Message from the Museum Director

The National September 11 Memorial & Museum are being built to honor memory and in doing so to educate for a better future.

Providing visitors with access to the historic assets preserved at the World Trade Center site, the Museum will display both the monumental artifacts associated with the events of 9/11 and focus on the human dimension of history by narrating the personal stories behind these events.

In remembering the victims of the attacks and honoring those who went to their rescue, the Museum will explore the very real impact of terrorism in the lives of very real people, and their families, friends, colleagues and communities. As custodian of memory, the Museum will take on the mantle of moral authority that will define its continuing and evolving role. This Museum will do nothing less than underscore the absolute illegitimacy of indiscriminate murder.

It has been said that memorials are the way people make promises to the future about the past. By demonstrating the consequences of terrorism on individual lives and communities, it is our hope that the National September 11 Memorial Museum can embody the promise of a world in which it should be impossible for people to go to work in the morning only to get caught in the vortex of terrorism.

The Museum will be about each of us, about what it means to be a human being, and what it means to live in a complex, global community at the start of the 21st century. It will, we hope, be a place for understanding ourselves and the world in which we live, a place for promising the kind of world we want to bequeath of our children and grandchildren.

Alice M. Greenwald
Executive Vice President for Programs
Director, Memorial Museum

Memorial Museum FAQ »