9/11 survivor recalls being pulled from ground zero rubble

Genelle Guzman McMillan describes being trapped in the disaster for dozens of hours in People interview

Sep 12, 2021

Saturday marked the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and other sites in the U.S.

When the Twin Towers collapsed after being struck in September 2001, countless people were still inside the towers and very few of them survived.

One of those survivors was Genelle Guzman McMillan, a Trinidad native working at Tower 1 as an office temp for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Guzman McMillan, who was 30 at the time, recalled to People the terror of being in the building when an airplane hit the North Tower.

Genelle Guzman, 32, of Brooklyn, N.Y., recuperates from Tuesday’s terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, in Bellevue Hospital Center in New York, Friday, Sept. 14, 2001. (AP Photo/Paul Chiasson, Pool)

“Everything just went boom,” Guzman McMillan said. “Everything was crumbling and was just coming on top of me.” Soon, she would become trapped underneath the building’s rubble.

Also Read:
For World Trade Center cook, surviving 9/11 led to activism

“I felt like I was there forever,” she said. “I just thought I was dreaming. I just figured this has to be a dream. This is not happening. And I didn’t know if anybody was going to find me. I just laid there.”

After being trapped for 27 hours, Guzman McMillan began to accept what seemed to be an inevitable fate. “I tried to put my head out and I realized that it was really wedged and stuck,” she continued. “I was thinking I’m going to die. I knew I wasn’t going to get out. I’m preparing myself to die.”

But after praying to see her 12-year-old daughter again, she heard a voice calling out to her; a voice who called himself Paul. “He holds onto my hand. And I hold on his hands. Talking to me, telling me, ‘I’m going to be fine. I’m not going to let you go.'” She emerged from the rubble burned, and she received four surgeries on her leg to keep it from amputation.

Also Read:
Daughter of 9/11 survivor ‘The Dust Lady’ Marcy Borders remembers mom’s story of trauma to triumph

In 2014, she would later write about her experience being trapped and later saved in her book, Angel in the Rubble: The Miraculous Rescue of 9/11’s Last Survivor. She lives with her husband, Roger McMillan, who was her boyfriend at the time of the attack, with whom she had two more children.

As a commemoration of the attacks, Oculus TV released Surviving 9/11: 27 Hours Under The Rubble, a TARGO studio produced a 20-minute virtual reality documentary that chronicles Guzman McMillan’s ordeal. It followers her life from when she first moved to New York, through her being trapped, to her life 20 years later.

TARGO co-founder Chloé Rochereuil spoke with Oculus about working with Guzman McMillan on the VR project.

“Working with her was very powerful—it really is humbling to meet and work with a 9/11 survivor,” Rochereuil said. “For our team, it felt like we were actively contributing to documenting history. It was very emotional too, for us and for her. You can sense during the interviews that her memories of the attacks are still very vivid, still fresh in her mind.”