A Sad Heroine A German's Search for Victims at Ground Zero
Her first body was Gary. He was wearing a New York City fire department uniform. She found him one day after Christmas.
She wished she had discovered Gary two days earlier. It would have been a gift for his family. His relatives would have known for certain that he was dead, that he had perished in the collapse of the World Trade Center, buried under the rubble of the towers. They would have had closure.
Pia Hofmann leans up against the fence. She wears her bleached blond curls loose, a cell phone clipped to her belt, sturdy construction boots on her feet. Gripping the netting above her head, she stands on tiptoe to peer into the world's most notorious hole: Ground Zero. She gazes at the concrete expanse, now clean and innocuous - as though nothing had ever happened here. There are no reminders of the chaos and debris. There are no reminders of the corpses.
Pia points toward a corner of the pit. Gary was back there.
She stands alone in the crowds hurrying home from work. But Pia Hofmann is oblivious to the thronging masses. She is all by herself in the place that changed her life.
It has been four years since she left the disaster site in Lower Manhattan. For nearly nine months, she worked here every day.
She came to help clean up, operating her excavator and her crane. She was one of the few women among the construction workers of Ground Zero, the only one operating heavy equipment and the only German.
She lights a cigarette and blows smoke through the fence. Coming back wasn't easy. She shakes her head, then sighs. After Gary there were more victims; she found body parts for 100, 300, maybe more. It was her job to locate the remains before the mountains of rubble were removed. She hadn't ventured down here again for a long while. "I miss that time," she says. "I really do."
Pia Hofmann grew up in Hommertshausen, a small town in the region of Hesse, and decided to emigrate to the United States at the age of 16. Twenty-six years later she reported for duty after 9/11. These are the two turning points in her life and somehow both are related - her escape from Germany and her experience at Ground Zero.
A house on Long Island, in the suburbs of New York, 10 minutes from Queens. Pia has built herself a wooden deck, with a big grill. In the small living room there is space for a pool table, a foul-mouthed parrot and a black, wall-length cabinet. On a shelf in the center of the cabinet, Pia Hofmann has created a shrine.
Its relics include a replica of the Twin Towers welded together from a piece of steel from the site, a model of the tower made of plastic, another made of glass, framed photographs emblazoned with "God Bless America" and "United We Stand," a miniature American flag, and a bottle of wine found undamaged in the rubble. The shrine has been there five years. Pia says she will never take it down.
"Piaaaaaa," rasps Max, the parrot. "Piaaaaa, fuck you!"
Pia goes into her bedroom and pulls out a large shoe box from under the bed. It holds memorabilia from her time at Ground Zero. She hasn't opened it for years.
She extracts a letter of thanks from the mayor of New York. A plastic rosary, given to her by a little girl at the edge of the site. And lots of photos of the wreckage, the steel, the debris, and Pia in her excavator and hard hat in the middle of it.
"I've often tried to put it all behind me," she says. "But that only works for a while." The pit holds too many memories. It's like a slide show in Pia's head: a slide show of severed limbs.
She points to a photograph. Right there is the spot where she found a woman's torso. She had climbed out of her digger to look for more pieces of the body. Eventually she found the hand; on the ring finger was a gold wedding band.
She tried to find some good, even in this terrible human catastrophe. "This woman's husband, whoever he may be," she told herself, "will be happy to have this ring."
Pia says she will probably never escape the memory of 9/11 and Ground Zero. The real question is: Why did she go there to help in the first place?
She retrieves another small photograph. It's turning yellow. It shows a family squeezed together on a couch, a red lamp to one side, patterned wallpaper behind. It's a German family from the 1970s, a conventional image of her conventional origins.
It is the only family picture that Pia Hofmann has kept. There she is, a young girl in Hommertshausen, sandwiched between her austerelooking father, her grandmother and her siblings. It's a reminder of why she left Germany: a portrait of confinement and severity.
After high school Pia wanted to become a draftswoman, but there were no apprenticeships. She imagined herself withering away in Hommertshausen. Then there was the advertisement in a local newspaper: "Wanted. German nanny for New York City." It sounded like an invitation to freedom.
She took the plunge. At age 16 she left Hommertshausen and headed for the Bronx - despite flunking English at school.
When Pia flew across the Atlantic on October 15, 1975, she had never heard of the American Dream. But she was living it just the same. Like hundreds of thousands of other Germans a century earlier, Pia emigrated in pursuit of happiness.
And so she moved to one of the world's great cities, married and had two sons. Once the boys had grown up, she was able to pursue her real career goal and trained as a crane operator. In her mind, this experience is inextricably linked with America, the land of opportunity and the land that set her free. And she had long sought a way to give something back.
When the Twin Towers collapsed and global politics invaded her world, she was watching television. For Pia it was more than just a catastrophe. She regarded it as an assault on her way of life, on her personal American dream. She was enraged and distraught. She cried. For three days she felt paralyzed.
On the fourth day she turned off the TV and reported at Ground Zero as a volunteer.
She wanted to help her adopted home heal its terrible wound. She wanted to clear away the rubble, recover the bodies. And make New York City beautiful again.
Her boss had only a single question: "Well, how's your stomach?"
She soon found her place in the microcosm that was Ground Zero. Being one of the few women didn't bother her; she could curse along with the best of them. When she barked into her cell phone, half the guys in the pit would turn to listen. When she strode across the site, she looked like a modern-day cowgirl: a cowgirl in a hard hat. The men treated her with respect.
But there was tension among the workers in the pit. Envy was everywhere. The police and firefighters were jealous of the construction workers because they earned more money. The construction workers were jealous because the police and firefighters were fêted as heroes by the media.
A two-tier class system emerged - even for the dead. The bodies in uniform were carried away with respect. They were blessed by priests, laid on a stretcher, and draped with the American flag. Their colleagues lined up as an honor guard to escort them out of the ruins.
Civilians, on the other hand, were packed into black plastic bags and shipped out by truck. Until one day in February.
An icy wind was raking through the pit when Pia found the body of an office worker. A firefighter called for a black plastic bag, as usual. But Pia climbed down from her cabin, stationed herself in front of the corpse and growled, "Listen! You're not moving this body until I say you move this body."
She was fired up and had never felt so sure of anything in her entire life. "I want a priest, I want a flag and I want an honor guard!"
Finally, a priest arrived, a flag was found and a site crew lined up as an escort. From that day onward, all the dead were treated as equals.
Coworkers from those days still greet her as the "American Hero" or "American Angel." For the workers down in the pit, Pia became an angel, even though she swore like the devil.
Pia is proud of what she has achieved. "I love this country," she says. She would do practically anything for her new homeland. A piercing gaze brings her point home: "I wanted to pay my thanks to America."
Her patriotism seems a shade overdone, a bit too emphatic. It's the fervor of the uprooted, those who cling to their new home more passionately than others, defending and protecting it without question. Her patriotism is also a justification for her own life choices. It's as though Pia needs to prove to her family back in Europe that she did the right thing in leaving.
Even now Pia's family doesn't really understand what their lost daughter and sister was doing in that strange place. Or what it has meant to her.
Last autumn Pia returned to Hommertshausen to attend her 30th high school reunion. Her class met at a restaurant in a neighboring town, and her former schoolmates showered her with questions. They could hardly believe "their" Pia had been clearing the world's most famous construction site.
After the reunion she stayed on a few days with her mother. Her siblings came to visit and it was nice to see the family again. But before long they were arguing about the United States, George Bush and the Iraq war.
Her sister said Bush was dangerous, the Iraq war a terrible mistake. Pia parades a big "Support our Troops" sticker on her pickup. She supports Bush's invasion. Her patriotism is not up for discussion.
Her sister said 9/11 might have been bad, but the Americans had blown everything out of proportion. With a bitter laugh, Pia told her sister she didn't know what she was talking about. After all, who would ever want to blow up Hommertshausen? "No one gives a shit about Hommertshausen!"
Suddenly, it was all international politics. The Germans were accusing the Americans of arrogance: they were acting as if the world revolved around them, taking themselves way too seriously.
The Americans were calling the Germans naïve: sitting in their ivory tower, they were ignoring the grave dangers ahead.
It was a clash of cultures, a global conflict playing out in a living room in a small German town. The transatlantic rift tore the family apart. At the end of the week, Pia was happy to fly back home - to New York.
The Dakota Roadhouse is located in a side street near Ground Zero. Neon beer signs flash; construction workers' helmets hang on the wall like trophies. Mounted between them is a stag's head with a bra for an eyeshade. The long wooden bar is lined with mouse traps. For tips, not rodents.
Pia takes a seat at the bar. She hugs Andy, the manager, like an old friend. She orders an apple martini and a giant cheeseburger. She had been wanting to come back here again - it's a voyage into her past.
During her nine months in the pit, Pia spent countless hours at this bar. She came here every evening with her coworkers to talk about - and then forget - what they'd experienced. She drank glass after glass - apple martinis or vodka with cranberry juice - smoked thousands of cigarettes, and watched muscle-bound men weep over the events of the day.
The coworkers became friends because their other friends suddenly seemed to be from another planet. Pia lived in the tiny world of Ground Zero, a parallel universe with its own rules and rhythms. She learned things most people never need to know. You smell body parts before you see them. Firefighters are usually the only ones recovered in one piece, because of their protective suits.
Pia didn't take a single day off in those nine months. She worked seven days a week, 12 hours a day. In the evenings she spent a couple of hours at the Roadhouse. Only there, surrounded by coworkers, did she feel understood.
She settled in to a parallel life amid the rubble, and at some point it seemed completely normal to her. "The world outside, where people laugh, eat and make babies became more and more alien to me."
Even today she hasn't really returned to the normal world. Once a year she invites her site crew to a backyard barbecue. These are the best few hours in her year, she says.
She met her new live-in partner down in the pit. She and her sons' father separated years ago.
Richie sits in a plastic chair on the deck, a Beck's beer in his hand. He has bulging biceps and a thick moustache that droops like a sea lion's. A heavy silver chain dangles around his neck. Richie smokes cigarillos like other people smoke cigarettes. His voice drones like a tractor engine.
Richie carted away the rubble. Several times a day he drove past Pia. At some point they began talking, amid the wreckage. He says it felt like doing combat duty. He says none of the workers emerged from the experience without being scarred in some way.
A study published in the autumn of 2004 found that 60 percent of the workers at Ground Zero had severe damage to their lungs and respiratory tracts due to the dust. More than half suffered psychological trauma. Richie tells of a close friend who suddenly turned to hard drugs and is now doing time in prison. "Ground Zero destroyed many people's lives," says Richie. Then he heads off to buy some more beer.
Pia recently visited a doctor. He told her she has the lungs of a 65-year-old. But for Pia, the dust clogging her respiratory tract isn't the worst of it. Worse still are the memories clogging her head. What is there to live for when the high point of your life is already in the past?
Her dream profession is now "just a job." Every morning she sits in her crane, somewhere high above the city. But it's not the same.
"When I was down there I had a mission," says Pia. "And now we're building buildings. So what?"
Recently she dreamed she was standing in front of a 9/11 memorial plaque. It was the year 2300 and she was happy that people still remembered the catastrophe. Maybe this is all just too big for a small life.
There are the shining heroes who go on enjoying life after their heroism. Then there are the sad heroes who cannot, because their heroism has brought them harm. Pia Hofmann is a sad heroine.
There's no way to control memories, although Pia has been trying. She has vowed to dwell only on the good times in that terrible place. There were such times, and she is really trying hard.
On the day the cleanup ended, nine months on, there was a ceremony. Its highlight was an empty stretcher, carried up the ramp out of the pit. Pia was chosen as one of the 12 stretcher-bearers.
At least 2,749 people died in the attack on the World Trade Center. Pia and the other workers recovered some 20,000 body parts; about 1,150 people are still missing. The empty litter symbolized all those who could not be identified, the ones Pia Hofmann could not find, despite all her dedication.
The stretcher-bearers marched solemnly through Manhattan, past thousands of people lining the streets. One of them was distributing flyers with a photograph and a few lines of text.
"This is my brother. They found him in the rubble of the World Trade Center," the man said gravely. He seemed determined to share this memento of his brother. Pia pocketed the flyer; she didn't have time now, she had to move on.
A few days later she found it again. She saw the face, read the name. It was Gary, her first body.
