Eight Poles died in the Twin Towers, their heartbreaking stories peppered with what-ifs. Poland will today join in paying tribute to the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, with memorial services honoring those killed, among them the eight Poles who died in the World Trade Center. It is now known that eight Poles were among the 2,977 people killed when two hijacked planes were flown into the Twin Towers twenty-five years ago. Though each loss carried its own unique sense of tragedy, Jan Maciejewski’s story feels particularly cruel—a waiter at the Windows on the World restaurant, he had agreed to come in during his time off to help with a large event. After the first plane struck, he managed to reach his wife by phone, telling her he was waiting to be evacuated and that he loved her. It was the last time they would speak. A keen sportsman, Maciejewski had played football alongside his twin brother at Warta Działoszyn in southeast Poland and coached at Hutnik Warsaw. Just days before the attacks, he had been working part-time at the US Open, proudly getting snaps with Martina Hingis, Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras. But perhaps the most poignant image of all is an undated photograph showing him in New York, the Twin Towers rising in the background. At just 21, Łukasz Milewski was the youngest Pole to die in the 9/11 attacks. A third-year student with ambitions of a career in finance, he had travelled to the States to spend the summer with his émigré parents and take on seasonal work, scoring a job delivering sandwiches in the North Tower. On the day of the attacks, his father later recalled how Łukasz had rushed enthusiastically to work, “as if he were opening the towers himself.” He was just 15 days away from returning to Białystok to resume his studies. His ticket home had already been booked. Fate’s blind indifference was on rich display that morning. Norbert Szurkowski, son of Poland’s most celebrated cyclist, Olympic silver medalist Ryszard Szurkowski, was only supposed to be at Cantor Fitzgerald’s offices on the 104th floor of the North Tower for a brief wallpapering job scheduled to finish by 9 a.m. The first plane smashed into the WTC just minutes before he was due to leave. In an especially savage quirk, Szurkowski almost never made it into the building at all. As he prepared to leave home he realized his ID, needed to access the offices, was missing. His wife, pregnant with their second daughter, had accidentally taken it with her. He caught up with her just as she was about to drive off. Carpenter Józef Piskadło, 48, was also—according to some sources—carrying out work at the Cantor Fitzgerald offices (other accounts place him elsewhere in the complex). Eight years earlier, he had survived the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center when a truck stuffed with explosives was detonated in the underground car park. This time, he would not be so lucky. The story of 9/11 is peppered with what-ifs. Just weeks before, 40-year-old accountant Maria Skibińska Jakubiak had survived a terrifying elevator malfunction at her workplace, the Marsh & McLennan offices on the 98th floor, which had sent the lift she was in plunging several floors. Her husband Kazimierz had suggested she quit, but after taking a few days off to recover, she returned back to work. “She loved her job, and especially her colleagues who were fresh out of college—she was like a mother to them,” her husband told the New York Times. “It was her first job in the U.S., and she was proud of it.” Twenty-six-year-old Dorota Kopiczko, another employee of Marsh & McLennan, had also found herself reassuring a worried loved one not long before the tragedy. After showing her mother around her workplace, she brushed aside her worries about working so high above the city, insisting that it was one of the safest buildings in the world. Kopiczko, who was originally from Augustów, had worked hard to build a life and career in New York, but her ambitions had not dulled her vivacious personality. Nicknamed ‘Sunshine’ for her blonde hair and bubbly presence, she had recently returned from one trip and was due to leave for Florida with friends on September 13. Suffering from a cold, she was urged by her mother to stay home on September 11. “I told her not to go to work on Tuesday, but she said she’d stop by the office, take care of something, and come back,” her mother later said. She never did. “Now all I have left of her are two burned credit cards recovered from the site.” There was to be no narrow call for administrative assistant Anna Piętkiewicz-DeBin. As soon as she heard about the attacks, her sister Joanna feared the worst. “I knew she would already be at work. She was always an early riser,” she said. “I called her several times, but unfortunately she didn’t answer.” On a memorial page set up for victims that worked at Cantor Fitzgerald, Anna’s husband remembered her as being “incredibly devoted to family life and deeply absorbed in the joy of raising our son”. Nor was it just family that shared these touching memories of her. “I have never met anyone so genuine and true, kind and compassionate,” wrote one colleague. Another added: “Everyone who knew you knows how your kindness and beauty radiated out to touch all around you.” For the family of Gina Sztejnberg, a 52-year-old database consultant at Marsh & McLennan, the scale of the catastrophe was not immediately clear. While her daughter initially took comfort in reports that it was only a small plane that had smashed into the World Trade Center, her husband, who worked close by, knew something far worse had happened. “I looked out the window and saw flying papers. When I heard the plane hit the tower, I knew...” Born in Wrocław to a Jewish family that had survived the Holocaust, Sztejnberg emigrated to the United States in the 1960s. In 1999, she returned to her hometown for the first time since leaving Poland, bringing along her husband and daughters so they could see where she had grown up. But her name, and also Józef Piskadło’s, remain absent from the discreet memorial to Poland’s 9/11 victims that stands by the entrance to Warsaw’s Park Skaryszewski. Unveiled just a year after the attacks, these oversights are a reminder of just how long it took to establish the full extent of losses—and identify those that had been killed. And there is one other Polish name that likewise deserves to be remembered, albeit not on the memorial itself. Though unconnected to the Twin Towers, Polish immigrant Henryk Siwiak was shot dead in Brooklyn late on September 11 and has since entered history as ‘the last victim of 9/11’. Having earlier witnessed one of the planes hit the World Trade Center, Kraków-born Siwiak learned his cash-in-hand construction job wouldn’t need him that day. In urgent need of money, he scoured ads in a Polish-language newspaper and found a cleaning job. Later that evening, against his sister’s wishes, he set out to find the address but was mistakenly directed into a notorious neighborhood by his landlady. Sometime shortly before midnight, he was fatally shot. Although his family have long believed that his heavy foreign accent and camouflage jacket may have led to his killing, police have speculated that he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time: the victim of a robbery gone awry. Either way, with New York’s emergency services overwhelmed by the day’s events, the investigation didn’t get far beyond the starting blocks. His murder remains unsolved to this day.
