Photo by Daniel Reidel

The Library of Congress has received about 200 oral accounts from responders to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. In a couple of months, you’ll be able to access the materials in a reading room in the library’s American Folklife Center, said Jennifer Gavin, a spokeswoman for the Library of Congress.

The collection, known as “Remembering 9/11 Oral History Project,” was donated on Friday by physician Benjamin Luft, a professor and director at Stony Brook University who treated responders following the tragedy.

The interviews describe “courage, love, sacrifice and survival,” Luft said in a release. And after a series of terror attacks have swept the globe this year, the accounts inspire and inform us “on how we need to be unified and care for one another during this time of unease,” Luft continued.

Each responder speaks for at least an hour. According to the release, the collection will also include “more than 1,000 digital photographs, manuscript materials, logbooks and indexes involving the personnel who responded to the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center towers and who worked on response to the event, including rescue and recovery work on the building debris pile, over subsequent months.”

“Memorial at the Pentagon – Flag 1.” September 11, 2001 Documentary Project collection (AFC 2001/015), American Folklife Center, Library of Congress.

The Archive of Folk Culture also holds more than 380 audio recordings and other materials from everyday people’s reactions to the attacks that were sent in between October 2001 and May 2002. That collection is known as “September 11, 2001, Documentary Project.”

But this particular collection is unique. “No one else had the first-hand experience of being at Ground Zero on 9/11 quite like our brave first responders,” said Congressman Steve Israel (D-NY) who helped facilitate the collection with the library. “Their memories of that day will always be with them,” and now with us at the Library of Congress.