204: The Long Shadow: What if you fought the fire?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services.

Twenty years after the attacks of September 11th changed the world as we knew it, this month the This Is Actually Happening podcast dives deep into the stories of four survivors whose jobs brought them face to face with the unthinkable. Today we continue our series with part three featuring Captain Brenda Berkman, who worked at Ground Zero that day as a member of the New York City Fire Department. You try not to think about the fact that you really think you're going to die here, that it's totally out of control.

Any first responder who had any experience in their job that day, I think, wouldn't be telling the truth if they said they weren't scared. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You're listening to This Is Actually Happening, with our special series honoring the 20th anniversary of 9-11, The Long Shadow. Episode 204, The Long Shadow, Part 3. What if you fought the fire?

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My family was very much a sitcom family in some ways because, you know, I had a brother, a younger brother, and there was me. And then I had a stay-at-home mom and my dad, who went off to work 9 to 5, Monday to Friday. My father worked for the post office in a suburb of Minneapolis. We didn't have a whole lot of money.

My father had gotten very seriously injured in World War II in the Navy, D-Day.

A lot of those folks who served in World War II, they carried around within their whole lives a lot of trauma that was associated with what they saw and did. And they often were not encouraged to talk about the trauma that they went through. They talked about it to other veterans who had similar experiences. But basically, it wasn't something that was discussed with people regularly.

I was a little, what was in those days called a tomboy. I liked doing things outdoors. I liked playing baseball. And I wanted to do a lot of physical activities of sports, but prior to Title IX in the 1970s, most girls had very few, if any, opportunity to train in sports in the way that boys did.

I begged my mother to sign me up for Little League at age eight, which she did. And the coach called her up on the phone and said, oh, I was very sorry. You know, we don't let girls sign up for Little League. And I thought, well, that's really stupid because I'm at least as good a ball player as most little boys my age in the neighborhood. And so why why can't I sign up for Little League?

You know, that happened a lot to me in school. You know, there were these gender lines that I kept running into growing up that I thought, "Oh, this doesn't make any sense." So I guess I was a little troublemaker. My parents were very much of the philosophy that you're not put on Earth just to take up space.

Both my parents did various things that set an example for me in terms of giving back to the community and also being involved in politics. And I was also interested in volunteer work, so trying to help people who didn't have the advantages that I had growing up.

You know, you try and think about how it is that people develop empathy for other people that, you know, aren't necessarily in their family or in their group, you know, not in their neighborhood, not of their race or country.

How does that happen with people? And for me, I think a lot of it came out of the sense that I had growing up of the world's not perfect and there's certain inequalities in our country. So I've always been interested in trying to foster change to make things better. Growing up, I thought I was probably going to be a teacher.

teacher, secretary, maybe nurse. But of course, once you got married or had kids, the expectations were that you would just drop out of the workforce and stay at home again.

You know, I was going along in school. I was very interested in history. And by the time I got to college, I was always really perplexed by why it was that there weren't many things written in the history books about idolatry.

either women or people of color or immigrants. So even as a kid, I started investigating what were these stories that were being left out of history? I mean, I was really interested in making sure that people were not ignored, that they were not erased from history.

And while I was in graduate school in history, there weren't any lectures on women's history. So I asked my supervising professor if I could give a lecture on women's history. So she said, go for it. And I made up my own lecture on American women's history. And I was looking around at what was happening to people with PhDs in history. And I saw that they were not getting jobs.

So one summer while I was in grad school, I had worked in my ex-husband's father's law firm in New York. And I thought, seems like the law is a great way to achieve social change. Maybe I should think about going to law school because I could find something to do to try and make the world a better place as a lawyer.

So I applied and got into NYU. And I'm in law school, and I was discovering that law is actually a very conservative mentality in a lot of ways. While lawyers can obviously use the law to achieve social change, it's a slog.

But I was sticking with it, so I'm going along in law school, and I have a classmate sitting next to me who was what we call a firebuff.

And he had been a volunteer firefighter down in Maryland, I think. And he was talking to me about all these fires that were going on in New York at the time in the mid-1970s. And he made the job of firefighting sound so appealing. I mean, it was helping others when they're in their direst hour of need and they don't know who else to call. They call the fire department.

You don't know what's going to happen when you go to work. It's knowing a little about a lot of different things. So a little bit about electricity, a little bit about building construction. You have to know all these different things in order to do your job well. In addition, you know, it's a physically demanding job. So I was still a jock and I thought, you know, this job sounds pretty good.

So I'm doing my law and I'm trying to figure out maybe I should take the fire test. But there was one small problem with that. And that was that prior to 1977, no matter what her capabilities were, no women were allowed to even apply to take the firefighter test in New York City. Now, I was in law school when they changed that in 1977.

So I rushed down to register for the fire test. More than 400 of us had taken the written portion of the exam, and more than 400 women passed that part. And then the next part that we had to go through would be the physical abilities test. But the physical abilities test was changed completely.

The city had changed the physical portion of the entry-level firefighter exam to make it the most difficult test that they had given for any position in the city of New York in its history. And that's not my opinion. That's the words of the city employee who was responsible for the development of the fire test.

When I found out that no women had passed the physical abilities portion of the exam, including myself, I decided to go and talk to a law professor at NYU, Laura Sager, who was head of the Women's Rights Clinic.

I said, you know, let's just go talk to the personnel department and explain to them that they need to develop a new physical abilities exam for a firefighter that truly measures the abilities that are needed to be trained to do the job. And I'm sure that once they realize that they made a mistake here, that they'll just do what we ask. And we were pretty much laughed out of the room.

So at that point, I convinced Laura to help me file a lawsuit challenging the firefighter test. As it turns out, I was the only person to challenge the test. So I was the sole plaintiff. So I went ahead and filed this lawsuit. And then five years later, to everyone's great surprise, I won my lawsuit.

And that's really when all hell broke loose. So the city had to go back and develop a new test, as we had asked them to do five years earlier.

About 40 women passed the new test, and I think the city was surprised that that large number of women actually passed, but we did. And we went into the fire academy, and that became the opportunity for men who still opposed the admission of women into the department to try and get us to quit or get fired in the academy through bad acts, shall we say.

harassment and changing standards and all different kinds of things to try and get us to quit. But actually, almost none of the women who went into the academy quit. And we went out into the firehouse and that became another hurdle for a lot of the women.

No two women were working together. We were very widely scattered. And I convinced the women while we were still in the academy, we needed an organization so that we could advocate for us once we got out into the field. And then I became the first president of that organization. So as a result, you know, I was listening to these stories of women from around the city who were having bad things happen to them.

I was having a lot of bad things happen to me with death threats and various kinds of things that were totally illegal. There was just so much of pornography being sent to my home, people following me around, people threatening me face to face, but then also draining my air tank or whatever. I mean, this is not a joke. This is not teasing. This kind of stuff went on

for some of us for over the course of years. And it was really intended to make women feel unwanted, to make them feel like they were not capable, that they were always in the fishbowl and always being watched for doing

even a tiny mistake that could then be used to argue that no women should be on the job. I mean, it's the kind of scrutiny that nobody performs at their best when they're subject to that. It was definitely an element of psychological warfare in addition to, you know, just out and out physical attacks and physical abuse of the women firefighter.

Not all the men, but some of the men just identified their masculinity with their job. And so the fact that women were there and they were able to do the job somehow undermined their masculinity and they didn't like that.

I really liked going out and trying to help the public, no matter what it was. I mean, sometimes it was, you know, really scary, big fires, and other times it was dealing with somebody's pet or a water leak in the middle of the night or all different kinds of things. So I really liked being physically active. I really liked helping people. I really liked having to learn all different kinds of things and never knowing when

When I went into work, you know, what was gonna happen that day? And I wanted to learn as much as I could. I wanted to be the best firefighter I could be. I got a master's in fire protection management, and then I went to training for chief officer school. I was involved in all different kinds of national organizations having to do with both women firefighters, but also the profession of firefighting. But the hardest thing for me was being in the firehouse.

loving the job, but at the same time not being fully accepted on the job by a lot of people. So even though my own department didn't think I had anything valuable to contribute for the most part, a lot of other people did.

I'd been chosen as a White House Fellow, so I went down to Washington for a year in '96, '97 to work at the highest levels of government. I was a special assistant to the Secretary of Labor. And I came back and I was doing my gig as a fire officer in this ladder company in Manhattan. I'd been both a firefighter and an officer in both engine and ladder companies.

At the time of 9-11, almost all the women who had come on the job with me in 1982 were eligible to retire. So at the time of 9-11, there were only about 25 women firefighters in the firehouse out of almost 11,000 firefighters. A few of us had gotten promoted, so I did get promoted to lieutenant.

That meant I'm in charge of a group of all-male firefighters who, some of them not so happy to have a woman boss, but that was my situation on September 11, 2001. I was a lieutenant in a ladder company in the Chelsea section of Manhattan, kind of between the Trade Center and, say, Midtown Manhattan.

Ladder companies are the group of firefighters that focus a lot on search and rescue. The engine companies are the people who put water on fires and also do emergency medical. But the ladder companies, you know, get you out of a stuck elevator, deal with you when you're in a car accident, break down the doors, that kind of stuff.

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And I was at my apartment in Brooklyn when at 9 o'clock in the morning I get a phone call from Kentucky. And this friend says, "Turn on your television." At 8:46 in the morning, you know, the first plane had flown into the North Tower. So when I looked at the television at 9 o'clock in the morning, the North Tower was burning.

And then I heard that a second plane had been hijacked and flown into the South Tower. Now, of course, everybody's saying terrorism. Even though I was off duty, I was going to get to the Trade Center because it was going to be such a mammoth event. I had just been at a major high-rise fire in a residential building a couple of weeks before. I had all this training and experience in high-rise fires before.

At that point, the city had pretty much shut down all the mass transit. There's no way really to get to headquarters fast, so I changed my plan and I decided I'm going to run to a nearby firehouse where I had worked. And when I got there, there were a bunch of other off-duty folks. And when we got to this particular firehouse, there was nobody there. And by nobody, I mean none of the on-duty people. They took the fire truck, they took all the equipment on the fire truck,

The police were restricting entry into Manhattan, so the little group of us that was in the firehouse, the off-duty group, we decided we're going to go next door to the police precinct and we're going to ask them for a cop to drive us in a van over to the World Trade Center. When we get in the van, we're basically just wearing spare sets of gear, and off we head across the Brooklyn Bridge.

You know, as we're crossing the Brooklyn Bridge to get into Manhattan, of course we're looking at this tremendous dust cloud in lower Manhattan and the smoke that's being generated by all the fires that are going on as a result of the collapse of the South Tower and the debris and everything that's falling off of the North Tower.

On the other side of the bridge coming out towards Brooklyn, four lanes of people, many of them covered in dust. And what I remember about those people is that, you know, nobody's pushing or shoving. I know that there had to have been injured people in that group. So everybody's just trying to get across to safety. And we're going into it. Just as we get to the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge, we hear a loud noise.

And we hear, but we don't see the north tower falling down. Now keep in mind, it took about 11 seconds for each of those 110-story buildings to fall down. And suddenly our little van is just in this tremendous cloud of dust, pulverized glass and concrete. The police officer couldn't see out of his windshield. He stops the van. We hop out.

We immediately start coughing and rubbing our eyes because, of course, we don't have any breathing protection. And right near City Hall, where we had stopped, is a fire chief standing there on Broadway with a bunch of fire officers next to him.

He's all covered in dust because he's just survived the collapse of two 110-story buildings. He seems to be handing out assignments to these fire officers. So I said, "Chief, I have firefighters." He said, "So he gives us an assignment." And we start to walk towards the Trade Center. It was very disorienting because nothing looked like it normally looked. I don't recognize the Trade Center. I don't recognize really the area, you know. Everything's on fire.

All these buildings down there, they all had damage and the sides facing the Trade Center were on fire. And then we're looking at Seven World Trade Center, 47 stories high, and it's still standing but it's on fire from top to bottom.

A decision had been made pretty early on in that they could not fight the fire in Seven World Trade Center because when the Twin Towers fell down, it basically broke the water system around the Trade Center. And you also have to imagine, you know, that what used to be two 110-story buildings is now basically compressed into

into the seven stories below ground and about 12 stories worth of debris above ground, and it's all on fire. A lot of people watched this on television. They may even have visited the World Trade Center at some point while the rescue and recovery effort was still going on, or they may have seen photographs or read books. But I'm telling you that that's nothing compared to being there that day.

It was worse than their worst nightmare, worse than any science fiction movie or horror movie that you could possibly imagine. We thought we were going to die. Those of us who had any experience at all in our jobs, we knew this was way beyond impossible.

And the best that we could hope for would be to try and rescue people who were trapped or who were injured. And so that's what we started to try and do.

We were looking around the edges because it was so hot that it was impossible to really stand on the pile for any length of time. So as we're doing this, people keep coming up to us and saying, "Have you seen my fire company? Have you seen the people that I work with? Have you seen our fire truck? Have you seen my uncle? Have you seen my father? Have you seen my brother?"

And then as we're working at about 5:20 in the afternoon when it's starting to get dark,

We hear another noise, and this time it's 7 World Trade Center falling down. So everybody forgets that, you know, a 47-story building fell down in the late afternoon. But those of us who were in that particular spot don't forget because once again we're running down the street, running away from the dust cloud that's fallen down on top of us. All the stuff is enveloping us.

You try not to think about the fact that you really think you're going to die here, that it's totally out of control. Any first responder who had any experience in their job that day, I think, wouldn't be telling the truth if they said they weren't scared.

We were lucky, we just ran into a building and we got out of that. And once everything stopped and the debris cleared a little bit, we went out again and we started doing what we were doing again. The mentality of first responders is we are here to help. No matter what you ask of us, we are going to try and help you in whatever way we can, even at risk to our own lives.

That's what you sign up for when you take these jobs. But it's very frustrating as a first responder to feel like, "I really want to help people here, but there's not a whole lot that can be done."

We knew that there were thousands, potentially tens of thousands of people who would need our help, including thousands of first responders who had come down there and were now trapped themselves. There were all these people there that needed our help. So, you know, you weren't going to leave. You were going to do the best that you could. For me, I just feel incredibly lucky that I didn't die that day.

I think for a lot of first responders down there, it was luck of the draw who lived and who died.

Two men that I knew, Pete Gansey and our first deputy fire commissioner, Bill Feehan, they were killed over on the West Side Highway when the North Tower fell down. And the firefighters and officer and engine company three were pretty much standing right next to Bill and Pete. And engine three ran one way and Bill and Pete went the other way. And three survived. Bill and Pete did not survive.

Ladder 12, my own fire company, was in the Marriott Hotel helping to evacuate guests. And three of the company, the officer and two of the firefighters, were a little higher in the building in the stairs than the rest of the firefighters. So those three were killed and the firefighters lower down survived.

That's the way things went that day. It was just, which direction did you happen to run to? Where did you happen to be standing? Somebody went back to the fire truck for a tool, that person survived, the rest of the people did not.

As a first responder, you do not have total control over your environment. You try and mitigate risk when you're doing your job so that you're not wasting lives and you're not getting people injured unnecessarily.

But at the same time, you realize that there are situations like 9-11 where you're going to be called to do things to try and help other people that aren't necessarily safe for you. So you have to make a decision about what's possible, what's the most effective thing that you can do to try and help. People were taking tremendous risks to try and find somebody alive.

Crawling around looking for people who were trapped was kind of like working in a field of razor blades because the concrete and the glass had been pulverized, but all the metal, the rebar, the sheet metal, the structural steel, that stuff was still around. So, you know, as you're crawling around, I cut my arm open.

People did not go on medical leave. They just got some first aid like I did. They patched me up and, you know, you just keep working. Nobody should underestimate the demands that were being placed on first responders for not only on 9-11, but for weeks thereafter and really for months after that. What's amazing to me is that nobody was killed after 9-11 because it was so incredibly dangerous down there.

So on 9/11 at about midnight, after having been down there for more than 12 hours, I made a command decision we needed to go back to the firehouse. And that's when we found out that so many people were missing. And we wanted to try and find them as quickly as possible. There was only a certain time period that there would be any chance at all that they could still be alive.

So early the next morning on September 12th, we left the firehouse and we went down to the Trade Center and we were working and crawling around in this stuff and covered in things and moving debris and body parts and just searching for anything that might lead us to somebody that was trapped. We thought that we were going to find a lot of people.

And actually, there weren't a whole lot of people to be found. That was what was so kind of shocking about what was going on that day was that there weren't more people that we saw to give aid to. But after a couple of weeks of that, the city basically decided that there wasn't anybody else to be found alive.

That's when they brought in the heavy machinery to go right on to the site. And after that, the operation shifted to trying to find remains. Now, for months after 9/11, the fires were still burning. And so, you know, we were still operating in a dangerous situation. We were still recovering remains 10 months after the event.

I went down there in the month of April for the entire month to look for remains as an assignment. And we were still finding remains in April by smell. I'm not talking about the dogs. People could smell remains even nine months later. You know, what people often say that they remember is the smell of the Trade Center.

You know, that dust cloud went out 15 miles and the stuff in the air hung around for months and months. Even people who weren't right on top of the World Trade Center still often have memories of what that area smelled like.

One of the things that I think happens with a lot of people when they experience a traumatic event is that they do not talk about a lot of the details of the event to people who were not part of the event in the same way that they were.

So what I was saying about my father not talking to the family about his experiences in World War II, but he would talk to other veterans who had similar combat experiences. It's often that way with the 9/11 community. I don't talk about a lot of things about 9/11 to people outside of, you know, the folks that I was with that day or that I was around.

So that 9/11 or traumatic event doesn't define you, that you're not forever stuck in the trauma of that particular day, I think as a matter of like psychological recovery or survival, you don't constantly revisit those details in your mind.

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In my firehouse, we lost five guys. And then all around in my battalion, there were dozens of folks who were lost. And of the 343 in the fire department that I knew, I had worked with about 250 of them.

So normally when there's a line of duty death, namely a firefighter or officer dies in the performance of their duties, there's a special unit that helps organize the funeral for that person.

You'll have 5,000 firefighters and then you'll have thousands of other first responders from all over the place come in for the funeral and it's a big ceremony. And we would have in the beginning like a dozen funerals a day or a dozen memorials a day.

So if you knew a lot of people on the job like I did, you had to make a decision whose funeral were you going to go to. And maybe you could get three funerals in a day, but invariably you'd have to miss somebody's funeral that you really wanted to be at. I think a lot of people had survivor guilt.

There were a lot of people who were at the Trade Center who normally would have been off or in a different company or, you know, they just wouldn't have been there. But they were there. People who were scheduled to work and they traded a shift with somebody else and now that person got killed and you didn't get killed. Now you're walking around, but the person who was there instead of you is not.

because I was in an area that had lost so many people and I had lost so many friends. We were really busy and I wasn't really watching much of the media coverage at all. I didn't have time for it. I didn't have any real interest in watching it.

And I started getting some phone calls from women firefighters around the country and they were like, "What is going on in New York?" I'm like, "What are you talking about?" And they said, "Well, were there any women first responders at the Trade Center on 9/11?" Because, you know, the media's talking like there weren't any women down there doing anything.

It was very frustrating to hear from my friends around the country that the media was erasing women first responders from the history of the rescue and recovery effort on 9/11.

I had seen as a student of history how, you know, women and people of color had been erased from history in the past. And I thought, where are we as a country if now, when we say that we're fighting the Taliban because of the terrible way that they oppress women and hurt women, if we don't want to recognize and honor the sacrifices that were made by women first responders on 9-11?

People were angry. They didn't like being attacked. They didn't like all the loss of life. So it's usually not the best idea to raise issues of unfairness in the midst of anger.

But, you know, at the same time, the journalists who are writing the stories are writing the history for the future. So if women get erased, if stories get erased from that journalism, then they're going to be erased from history. So I decided I was going to say something. As a result, you know, people didn't like that. So talk radio, you know, was criticizing me for being divisive.

I really didn't feel like I was being divisive. I was just bringing to light the facts of the matter, which were that women were doing exactly the same thing as the men were doing on 9-11 and all the days thereafter. And that as a country, we should be proud of those women.

And we should want to make other people aware of that so that people recognize that we encourage our women to make contributions. Women have always made contributions to our country, but very often those contributions have either been completely overlooked or intentionally ignored.

I would go to funerals and I'd hear the people talking about the men of the New York City Fire Department and the brothers, you know, that this guy worked with. And I'm thinking, well, I worked with this guy and we were good friends and I

I even supervised him, and I'm his sister, but I'm sitting in this funeral in my Class A dress uniform, and it's like I don't exist, like I'm invisible, like there's no acknowledgement. And meanwhile, good friends of mine would be sitting right next to me, men, and they wouldn't even hear this because they were included in

You know, people might think that that's petty. Why would you even care about that? Why do you care about language? Again, at that very moment, you know, people are being erased from history. They're being treated like they didn't do what they were doing, that their connections to the folks that are being memorialized didn't exist.

I gave a couple of interviews. I went down to Washington and spoke to a big group at the annual dinner for the National Women's Law. About 5,000 people, I think, were at that dinner. And I just talked about how important it is to not forget that women were at ground zero and that they made sacrifices, some with their lives.

Yamel Marino, who was this EMT who worked for a private ambulance company, she was killed helping somebody who was injured.

Moira Smith, who was a NYPD officer, famously is photographed leading a bleeding man out of the South Tower. And then she went back in and plenty of people testified about how Moira was directing them to get out of the building and get away from the area as quickly as possible. And she got trapped and died in the South Tower area. And then Kathy Mazza, who was also was helping people escape from the World Trade Center site when she herself was

caught and killed in the collapse. So as a country, we owe it to these women to hear their stories and to preserve their stories. We have to keep reminding ourselves that we need to tell the whole story of our history. And only when we have that kind of a fuller picture do I feel that we can truly understand why we are the way we are today, the good and the bad.

Right after 9-11, I think for a lot of people who had a personal connection to the event were having a hard time. So people coped in different ways. They drank or they, you know, their marriages broke up or they did all kinds of things to try and deal with the psychic pain that was going on.

For a lot of us, the most powerful way of dealing with the trauma of 9/11 was to work. It was really through work and doing what we had been trained to do, namely the normal emergency stuff, if there is such a word as a normal emergency. That was how we felt that we were doing something worthwhile.

There's a kind of macho attitude about admitting to pain or sadness or need for help in some of these emergency service organizations, even still. To ask for help for yourself is...

seen as a sign of weakness. Some people felt that if they went to counseling, they would be taken offline because the fire department would think they were too screwed up to go to work when it was actually work that was keeping them from being too screwed up.

And for women, I think there was another added-on layer there that there was really no confidentiality because of our small numbers, but also because, you know, we were still in the fishbowl all the time. So, you know, every little thing that women first responders did, at least in the fire department, was going to be scrutinized.

You know, at the same time, people were worried about their health and continue to be worried about their health as a result of the exposures. There was a lot going on initially, but that also continues out now into the future.

I stayed with the New York City Fire Department five years after 9/11 because I felt it was important that the department not lose all its senior people all at once. So even though I was eligible to retire and for health reasons maybe I should have retired, but I stayed. And then I sort of decided that I had lots of other things to try and do outside of the fire service. So I decided I wanted to make something, to be creative.

Even though I didn't know anything at all about printmaking, I fell in love with printmaking and now I'm a printmaker. I've done some art that is related to the World Trade Center and to 9/11. It took me 10 years after 9/11 before I really did anything in my art that was overtly about 9/11.

But then in time for the 15th year anniversary, I finished a three-year project called 36 Views of One World Trade Center, which is really about the resiliency of New York and the rebuilding of New York.

One of the most challenging things for me in trying to cope with 9-11 was the loss of so many people in the New York City Fire Department who had one more tour left to do and then they were retiring, who weren't supposed to be at work that day, who were going to be the chief of department in their career because they were so fantastic at what they did.

You know, why, why did they die? You know, what are you going to do with that? Are you going to just be forever angry about that or forever sad? You can have all those feelings, but at the same time, there's things that you can do as a person and with others to honor them. All these firefighters like myself and others went down to

the Gulf after Hurricane Katrina to try and help in whatever way we could. We were paying back what New Orleans had done to try and help New York after 9/11. And some of us even were invited to go over to Japan after the great tsunami, earthquake, and radiation disaster in northeast Japan in Fukushima. We went over to that area and talked to the survivors of those disasters

We were trying to talk to them about what we've tried to do in New York to recover and move forward.

I started volunteering at the 9/11 Tribute Museum and then when the big museum, the 9/11 Memorial and Museum opened up, I did some programs there as well. All of us who are the volunteer guides for Tribute, we incorporate our personal stories. And as a result, you know, I have made all these friends from the other volunteers and we're very tight.

During the pandemic, I've been working with a small group to try and develop best practices for churches in New York City to deal with the pandemic. And I've been working on some social justice issues.

I got involved with Monumental Women, which is a group that organized because walking through Central Park, some of our board members noticed that there were no statues of actual real women in Central Park, and they decided they were going to try and change that. So we raised over a million and a half dollars in private money, and we unveiled in the midst of a pandemic

on the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment that enabled women to vote. We unveiled a statue, a monument to Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. These are women that should have been honored in the park 100 years ago, but now they're there. And I'm very proud to have been part of that project.

And now we have many other projects going on. Now we have a women's rights history trail we're doing in the five boroughs, and we really feel as an organization that it's important that this movement to put women and people of color back into their rightful place in history and recognize them is only really just beginning. Those are the kinds of things that you do after these terrible events like 9/11.

When people think about 9/11, they're invariably thinking about all the death and destruction, and that's never to be forgotten. But at the same time, I hope that people remember how that for a time at least, you know, we pulled together and we tried to help out our neighbors and total strangers. And actually the whole world did that.

The people who have been part of the 9/11 experience up close and personal

We're not ever going to forget 9/11. We're not ever going to forget the people who were lost on 9/11. We want to honor their sacrifice. You recognize that, you know, you have the blessing of still being here on Earth, and you need to make good use of that time by doing things in the world that's going to make the world better.

Today's episode featured Captain Brenda Berkman. Since her retirement from the New York City Fire Department in 2006, Brenda serves as a volunteer guide at the 9-11 Memorial, is vice president for programs of the women's history organization Monumental Women, and pursues her passion for printmaking, specializing in stone lithography. You can see her artwork at brendaberkmanartworks.com.

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