a day passes that we don’t think about,” she said. “We love you. And I know you’re smiling at us.”
