The murder of 2,977 innocent people is burned into the memories of so many alive and aware on that day, young and old. For some, the trauma is deep, being personally connected to those who died, or having been in these places personally. For others, it was more distant, watching life and safety shattered on international television.
We are left to wonder how those who narrowly escaped death that day must have felt and continue to feel. Among them was Konstantin Petrov, an Estonian electrician who was working at the Windows on the World restaurant at the top of the WTC’s North Tower the night before the attacks.
Petrov’s path to the United States began in Estonia, where he had once made and sold electronics and offered his services as an electrician. After his friend Dmitri Don convinced him to move to the US in 1998, he secured a student visa and later a green card through marriage, which opened up further opportunities. In New York City, he landed a job as an electrician at the famed Windows on the World restaurant. As Nick Paumgarten writes in his commemorative article in The New Yorker, it was an impressive development among Petrov’s circle of friends. “When he got this job at World Trade Center,” Dmitri recalled, “we were all, like, ‘No way! World Trade Center is, like, so cool.’”
