As the nation marks 25 years since the September 11 attacks, a group of Brooklyn Catholic school teachers who lived through that day as children are now the ones explaining it to students who were born decades after the towers fell.
Kathleen Palladino was a 6-year-old kindergartner in Brooklyn on 9/11 when classmates began getting pulled out of school over the PA system. Her mother eventually walked her and her older sister home, past a skyline split in two.
“It was like a dividing line,” Palladino told Fox News Digital. “From the bridge backwards was just blackness.”
She remembers asking her mother why the sky was black. “She just kept squeezing my hand, and we just kept going,” Palladino said.
Now Palladino teaches nursery school at St. Patrick Catholic Academy in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where her 3-year-old students have no frame of reference for the attacks at all.
“I don’t go into the events of 9/11,” she said. “They are too young, and the scope of what happened is just beyond their understanding right now.” Instead, she asks them what they can do when someone is hurting — clean up toys without being asked, offer a hug. “Anything to show the ones that we love that we’re here for them,” she said.
A Ringing Phone, a Screaming Classroom
Fourth-grade teacher Elizabeth Giacchino was a sixth grader at Our Lady of Guadalupe School in Brooklyn when her teacher took a call about the Twin Towers. “So many of my classmates around me just started screaming and crying because they had family members that were working in the city,” she said. Smoke was visible outside the window as parents rushed in to collect their children.
Giacchino stayed at school because her mother worked there. “All I wanted to do was just be with my family at that time,” she said. Years later, teaching herself, she thought back to how calm her own teacher had stayed while the class fell apart around her. “I don’t even know if she was feeling some type of way or if there was any personal situation she was going through, because all she thought about was us,” Giacchino said. “So that’s what I always make sure to do with my students too.”
Nikki Fregara, now a third-grade teacher at St. Patrick, was a high school senior when her history teacher interrupted class. “I hate to tell you all this, but I’m afraid that the Twin Towers got hit,” the teacher said. Fregara and her classmates went to the window and saw the smoke themselves, then gathered around a small television in the auditorium. She worried about her father, whose job took him around the city, and about her sister and brother-in-law, who worked nearby.
With her own students, Fregara skips the graphic details and focuses on the first responders who ran toward the danger. “Helping others is so important, especially when they are in need,” she said. “Never forget to be an everyday hero.”
The Principal’s Brother
Principal Kathy Curatolo has the most direct connection of all. On the morning of the attacks she was headed to a principals’ meeting when she heard on the radio that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. She and other principals watched the second plane hit on live television before she returned to her school and climbed to the roof.
“I saw the second tower fall, not realizing that tower killed my brother,” she said.
Her brother, Robert Curatolo, was a 31-year-old FDNY firefighter assigned to Ladder 16 in Manhattan. Kathy’s mother had initially called to say all four of Kathy’s firefighter and police-officer brothers were accounted for and safe. Robert had just gotten off duty when the attacks began and headed to the World Trade Center with two other firefighters in a police car. One of them survived, which is how the family later pieced together what Robert did that morning: directing panicked people away from falling debris, then, after the first tower collapsed while he was in a walkway between the towers, returning to the rubble to pull a man with two broken legs to safety. When the second tower came down, he dove under a fire truck. It didn’t hold.
People have asked Kathy why her brother didn’t leave after surviving the first collapse. “That’s not who he was,” she said. “That’s not how we were raised.”
She wants her students to know the rest of him too — the youngest of eight siblings, funny, athletic, always late for everything except, as it turned out, the one day it mattered least. “So he actually ended up at the Trade Center on time, where we’re like, the only thing you ever got to on time,” she said. Robert had married at Disney World just three weeks before he died; the wedding was the last time Kathy saw him in person, though they spoke by phone the day before the attacks. “I want them to know that Robert was — he was a regular kid growing up just like them,” Kathy said.
Curatolo said it was around the 10th anniversary that she noticed her students had no memory of the day at all. “These kids have no idea what I’m talking about unless they learn it from us in school or their parents who had experienced something,” she said. Students raised on smartphones are stunned to learn that survivors sometimes couldn’t reach their families for hours. She tells them about grounded planes, postponed baseball games, packed churches — and a country where, for a while, “people were kinder to each other.”
Twenty-five years on, Curatolo said remembering the tragedy doesn’t mean being defined by it. “My brother is always with me, but I don’t let 9/11 define me,” she said. “You can survive a tragedy and still live a good life because the people who were lost don’t want you to stop living your life.”
Her family keeps Robert’s memory alive through a scholarship foundation, charitable work, and support for Tunnel to Towers. She still counts him among her siblings. “There are eight of us,” she said. “Four live in Florida, three live on Staten Island, and one’s in heaven.”
