In their words: Samantha Katz

So, first could you just tell us about your day and what happened immediately after?

So the morning of September 11th, I was getting ready to go to work. I had a trip planned to go to Paris that night, actually. My grandparents were supposed to come up from Miami and they were actually on the way to the airport when the first tower was hit by a plane. I was on the phone when the first tower was hit, talking to the guy who ran our Paris office. My office at the time was at 140 Broadway; we were on the 30th floor facing the South Tower, and I lived in lower Chelsea, right off of Seventh Avenue. So if you walk to the corner of my block, you could actually look down and see the towers. I was late to getting on the subway because I was on that phone call. Otherwise, I would have been taking the train into the World Trade Center because that was my normal commute. And I got a phone call from my mom, saying, “Turn on the news, a plane has hit the World Trade Center.” I turned on New York 1, saw a big hole in the World Trade Center and smoke coming out of it. I told the Paris office I had to get off with them, called our office, and they said, “We really don't want you to come in. We want you to stay at home.”

And honestly, I didn't realize how quickly we were going to go to not being able to talk, to call people, the lines just flooded at that point. You couldn't call people back, but I was able to get a couple of phone calls in. I called my brother who lived a couple blocks away and he said, “Let's go figure out how to volunteer.” We thought we would go to the hospital, a couple blocks down, and unfortunately no ambulances came to the hospital. At that point, we were told by my sister-in-law to go help Meals on Wheels, which is a food delivery company that helps the elderly and ill who are homebound — that they were going to need some help getting food to people as, essentially, the towers had now fallen. They had no idea how to get a hold of any of what they call their clients. Very quickly, we went down to the area where they were based, which was a church in the West Village. The executive director was crying, she asked for help. But she said, “I can't even emotionally process how to help. We can't even tell people we're not showing up today with their food. And they won't understand why we aren't there.” She sent me upstairs, and it turns out that Mayor Giuliani's chief of communications was a member of this church and was running communications out of the church. She said, “Actually, I do need help. And the first thing I want to do is make sure that the firefighters and policemen in the West Village have food when they come back from the World Trade Center.” I think she hadn't emotionally processed that a lot of people were not going to come back. . . .

So I helped design a distribution system by which we got local chefs around all these different police precincts and firehouses to start preparing food, and then organized hundreds of volunteers to by foot or by car, to start taking food to these different police precincts and firehouses all over the city. And honestly, that turned into a massive food distribution system that went on for a couple days out of the church. From there, I got called in by federal agencies, city and state agencies, the Red Cross, and on behalf of the restaurateur community, to help them figure out how to build a logistics program for food donations for feeding all of the relief and recovery workers in a very safe environment. After designing it, I helped staff it and ran it for 11 weeks.

How did it affect your life afterward? You were directly involved in it, so after you were done helping the Red Cross and managing the food distribution, what was the biggest change you noticed after you returned to your life before it happened?

I was working full-time. . . . I was actually back at the office within a week, while the World Trade Center was still burning; I had to go into the office to run my businesses. I mean, even though I was 22, I managed an entire California marketplace for a Wall Street firm, with thousands of industrial customers, farming customers, all who wanted to obviously understand how they could be helpful to New York City, but who also had business to do. So when you say like, what was your life? You know, when did you get back to normal? I would say the things that I remember most are being terrified of getting on the subway — definitely having real anxiety about that. It took weeks to feel comfortable and safe while I was taking a train underground and not knowing what was happening above ground for a while.

I went to the office and the smell of the towers burning lingered and was very, very, very strong, so strong that you'd get migraine headaches at the end of the day from working in the office and I worked from 9 a.m. to 2 a.m. in the office on my regular job hours, plus running in, staffing everything on the food relief, and I have to say my bosses were really nice at the time. I needed phone lines to handle all the inquiries related to wanting to help on the food recovery and relief effort. And there'd be days where 7 to 10 phone lines would be lit up on the trading floor, from chefs around the country calling in to lend their time and talent to cook or from large corporations calling to donate food, like Tyson chicken wanting to deliver X amount of chickens or whatever it was going to be, any way people could find a way to help. We wanted to give them an opportunity to help use their superpower or whatever they had to give.

As far as normalcy goes, if I were to put it into context, I had best friends that were covered in debris, leaving the World Trade Center neighborhoods who were not as fortunate as I was by having made the call and stayed and been late to work. I have one friend who jumped into the Hudson. The post-traumatic stress disorders still exist for people from what they experienced that day, and I don't know if there's ever a return to normalcy when your friends, your bosses, your colleagues are so deeply impacted by something.

So can you talk a little bit about the community, the New York community after 9/11, and what you thought of its initial reaction. Just to put some things in context, you can even talk about how the community reacted to the United States going into Afghanistan. We talked a lot about how everyone's initial reaction was very patriotic, and everyone came together and almost rallied behind President Bush at the time. Initially, when the government had decided to go into Afghanistan, there was a lot of support for it. So can you talk a little bit about that and what your political stances were directly after, and how they changed over time?

So I may be very different from other people here, but I'm way more of a lover than a fighter. I can talk about the things that I just remember clearly; there are things that you see and there are things that you read and then there are rooms that you're in. A vivid memory for me is six days after the Trade Center fell, I'm in this room with all of these federal agencies, the state, the city, the restaurateurs, the head of the Red Cross, and everybody's exhausted and emotional and they're trying to figure out how to be New York in this moment: be strong and at the same time, follow health and safety standards for moving food and protocols on disaster relief. New York has very strong personalities, especially our restaurateur community, our creatives, our talent. And I remember watching the head of the Red Cross explain that there are things you cannot serve in this kind of disaster, and there are all these reasons why, and you're going through the normal protocols and she's like, “This is why we should deliver airplane food containers of food to everybody working on this.” And I remember . . . very prominent chefs just screaming at the top of their lungs, turning beet red, and saying, “This is New York! If we want to serve them our best prime rib T bones, we're gonna cook them to the best of our ability!” And in that moment, you're so proud that people are responding this way to do everything they can in their power.

Then, the next image is my first time getting on a plane because I ran West Coast markets for my business, and I used to travel back and forth to California once or twice a week, and the first plane I got on, I remember sitting in that seat and watching everybody profile every single person that got on the plane. And so I know you're looking for a story on, “How did you feel about us going to war?” It wasn't even on my wavelength or thought process as a 22-year-old at that time. Obviously, sending people to war, I was thinking, “Oh my god, what if we start drafting people?” You know, those are the kinds of things that I was thinking about as a 22-year-old. But I was so deeply entrenched in what we were doing to rebuild and take care of each other here, that what we did overseas almost didn't register for me, to be honest.

How did you see racial profiling affect the city?

We are a melting pot of cultures here. No matter what we say we all have bias to a certain extent. Obviously, the more aware you are of your bias, hopefully you do your best to try to not live up to that bias and do your best to counteract it. Was there a ton of profiling here? Yes. But I think there was more of a feeling that New York is going to come together. I think a lot more of that. My guess is a lot that was probably felt much more strongly outside of New York than it was felt in New York at the time, at least in the early days.

We learned about the “Ground Zero mosque” controversy and wanted to know what your thoughts on people heavily protesting that, since you experienced it? [In 2010, there was significant controversy surrounding the building of an Islamic community center, which also contained a Muslim prayer room, near Ground Zero. This soon became referred to as the “Ground Zero Mosque.”] Living in New York and experiencing 9/11 first hand, can you justify their aggressive protest towards this? And other acts like this?

I mean, I love that we live in a country with freedom of speech. I love that we have the ability to discuss different points of view here. I wish we had calmer ways and more constructive ways to do that. I think that New York is made up of a number of different types of religions and cultures and races and identities, and we should all be represented here in New York. Some people identify themselves in different ways, and when I see people wanting to come together to celebrate identity and talk about what their feelings are about different perspectives, I think we all have something to learn from one another.

You know, it's very interesting having this conversation now. Because I just got off of a multi-week tour where I managed a team that drove a bus across the country to Super Tuesday states doing “Get Out And Vote” and met lots of protesters along the way because of the candidate that I was representing. I definitely discovered on this trip that I am way more of a pacifier than I am a person who likes to get up and be angry in a protest, and having been a part of that journey working for a candidate who is very much an enormous advocate for gun reform and gun safety in this country, and having watched how people protest that, it is very eye-opening to see how aggressive things can become. But I definitely do believe that everybody should have an opportunity to voice their opinion. I just wish we did it in a calmer environment.

I know I'm not also directly answering questions, which is probably more complicated. My 22-year-old perspective is very different. . . . I imagine, you know, if my life circumstances were different, if I had kids at the time, my perspective would have been totally different. If I was married at the time, if I had elderly parents I was taking care of, if I had been down there, if I had somebody directly related to me that passed away, all of it would be very, very different.

How do you think the events that happened affected how you raise your children?

Okay, let me think about that one. That's like a big existential question.

I think if anything, it just puts you in this moment — that idea that you might think you're invincible, you are not invincible. So like right now, I'll give you a perfect perspective. We're living in the midst of New York during a massive epidemic. And even though school was open for business, I made a decision two days before the schools closed to pull the kids out of school. And luckily, I am in a position where I didn't have to go to work those days, I could pull them out and be at home to take care of them. But I think it's just this reminder that everything is just a perspective of, you never know when your day is going to be your last day so live each day to its fullest and, you know, I might sound morbid or crazy, but I made a pact with myself because of that experience that I do my best to live every day such that if I did not wake up tomorrow, I would die knowing that I accomplished what I wanted to accomplish today and content with what I've done for myself and for others. I married a guy — probably because of the influence of 9/11 in some crazy way — but I married a guy whose motto in life, his daily mantra is, “You can never be too kind.” . . .

It wasn't like I was coded into what adult life is supposed to be like — that coding basically was happening in real-time at that moment, and I was surrounded by people who were much older, trying to navigate uncharted territory, a totally crazy emotional time. And you know, I think there were, I think maybe for the first five days, I didn't go to sleep. I literally didn't sleep for five days. So there's a resilience that I think I learned and implemented then, that I don't know unless you've ever been through something that is that type of disaster, that type of emotion or energy or adrenaline driving you to just get what needs to get done, done. I think it's, it's, it's changed my whole perspective.

My kids are only seven and four. So the conversations are a little bit different right now. Now, I'm having a totally different, you know, experience where I've got to somehow manage what I know to be reality, what everyone wants to talk about in terms of what's happening. And there's a lot of negative conversation that can be had, you know how many people are dying or fear about going outside. I mean, my family's been under quarantine for 18 days, we have not left the house. Not even to go for a walk around the block. So I'll tell you like, I'm trying to manage the fear of children, alongside being a realist.

Can you draw parallels between this epidemic that we're currently experiencing and 9/11?

[This interview was recorded on March 30, so most of the country had only been on lockdown for about 2 weeks. There were about 160,000 cases in the U.S. at the time and about 67,000 in NYC. It was still very early in the process of dealing with COVID-19.]

Sadly, I don't think that we feel the severity of this as much across the board like we did in 9/11 because we can't see it or smell it.

Until we start seeing it for real — I think that building a hospital in Central Park or cruise ship hospital, coming in and docking today and people seeing that imagery, I hope will start to put some perspective out there for our medical and healthcare workers who are risking their lives every day, the NYPD and firefighters and emergency services that are out there. I can't remember the last number. I think at least 900 police officers have been diagnosed with COVID in New York City. I wish that we were taking it as seriously as we did during 9/11, because we worked together as a city to solve it. But the thing that's really hard about this one is that because it's community spread, you've got to find different ways to put your superpowers in play.

So for me, I'll draw a very specific parallel. Obviously I always go to food, feeding people first in natural disasters and emergencies. For the last two weeks, I've been trying to think through how to do this best, given the normal routes the city takes to feed people, and how we might need to do things very differently. So now in the last few weeks, I've organized 100 volunteers to go out and cook in kitchens for the elderly. I've had them picking up food, and we've rescued over 100,000 pounds of food from restaurants that were closing. We've had corporate donors who want to deliver food. We've popped up to community kitchens, we've, you know, my husband's distillery has become a hand sanitizer operation and I put a list together of over 160 distilleries that are making hand sanitizer. We've gotten gloves to people, and it's crazy, but at the same time, while you're asking people to go out and help, there is a risk that you put yourself at by going out to help. More than 50% of the COVID cases in New York are among the younger population, not the older population, so we have a total flipping of the system here, that is a need for out-of-the-box thinkers and strategists to come up with ways to help people through this process and obviously that's just food, but we could break it down to anything.

There are more people collaborating than I have ever seen collaborate before. Even in 9/11, I think the collaborations went on for a short period of time and then it got very focused on who needed to be collaborating based on what the essential services were for relief. But this, this is so deeply affecting so many populations. I haven't seen numbers on it, but I would imagine that we have a significant number of people who have lost their jobs here, who are now food insecure, who are single, working parents who have to figure out how to take care of their elderly parents or their kids without a school system in place for that. This is the most challenging, I would say, the most challenging emergency or disaster I've ever volunteered on for sure.

What do you want future generations to know about 9/11 and its impact?

Before I answer this, to be honest, I would love to know what 9/11 means to you guys. And how it impacts you, reading about it and learning about it the way you have at Ransom?

So we've discussed this before, when we actually traveled to New York. We had a long discussion about this to men who worked in the Secret Service and the FBI. But, yeah, so for us, the big problem with learning this is that we, as sad as it is, cannot relate to it, so for us, we're just learning about history, even though it's so recent, and it's not history for our parents or our grandparents, or even some of our older siblings who lived through it. That's part of their lives. For people like you... people like [our teacher] Mr. Cooper even remembers very specifically what happened even though he wasn't in New York at the time. So to us, 9/11 is just another thing of history that has affected us greatly. So to learn about it has been eye-opening, because we've seen how many aspects of our lives have stemmed from this problem. I don't know how to explain it. We've learned that half of our whole environment was changed based on one event. And that event still affects so many people that we live with every day, but we can't relate to them.

I mean, I think one of the most important things is to make sure history actually gets into the history books, right? So, it is history. There have been many tragedies that have affected various communities throughout time and very specific communities throughout time. The idea that an airplane could become a weapon for destruction was just a crazy mind flip, right? That you can take an everyday tool and use that everyday tool that maybe you didn't put into that perspective. And it flips the perspective of that tool. What do I hope the takeaway will be? You read about it and you process it, and maybe, maybe to a certain extent that you don't carry the weight of the generations before but that, I would hope that you would find a way to see the positives that stem from it and also the mistakes that stemmed from it or that led to it. And as you go into becoming the next generation of leaders and doers and dreamers, that you find ways to do things better. We only learn from looking at how we process things in the past and understanding what has worked or not.

We’ve spoken a lot in class about how hindsight allows us to look back on the immediate responses and reforms that followed 9/11 with more accurate criticism. How can we prevent emotions from causing decisions that we later regret?

You know, on not letting emotion in, it's nearly impossible. Instead, I'm looking at the leadership that we have in the country today and I think I wish we had more empathy and compassion in the White House than we do today, given the rising fear and uncertainty that we have around COVID right now. . . . I'm not sure you want to strip away emotion.

I would say in asking me this question, this is the toughest one as a female on Wall Street as one of the very few that made it to a position of being a global managing director. I battled every day with whether or not you should bring emotion to work, emotion to leadership, and on Wall Street, the type of emotion — at least the kind I saw around me — was not necessarily positive emotion or encouragement, or showering people with love. You know, a lot of fear-mongering and bullying and oppression, which is also emotion, just another form of it. And it wasn't really until being able to grow up a little bit, moving into my 30s that I started to realize that it is okay for leaders to be emotional, but there is emotion that we should channel that is encouragement and empathetic and compassionate and challenging but challenging ourselves. To help lift others up. And the challenge to each of us as leaders is to how to best facilitate an environment that allows people to be their best selves. And I use that whether you're on Wall Street or in government or in any kind of role. Are we always challenging ourselves to be supporting those around us and helping them be their best selves and bringing their time and talent and energy to the forefront? And I think if we take that same perspective, in the most intense of situations, we will end up with better results because we've opened our eyes and our ears and our hearts to learning from each other, growing and doing better together.

Are there any last things you want to say that are very specific to you and explaining your perspective? Any last thoughts?

My last thought is for you guys. I think it’s amazing that you have this opportunity to learn about this. Honestly, I don't know anyone else that's ever really called me from any other school or talked about any of their kids learning about it in the way that you are, and you really have taken it on from a multi-dimensional perspective, which whether you were there or not, you are certainly learning by hearing from others who have different perspectives of the day. By seeing things and asking these questions, you know, are these things right or wrong, should we do this again, should the mosque be next to the Trade Center? You know, these are all great questions — curiosity and questioning and challenging and learning and understanding is what’s going to make it so we don’t have another one of these. So thank you.