November 27, 2006

From Teuvo Lehti, a Finnish retiree, serious amateur photographer, and former United Nations employee now living in France….

To: Farrar, Straus & Giroux (publishers)

Dear Sir,

I had visited the Twin Towers [in 1999]. While on the observation deck of one of the towers, I took a photo of what looks like a maintenance worker on a balcony of the other tower.

Later it struck me that this man might have perished in the tragedy, and I made an Internet search of his employer on the basis of the company logo clearly visible on his shirt. My thought was that if he proved to be one of the victims, his family might wish to have a copy of the picture. On the other hand, if – as I very much hope – he survived, I thought he might wish to have it as a souvenir.

PHOTO BY TEUVO LEHTI

(Lehti's letter continues...) The company, ABM Engineering Services, seems to be a large one, with operations in several parts of New York, as well as elsewhere in the United States. I contacted the company in question and explained my business but, alas, despite more than one letter and e-mail I received no reply….

I am now wondering whether you could help me to get in touch with the author of [Watching the World Change], in hope that in the course of his research he might have established contacts that might be helpful in this regard. My motives remain those stated above.

Any help that you and eventually Mr. Friend might be able to give me will be very much appreciated.

Yours sincerely,
T. Lehti

BLOW-UP FROM PHOTO BY TEUVO LEHTI

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE CAMAJ FAMILY

In fact, this is the face of Roko Camaj, who unfortunately did not survive the September 11 attacks.

Camaj, 60 years old at the time, typically spent a good part of his workday operating the automated system that cleaned the windows of the Trade Center. On occasion, as he would do on the day that Teuvo Lehti photographed him, Camaj would have to walk outside and complete the job himself—dangling 1,300 feet above the Manhattan skyline. “The windows on the 107th floor,” according to Time magazine, “could not accommodate the [remote-cleaning] machine, and he would attend to them manually, suspended from a harness.”

Having remembered Camaj’s photo from Time, I tracked down his son Vincent, who granted me permission to reprint the photo. Vincent will soon receive a copy of the Lehti’s photo.

The New York Times would write about Roko Camaj in its “Portraits of Grief” section: “His son, Vincent, said his father loved his job and considered it an escape. ‘He’d always say, It was me and the sky up here. I bother no one, and no one bothers me.’ Mr. Camaj…had just returned home from a vacation to Montenegro, a birthday present from his daughter. All five Camaj brothers, most of them scattered around the globe, had taken the voyage together. ‘It was a great pleasure,’ [his brother] Kole Camaj said. ‘Everyone was so happy.’”

Wrote Michele Orecklin, in Time magazine: “On days off, Camaj, a Roman Catholic Albanian,…liked to keep things clean and orderly around the house, mowing the grass, renovating the kitchen and, above all, spending time with his family, from whom he originally hid the nature of his risky job. When he started work at the World Trade Center in 1973, he told his wife he worked inside. He called her at 9:14 a.m. [on September 11, 2001] from the 105th floor of the south tower. ‘He told my mom he was with about 200 other people, and he was just waiting for the O.K. to head down,’ says Vincent. ‘He told her not to worry, we’re all in God’s hands.’”