A stunning tale of escape traps its hero in replay

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That Tuesday, he punched in at 6 a.m. and spent most of the morning cleaning glass doors and partitions on floors 90 to 95 in the North Tower, the impact zone. He worked through his 8 a.m. break so he could finish those top floors early – otherwise he'd be there until 9. He finished at 8:20 and took the elevator down to the 43rd-floor cafeteria.

At about 8:45, finishing his coffee and danish, he left the cafeteria, and dashed to make an express elevator about to run up to the 77th floor. At 8:48, as he and five others zipped up the shaft, they felt a jolt and then the building sway. The elevator dropped before the emergency brakes ground it to a halt. Later, when smoke started seeping into the car, they knew they had to try to get out.

Demczur quietly took charge. After they pried open the elevator doors, he saw the surface was drywall. "Does anyone have a knife?" he asked. No, nothing. So Demczur started chopping at the wall with the 18-inch blade of the squeegee. When the blade broke and fell down the shaft, he used the handle. It took over an hour, but the six men took turns scraping and poking, and finally burst through to a men's bathroom on the 50th floor. Startled firefighters guided them in different directions. Demczur went down the stairs.

The other tower collapsed at 9:59, when he was at the 11th floor. Soon engulfed in darkness, dust, and confusion, he put his hand on the shoulder of the stranger ahead, continuing down. Seeing him in a maintenance uniform, firefighters screamed to him, "How do we get out?" Demczur had them pan the smoke and dust-filled hallways on the third floor with their flashlights, and he spotted an exit to another stairwell. He instinctively held it open as others went through first, until a fireman grabbed him by the arm and led him out.

Outside, emergency workers gave him oxygen, and water to rinse his eyes. He made his way to the West Side Highway, just a few blocks away, and was finally able to see the sky. "When I look up, and see the tower burning, I turned like ice," Demczur recalls. "Everything was freezing in me." Then, the antennas of Tower 1 start to teeter.

"I start to run. I kept looking back, saw the building banging down like a pancake." As he ran, his eyes were burning, his head was pounding, the dust was choking him, and then his body felt numb. A few more blocks away, he noticed how beautiful the day was and, sheepishly admits he began to touch himself to see if he was really alive, like a scene from a silly cartoon.

Demczur couldn't have imagined he'd tell this story to so many, or that his squeegee handle and uniform would become a part of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. He'll relive a lot of it again this week, when he attends ceremonies in New York and Washington, D.C. But by the end of the year, he hopes to be able to get back to work.

"It is a different kind of life. But I prefer the way it was, when people were alive," Demzcur says.

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