Dr. Sherrie Raz, a traumatologist from Boca Raton, went to Ground Zero as the leader of the Green Cross trauma team.

On-Site Help After 9-11

By JUDY VIK, TIMES STAFF WRITER

They sat on the sidelines during the discussion by a traumatologist, who described her experiences working near the World Trade Center site.

But finally, when the topic got around to the importance of getting back to normal, Mildred Harris asked, "What do you tell the 3,000 widows? What do you say to the 5,000 or  6,000 children who lost parents or the parents who lost a son? We lost our son." Her voice cracked as she spoke.

Harris said her son, Stewart D., 52, was lost at the World Trade Center. He was chief credit officer for Cantor Fitzgerald, a bond trading firm, working on the 101st floor in the first tower to be hit.

She and her husband R. Jay Harris of Coconut Creek were among the 71 people who turned out recently at the Center for Group Counseling in West Boca to hear Sherrie Raz, psychotherapist and trau­matologist describe her experiences as part of the first trauma therapy team to arrive at the Twin Towers site.

"The Twin Towers attack affected hundreds of thousands of lives," Raz said.

She was working in a hospital when she first heard the news of the attack and someone told her to turn on the TV.

After first not believing it was real, her next reac­tion was to make sure her family was safe. Her broth­er was on a train on his way to the World Trade Center where he was to be on the 10th floor. "That jolted me," she said. It was several hours before he could be reached.

Raz is a past president of the Green Cross Projects, a group that sends traumatologists all over the world to the scene of man-made or natural disasters.

A team of 12 traumatol­ogists from several states and Puerto Rico was assembled for the trip on Sept. 14.

For the first four days, there was nothing anybody could do at the site, Raz said. The first response teams were trained in trau­matic medicine, but there was only a handful of people to treat at the hospitals.

"There wasn't a person there who didn't have primary traumatic stress. People were walking around in a daze," Raz said. "Even when told them loved ones were not alive, people were still hanging signs describing them. There were signs and stickers everywhere."

Raz said her team was traumatized from the beginning. They were tak­ing care of 1,800 people in a union building two blocks from the site, and most of the people couldn't function.

Raz has a doctorate degree in psychology and has worked as a psychotherapist in the United States and Europe for 30years. She also has 30 years' experience working with trauma cases in Israel, Bosnia, Croatia and North Africa. She is in private practice in Boca Raton.

Keep listening

Raz urged the audience to listen to those with losses. "The worst thing is to say that 3,000 to 4,000 died for nothing. The families and children are angry. But they have no one to be angry at and no one to tell anything to. It's important to keep talking about this and talking about the 4,000 and trying to make sense of it."
Discussing lessons learned by 9/11, Raz said we've learned this is not the first and last terrorist act, and we need a comprehensive learning facility in South Florida to teach trauma.

Raz said she fears that people who were patriotic and showing flags are now getting angry with each other.

Asked by a man in the audience to elaborate on that, she said she sees it on the roads and in the supermarkets and at the movies. She said now we're out of denial, and the energy that was going into waving flags is now going into anger.

"The numbness and patriotism have worn off. What's left is anger," she said later. "We haven't become kinder or gentler. We have become angrier. That's to be expected, but we need to find ways to have an outlet for this anger, rather than taking it out on each other."

After this session, R. Jay Harris said he has a great hatred for former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. "He's only interested in the firemen's wives. He's ignored the civilian widows," he said. "He's pitted the widows against each other."

"There's more to life than [behavior in the] supermarket and parking lot," Mildred Harris said. "We have been to Ground Zero, and it had no closure for us. It looked like a Disney set for a Hollywood picture."

They attended a memorial service for their son, along with 1,000 people.

"But we don't have the privilege of burial. People have forgotten," she said.