9/11 survivor: I remember everything, I was given a 2nd chance

Twenty years after the September 11, 2001, attacks, survivor Ari Schonbrun is again feeling the traumatic impact of that day, with the anniversary year bringing with it a constant reminder of what happened.

"There is so much noise about 9/11 that it is just front and center everywhere you turn. For me it was hard. There’s a lot of emotion that comes back," he said in an exclusive interview with Arutz Sheva.

Schonbrun, who gives motivational speeches about his experience surviving 9/11, has been doing so many interview and speeches that he felt like “secluding himself” because the emotional impact was taking its toll.

He explained that he can still remember every detail of what happened to him 20 years ago.

“It’s literally the whole day. I literally can tell you step by step what happened entirely, I can tell you exactly what happened,” Schonbrun said.

Schonbrun also explained that had he not arrived for work 40 minutes later than normal or if he’d been 15 seconds later or earlier on the elevator in the World Trade Center, he might not have not survived.

Likewise, he helped a badly burned co-worker get into an ambulance and she insisted he travel in the ambulance with her to the hospital. If he would have stayed behind he would have perished when the building collapsed.

He decided he had something to give back as a speaker six weeks after 9/11 occurred when on November 3, he was asked to be a speaker on a panel at his friend’s son’s yeshiva and it snowballed from there, where now he is now an in-demand speaker telling his story.

The messages of his speeches are about overcoming adversity, and about how he was given a second chance in life.

“I was plucked out of a collapsing, burning building and given a second change at life. And it wasn’t just a coincidence. And I understood that when I started to speak.”

He added: “We live in a crazy world today. And we need to fix it. My job is to help this world and I can’t do it alone. I need your help.”

Schonbrun said the best way to improve the world is to start with introspection and to make positive internal changes. Then you can inspire others.

He gives the analogy of a room of 500 people holding unlit candles and if he had a lit candle and he lights one person’s candle then there are two candles and a double the light, but then if that person uses their lit candle to light another candle who lights another, soon the whole room will be full of lit candles.

“Before you know it we have lit up the room, because with each candle we make a decision. And after you light up a room, you light up a town, you light up a city, you light up a country and you light up the world.”

Two decades after American troops first entered Afghanistan, Schonbrun’s opinion of the calamitous withdrawal from Afghanistan is not a positive one, and he feels that President Joe Biden made a huge blunder in the way it occurred.

“It’s unfathomable. Is he just getting bad advise or is he doing whatever he wants? I firmly believe he’s just doing whatever he wants. And then the backup is trying to make him out look like a good guy. He’s so incompetent,” he said.

“If I wasn’t living through it, I’d never believe it.”