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A Sad Heroine

A German's Search for Victims at Ground Zero

By Markus Feldenkirchen

Pia Hofmann grew up in small-town Germany. Operating an excavator, she helped recover human remains at Ground Zero in the wake of 9/ 11.

Her first body was Gary. He was wearing a New York City fire department uniform. She found him one day after Christmas.

She wished she had discovered Gary two days earlier. It would have been a gift for his family. His relatives would have known for certain that he was dead, that he had perished in the collapse of the World Trade Center, buried under the rubble of the towers. They would have had closure.

Pia Hofmann leans up against the fence. She wears her bleached blond curls loose, a cell phone clipped to her belt, sturdy construction boots on her feet. Gripping the netting above her head, she stands on tiptoe to peer into the world's most notorious hole: Ground Zero. She gazes at the concrete expanse, now clean and innocuous - as though nothing had ever happened here. There are no reminders of the chaos and debris. There are no reminders of the corpses.

Pia points toward a corner of the pit. Gary was back there.

She stands alone in the crowds hurrying home from work. But Pia Hofmann is oblivious to the thronging masses. She is all by herself in the place that changed her life.

It has been four years since she left the disaster site in Lower Manhattan. For nearly nine months, she worked here every day.

She came to help clean up, operating her excavator and her crane. She was one of the few women among the construction workers of Ground Zero, the only one operating heavy equipment and the only German.

She lights a cigarette and blows smoke through the fence. Coming back wasn't easy. She shakes her head, then sighs. After Gary there were more victims; she found body parts for 100, 300, maybe more. It was her job to locate the remains before the mountains of rubble were removed. She hadn't ventured down here again for a long while. "I miss that time," she says. "I really do."

Pia Hofmann grew up in Hommertshausen, a small town in the region of Hesse, and decided to emigrate to the United States at the age of 16. Twenty-six years later she reported for duty after 9/11. These are the two turning points in her life and somehow both are related - her escape from Germany and her experience at Ground Zero.

A house on Long Island, in the suburbs of New York, 10 minutes from Queens. Pia has built herself a wooden deck, with a big grill. In the small living room there is space for a pool table, a foul-mouthed parrot and a black, wall-length cabinet. On a shelf in the center of the cabinet, Pia Hofmann has created a shrine.

Its relics include a replica of the Twin Towers welded together from a piece of steel from the site, a model of the tower made of plastic, another made of glass, framed photographs emblazoned with "God Bless America" and "United We Stand," a miniature American flag, and a bottle of wine found undamaged in the rubble. The shrine has been there five years. Pia says she will never take it down.

"Piaaaaaa," rasps Max, the parrot. "Piaaaaa, fuck you!"

Pia goes into her bedroom and pulls out a large shoe box from under the bed. It holds memorabilia from her time at Ground Zero. She hasn't opened it for years.

She extracts a letter of thanks from the mayor of New York. A plastic rosary, given to her by a little girl at the edge of the site. And lots of photos of the wreckage, the steel, the debris, and Pia in her excavator and hard hat in the middle of it.

"I've often tried to put it all behind me," she says. "But that only works for a while." The pit holds too many memories. It's like a slide show in Pia's head: a slide show of severed limbs.

She points to a photograph. Right there is the spot where she found a woman's torso. She had climbed out of her digger to look for more pieces of the body. Eventually she found the hand; on the ring finger was a gold wedding band.

She tried to find some good, even in this terrible human catastrophe. "This woman's husband, whoever he may be," she told herself, "will be happy to have this ring."

Pia says she will probably never escape the memory of 9/11 and Ground Zero. The real question is: Why did she go there to help in the first place?

She retrieves another small photograph. It's turning yellow. It shows a family squeezed together on a couch, a red lamp to one side, patterned wallpaper behind. It's a German family from the 1970s, a conventional image of her conventional origins.

It is the only family picture that Pia Hofmann has kept. There she is, a young girl in Hommertshausen, sandwiched between her austerelooking father, her grandmother and her siblings. It's a reminder of why she left Germany: a portrait of confinement and severity.

After high school Pia wanted to become a draftswoman, but there were no apprenticeships. She imagined herself withering away in Hommertshausen. Then there was the advertisement in a local newspaper: "Wanted. German nanny for New York City." It sounded like an invitation to freedom.

She took the plunge. At age 16 she left Hommertshausen and headed for the Bronx - despite flunking English at school.

When Pia flew across the Atlantic on October 15, 1975, she had never heard of the American Dream. But she was living it just the same. Like hundreds of thousands of other Germans a century earlier, Pia emigrated in pursuit of happiness.

And so she moved to one of the world's great cities, married and had two sons. Once the boys had grown up, she was able to pursue her real career goal and trained as a crane operator. In her mind, this experience is inextricably linked with America, the land of opportunity and the land that set her free. And she had long sought a way to give something back.

When the Twin Towers collapsed and global politics invaded her world, she was watching television. For Pia it was more than just a catastrophe. She regarded it as an assault on her way of life, on her personal American dream. She was enraged and distraught. She cried. For three days she felt paralyzed.

On the fourth day she turned off the TV and reported at Ground Zero as a volunteer.

She wanted to help her adopted home heal its terrible wound. She wanted to clear away the rubble, recover the bodies. And make New York City beautiful again.

Her boss had only a single question: "Well, how's your stomach?"

She soon found her place in the microcosm that was Ground Zero. Being one of the few women didn't bother her; she could curse along with the best of them. When she barked into her cell phone, half the guys in the pit would turn to listen. When she strode across the site, she looked like a modern-day cowgirl: a cowgirl in a hard hat. The men treated her with respect.

But there was tension among the workers in the pit. Envy was everywhere. The police and firefighters were jealous of the construction workers because they earned more money. The construction workers were jealous because the police and firefighters were fêted as heroes by the media.

A two-tier class system emerged - even for the dead. The bodies in uniform were carried away with respect. They were blessed by priests, laid on a stretcher, and draped with the American flag. Their colleagues lined up as an honor guard to escort them out of the ruins.

Civilians, on the other hand, were packed into black plastic bags and shipped out by truck. Until one day in February.