Danish tourist recalls escaping World Trade Center attack

Henrik Thomsen was waiting for a train beneath New York’s World Trade Center when the first plane hit on September 11, 2001, DR reports.

The trains normally arrived every two or three minutes, but no train came that morning. As the minutes passed, people on the platform began checking their watches.

Although the station was directly beneath the huge complex, nobody on the platform had felt the impact when one of the towers was hit.

Thomsen had been visiting New York for three days and was staying in a borrowed apartment a few hundred metres from the World Trade Center. The night before the attacks, he and his travel companions, Erik Troelsen and Karsten Jeppesen, had dinner at Windows on the World, a restaurant at the top of the complex’s north tower.

“We had the wildest dinner I will ever eat in my life, and we did not leave until the restaurant closed,” Thomsen said.

The next morning, he said goodbye to his friends, who drove towards Long Island. He packed his rucksack and left the apartment to continue his holiday along the East Coast.

When no train arrived, he joined several hundred people climbing a staircase out of the station. The queue stopped at a turnstile that allowed people onto the street one at a time.

“We could see that every time someone came out through the turnstile, they looked up and started running,” Thomsen said.

When he reached the street, it was covered in debris. He initially thought there had been a car bomb, but then looked up at the towers.

“I looked straight up at the hole made by the first plane,” he said.

He began running, but after a few metres he heard an enormous bang and looked up again.

“I saw a fireball so large that it blocked my view of the top third of the building. It was like being punched in the stomach, and the fire plunged towards you. Then there was an equally large hole in the second tower,” Thomsen said.

He ran north through Manhattan towards Times Square. Along the way, he heard that the towers had been hit by planes. He tried to call his wife, who was pregnant with their second child, but could not reach her. He did manage to contact his mother-in-law, who informed the others that he was safe and heading north.

Trains began running from Pennsylvania Station in the afternoon, and Thomsen took one towards New Jersey. After the train crossed the Hudson River, he looked back at Manhattan.

“There were just two large columns of smoke and a huge mass of smoke around the whole of Manhattan,” he said.

Thomsen has two children who have seen many images of the attacks and grew up during the war in Afghanistan. He said it can still be difficult to explain what it was like to be part of history.

“Perhaps it is about explaining how shocking it was to lose faith in our own security,” he said.

He said the years between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the attacks in New York had been relatively peaceful, which had proved unusual.

“My children have really experienced nothing other than a world that is becoming increasingly more unsettled,” he said.