By Evan Wechman

Twenty-five years after surviving the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Marlboro, New Jersey native Aaron Levenson is determined to make sure Americans never forget what he witnessed that morning.

 Levenson wants to share his experiences and lessons he has learned with others, whether they are adults or children too young to have first-hand knowledge of that day.

Six years ago, his rabbi approached him on behalf of the United Jewish Federation, which was looking for 9/11 survivors to share their experiences. Levenson thought there was no better time to begin speaking.

 “The feeling that I always had is you’re doomed to repeat history if you don’t learn from it,” Levenson said. “When we have a moment of silence at work, if you don’t know why we’re doing that, then it doesn’t matter. I heard in the news recently that they’re considering not having a security check-in (at the airport) because it’s not convenient to everybody, and that the lines are too long. Why do you think that is? If you don’t know what happened in the first place, you’re making a very uninformed decision on why to take it away.”

He recalls the day he got off his train at Fulton Street near the World Trade Center, hoping to take the path to Jersey City, when everything changed instantaneously.

“I got to my stop,” Levenson said who was working for Merrill Lynch at the time.“We all walked out of the subway, and everything was kind of in commotion.  And I was coming out of the subway. I didn’t make it to the World Trade Center yet. But If I had gotten on the subway before the one I got, I would have been in the World Trade Center.”

“We didn’t know what was going on,”  Levenson later added. “It was nothing that you could ever compare this to. And from the angle, we just saw the smoke and fire.”

The realization of the horrors he and the other commuters were seeing soon dawned on him.

“I started seeing people fall and jump, so as I’m looking up, as we’re all looking up and looking at the fire, there were thousands of pieces of paper flying in the sky, and it was hard to tell the difference how high up they were whether that was paper or a person?” he said. ”You couldn’t tell.”

Though Levenson, 53, was only in his 20s at the time, the terror of the attack and of what he saw remain with him today. 

 However, he also remembers the unity of the country in the days and months immediately after that tragic day. He recalls the beautiful commercials appearing on the television nightly of every home in the United States having a flag attached, letting us and other countries know that we were not divided, but one people, all together in this. The spirit of patriotism and respect for one another stood out for him. 

More specifically on that day, he recalls people of different races and religions helping one another, regardless of their differences.

“Everybody was helping everybody,” he said.

That’s why Levenson, who now works for Morgan Stanley, continues speaking about Sept. 11. He worries that the unity and patriotism Americans showed afterward are fading.

“I was there. I will never forget 9/11 any day,” Levenson said. “I don’t need an anniversary of 9/11 to never forget. What I’m worried about is that people say never forget, but they forget 364 days of the year except one and then move on.”

The New Jersey native, even 25 years ago, was aware that memories could fade with time, so he wrote an essay for himself months after so he can always be reminded of the sights, smells, and raw emotions experienced during that day.

“Besides the visual sensory, it was the smell,” he said. “You can’t mimic it. It was the smell of burning rubber. It was the smell of burning bodies. I still smell it when I see pictures of the twin towers falling. I smell it more than I see it, and that’s something that’s hard to explain.”

For Levenson, he will keep sharing his story so the lessons of that tragic day are not lost on today’s children. He hopes that the patriotism that rallied the country 25 years ago is still present today.

The memories of that day were of course not just a lesson for others, but for himself as well. He takes time these days to enjoy the small things in life like noticing dandelions sprouting after a brief winter thaw in the middle of January, and more importantly, the people he surrounds himself with like his wife and daughter.

“You realize what’s important and what the priorities are, and I will never forget that.”