Ten minutes. That was all that separated Hans Gernot Schenk from death on September 11, 2001.
He had his office on the 32nd floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, where he had been working for more than a year for a German international logistics company.
That morning, he had not slept at home and arrived later than usual. When the first plane hit, he was still not at his desk. Two of his colleagues were, and they did not survive.
Today he is 55 years old, lives in Miami, and works as a consultant. But the guilt of having survived never completely went away: once, in a theater, he heard the sound of a crash in a recording and instinctively threw himself to the floor.
He quit his job two months after the attack and moved back to Germany, seeking a life away from those towers that no longer exist.
