Visitors to the 9/11 Memorial Museum at the World Trade Center will be introduced to the nearly 3,000 victims of the terrorist attacks by the people who loved them most.
In a museum gallery below the memorial plaza, the recorded voices of relatives, friends and other loved ones will be heard describing each victim as mini-movies about those lost on 9/11 will be projected on the walls, according to new plans revealed yesterday.
In what’s billed as the most carefully crafted part of the museum, the personal remembrances will be heard alongside a gallery displaying back-lit photos of each of the 2,982 people who died in all of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, and from the 1993 trade center bombing.
“The exhibition will create a connection between the visitors and the victims, telling the unique stories and vitality of each of these people: mothers and fathers, husbands and sons, brothers and sisters,” 9/11 Memorial president Joe Daniels said.
“We hope the exhibition will allow our visitors to come to know the true diversity and breadth of the losses we sustained on 9/11 in a very personal and human way,” he said.
Curators at the museum, expected to open in 2012 — roughly a year after the memorial plaza opens on Sept. 11, 2011 — are working now to collect more than 2,500 photos of those who died. The collection so far has photos of 400.
A mass mailing to relatives seeking photos, and requesting they record personal recollections of their loved ones, is going out this week, officials said.
“It’s the core purpose of why we’re here — that is to pay respect to the dead and to remind people that the terrorists may be thinking of high-value targets . . . and the anonymity of victims,” Jan Ramirez, the museum’s curator, told The Associated Press.
“There’s nothing anonymous about the individuals who were killed in this event,” said Ramirez.
The gallery of photos, along with the recorded stories and vignettes, will give greater detail to the lives lost than what visitors will see along the memorial fountain’s parapets, where every name will be inscribed in bronze.
Curators have been collecting personal belongs — from a set of car keys to purses and wallets — to include in exhibits about the victims that will be part of the rotating displays in the galleries.