Finding Resilience, 25 Years After 1993 World Trade Center Bombing

The first bombing of the WTC has mostly been forgotten, but some people who lived through it came away scarred.

For five and a half hours on Feb. 26, 1993, Carl Selinger was trapped alone in an elevator at the World Trade Center, wondering if the smoke seeping in from the elevator shaft would kill him. Unaware it was a terror attack that had left him stranded, he spent the first hour writing a goodbye letter to his family on a piece of loose-leaf paper. Then the lights went out. He paced, and sang, and waited.

His focus, he said, turned to an item he was carrying — “half a salad.” He had eaten the first half when the elevator stopped, but decided to ration the rest, not knowing how long he would be there.

“I was listening to the building go very silent after a while, and wondering,” Mr. Selinger said last week at an event at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum in Lower Manhattan.