HIGH POINT — The experience of High Point University student Helen de Weissenbruch on Sept. 11, 2001, is one she can’t remember, though it is poignant and remarkable.

She was born 18 years ago today, coming into the world after the first World Trade Center tower fell in New York but before the second one collapsed.

When she’s having a commonplace conversation with someone and the subject turns to birthdays, she tells people she was born on Sept. 11, 2001. De Weissenbruch said her remark often brings a pause in the conversation, as people don’t know how to respond or struggle for a comment.

“When I tell them I was born the day of, they are like, ‘Oh, really,’” she told The High Point Enterprise. “They don’t know what to say.”

De Weissenbruch, who was born in a suburb of Brussels, Belgium, enrolled this year at HPU to major in interior design. Her mother is from New York, which gives her family another tie to 9/11.

One of her mother’s best friends worked in the second tower and lost his life when it collapsed. So at the same time her family celebrates her birth, they mourn a personal loss.

De Weissenbruch is among a set of young people — seniors in high school or freshman in college — coming of age as adults whose impressions of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks don’t involve any personal memories. They sort through the anniversary of the nation’s collective trauma based on conversations with their parents and grandparents, lessons from teachers and documentaries that repeat again the images of the hijacked planes hitting the twin towers on a sunny, crisp late summer morning.

For 18-year-old HPU freshman student Keilah Moore, who was born Sept. 10, 2001, her age of one day old when the attacks happened means she finds herself left out of a frequent 9/11 conversation.

“When you talk about it, so many people will say, ‘Oh, I remember where I was.’ But I don’t remember where I was.’ I was born the night before,” Moore told The Enterprise.

Moore said her views of 9/11 are shaped through what she’s learned in school and listening to conversations of relatives and friends about their memories and impressions of the day.

“It forms my opinion on it, but I don’t have a first-hand opinion. It’s more a second-hand opinion,” said Moore, who hasn’t declared a major but is considering business administration or marketing.

Moore, who was born in Newport News, Virginia, and now lives in Rocky Mount, said she realizes airport security has changed noticeably since Sept. 11, 2001, with the creation of the U.S. Transportation Security Administration that screens bags at all commercial airports. But she has no memory of what security measures were like — or what it was like to fly in a jet — before 9/11.

“I know it’s a turning point,” she said.

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