Swiss eyewitness recounts the trauma of September 11, 25 years on

For 25 years, Beat Reinhart has left the morning of September 11 blank in his diary. The Swiss citizen was at work in New York on September 11, 2001, when the attacks began across from the World Trade Center. He has now decided to describe what he saw, including to his parents, who were visiting him in New Jersey that day.

Reinhart worked for Commerzbank and arrived at his office at 7am. By 7:10am, he recalled, being late at the trading desk already carried consequences. The morning was exceptionally clear. He remembers thinking that he should have brought a camera to work because the view was so sharp.

The memory changed within minutes. While working on the 32nd floor, Reinhart heard a noise he compared with the sound of a rocket. The sound stopped. An impact followed, accompanied by a shockwave. Phones on the trading floor went dead, including the brokers’ lines.

He moved to the east side of the building and looked up. Paper poured from the tower. Reinhart had seen terrorism in the same office before, during the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center car park. He had survived that attack too. The second experience left him with a memory he kept private for a quarter-century.

Reinhart watched paper fall from the tower before he understood what had happened. He had heard the impact and felt the shockwave, yet the scene outside initially resisted explanation. From his window, he saw a person lying motionless on the central reservation of a four-lane road. He wondered why nobody appeared to be calling an ambulance.

Inside the trading room, colleagues tried to reach relatives. Reinhart was particularly concerned about his mother. His parents had returned to Switzerland nearly 20 years earlier, but were visiting him in New Jersey. The previous evening, his mother had said she wanted to visit the bookshop in the World Trade Center complex.

He could not reach her by phone. Soon afterward, another massive explosion shook the floor. The second aircraft had struck the other tower. Reinhart’s account captures the confusion of those first moments, before the full scale of the coordinated attacks became clear.

The attacks involved four hijacked passenger aircraft. Two were flown into the World Trade Center towers, a third hit the Pentagon near Washington, and the fourth crashed in Pennsylvania. Almost 3,000 people died. Reinhart’s testimony places a Swiss professional and his family inside the immediate uncertainty of that morning, while the world watched the same images unfold.

The trauma lasted far beyond the date printed on the calendar. Reinhart says September 11 was followed by months marked by the constant smell of smoke and work in a basement. He describes the process of coming to terms with the experience as something that required an “incredible amount of time”.

His decision to speak now comes with the 25th anniversary. The disclosure reaches beyond a public audience. Reinhart is also opening up to his parents, who were on the terrace of his New Jersey flat on the day of the attacks and watched the planes fly into the towers.

The date has remained so important to him that he protects the morning from other commitments. His diary contains nothing for those hours. That practice offers a precise measure of how an event witnessed in early adulthood continued to shape his life without becoming part of his public identity.

Reinhart had already survived the 1993 terrorist bombing at the World Trade Center site. In 2001, the familiar office, the clear view and the ordinary routines of a trading day became part of a second attack. His testimony links the immediate sensory details, the dead phone lines and the smell of smoke, with the slower work of living after mass violence.

The attacks also left a permanent mark on the Swiss community around New York. Two Swiss nationals died in New York. In the days after the attacks, Switzerland’s foreign ministry sought to determine the whereabouts of hundreds of Swiss citizens in the United States.

The regional Swiss presence was already substantial in 2001. About 20,000 Swiss citizens lived in the greater New York, New Jersey and Connecticut area. Today, more than 26,000 Swiss nationals are registered across the region. That community includes people working in finance, media, education, diplomacy and other sectors that connect Switzerland with the United States.

Reinhart’s account places those wider figures alongside one family’s morning of fear. His parents were Swiss visitors in New Jersey. His mother had planned to go to the World Trade Center complex. His own office stood directly opposite the towers, and his first concern after the impact was whether he could reach her.

The anniversary has prompted Reinhart to speak after decades of silence. His decision does not resolve the memory. It records what he saw, identifies the Swiss connection and gives public language to an experience that had remained largely confined to his diary and his family.