Jan Demczur, John Paczkowski and George Phoenix reunited 25 years after their shared harrowing experience, appearing together in the National Geographic documentary 9/11 Reunited.
The three men, who were strangers before that morning, found themselves trapped together in an express elevator in the North Tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. In the documentary, survivors Paczkowski and Phoenix, who worked on the 67th and 74th floors respectively, recalled boarding what seemed like a routine elevator that fall morning. As the doors were closing, Demczur, a Polish immigrant window cleaner, rushed in carrying his bucket and squeegee — tools that would ultimately save their lives.
The elevator reached the 65th floor when the men heard a bang and felt the car begin to fall. Unbeknownst to them at that moment, American Airlines Flight 11 had struck the tower. “Everything was pretty calm initially, but then smoke started to come into the elevator,” Phoenix said in the documentary. The men managed to pry open the elevator doors, only to find themselves facing a solid wall with the number 50 chalked on it — revealing they had plummeted 15 floors.
As panic set in, Demczur took the squeegee from his pocket, removed the blade, and began frantically pecking at the drywall. “It was a dangerous proposition because you didn’t know if the elevator was going to stay where it was,” Paczkowski said. “We felt the impact on the South Tower while we were in the elevator, it shook the North Tower enough.” The men took turns trying to break through, making progress until the blade fell through a gap, causing their hearts to sink.
Demczur still had the handle, however, and refused to give up. “We just stood there, astonished,” Phoenix said. Paczkowski added, “This gentleman who I would see on a daily basis, his demener was the calmest out of most of us, although I’m sure he was just as frightened as we were.”
Demczur eventually managed to make a hole in the wall, and the men could feel air coming through, leaving them ecstatic. Phoenix began kicking at the opening, and together they broke through into the men’s restroom on the 50th floor. They found firefighters in the stairwell, and only then learned that planes had crashed into the World Trade Center. “One of the things that still sticks in my mind is the concern on the firefighters faces as they walked past us,” Paczkowski said. “I’m sure that many of them who passed us didn’t make it out. Their faces haunt me quite a bit.”
In the viral moment that has been told and retold across two decades, six men total — Demczur, Paczkowski, Phoenix and three others — escaped the North Tower approximately five minutes before it collapsed. Demczur’s squeegee handle, which he used to cut through the drywall, became one of the most celebrated artifacts of survival from that day and was later acquired by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. The museum’s collection notes that the Polish immigrant and his fellow trapped passengers “squeezed through the hole in the wall, fleeing from the building just minutes before the tower fell.”
It had been 25 years since the men had seen each other when they reunited for the documentary. “Without Jan, we wouldn’t be talking right now,” Phoenix said. “Three seconds could have changed everything.” Towards the end of the first episode, the three shared an emotional embrace, with Paczkowski telling Demczur they “wouldn’t be here” if it wasn’t for him.
The National Geographic documentary 9/11 Reunited spotlights six survivors reunited with their saviors for the first time since that devastating day, according to promotional materials for the series.