No Place to Hide from Terror

On September 11 I was by myself in a “borrowed” apartment in Berlin, Germany. When the telephone rang a friend’s voice sounded ominous. He told me the news. I was stunned. Soon I tried unsuccessfully to call my family members at home in Manhattan. Finally at night my husband reached me at another friend’s house.

Almost everyone expressed surprise. I was upset but not surprised. About two months before—it wasn’t the first time—I had expressed concern to my husband about both a possible jihad and the state of affairs in the U.S. We decided there’s no place to go, no place to hide. This time we cannot emigrate as we had as children from Germany, fleeing the Nazis.

I was scheduled to return to the U.S. on September 13 but the airports were closed to foreign flights. I wasn’t too concerned about staying on in Berlin—though I worried about my patients who were expecting to see me after a month’s absence. However, President Bush’s rhetoric about war and vengeance caused me extreme anxiety: What if he dropped a few bombs? The world would be afire! Then I might not be able to travel home to the U.S. for who knows how long. I wondered whether my fears were old fears. Was this like leaving Belgium and arriving in England only one week before World War II broke out, arriving in a London already prepared for an air attack, in a state of blackout? I decided to prepare for the worst. I went to the Deutsche Bank, opened an account, and sent a fax to my bank in New York City requesting a transfer of sufficient funds to sustain me for a few months. My anxiety abated.

Then came the anger. It hasn’t left me. It isn’t anger at the perpetrators. It’s rage at our incompetent elected officials and government agencies. Their isolationism, arrogance, greed, and false sense of grandiosity and invulnerability left them and us unprepared—despite warnings from foreign intelligence services.

I’ve been home now for five days. Thankfully, the family is all right and today I met with my patients. But the world is not all right. I don’t know what’s coming but I believe it won’t be good for a very long time.

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