Entry 3: September 12, 2026 -- The People Left Waiting
There are days when history stops being something we read about and becomes something we remember exactly where we were when it happened. September 11, 2001, is one of those days for me.
My children were still very young. I was home that morning, working on a biography of Thomas Edison, when my wife came rushing in and asked if I had heard what was happening. I hadn't. I turned on the television and, like millions of people around the world, watched something I could hardly comprehend. Twenty-five years later, I still remember that morning.
But yesterday, on the anniversary of September 11, I found myself thinking about another moment—one I could never have imagined back then. Last August, while Bill Doll, the director of the show, and I were in New York for the Off-Off-Broadway run of Undesirable Secrets at Theater for the New City's Dream Up Festival, we visited the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. It was one of those unexpected experiences that comes with taking a play somewhere. You arrive to perform one story and suddenly find yourself standing inside another.
It wasn't my first time at the site. Years earlier, when I was teaching theatre in Michigan, I brought a group of students to New York. Ground Zero was still a very different place then. I remember the photographs. The handwritten descriptions. The flyers that still hung on fences asking if anyone had seen a husband, wife, son, daughter, brother, sister, friend.
I remember the stillness. And I remember thinking about the people who had put those flyers there. They were waiting for someone to come home. Years later, Anthony would bring me back to that feeling.
During my early research for the play, I began to understand that Anthony's diary was more than a record of what happened at Berga. For some families, those pages contained something they had spent decades searching for. One of those families was the family of Bernard “Jack” Vogel, who died at Berga. Anthony recorded Jack's death in his diary, and decades later, what he had written helped the Vogel family learn more about what had happened to the man they had lost.
That discovery eventually became one of the moments in the play that affects me most deeply. Anthony could not save Jack Vogel. As a medic, there was very little he could do for so many of the men who were dying around him. But he could write down Jack's name. He could record what happened. And without knowing whether anyone would ever read those words, Anthony preserved something that, many years later, would finally make its way home to Jack's family.
That was a connection I fully understood when I first stood at Ground Zero all those years ago, and one I understand even more deeply today. I had seen the photographs and the flyers still hanging from the fences. I had read the handwritten pleas asking whether anyone had seen a husband, a wife, a son, a daughter. I understood then that behind every photograph was someone waiting, someone wondering, someone hoping that the person they loved might somehow still walk through the door. And when that hope was gone, there remained another need that was just as human: to know what happened.
Years later, Anthony's diary brought me back to that same place in an entirely different way. The families of the men at Berga had also waited. Letters stopped arriving. Sons, husbands, brothers, and fathers disappeared into a war thousands of miles from home, while the people who loved them were left with questions. Some of those questions would remain unanswered for years. Others, perhaps, forever.
That is why Anthony's diary matters to me in a way I don't think I completely understood when I began writing this play. Anthony wasn't sitting in Berga thinking about preserving history. He was writing down the names of men he knew, men he tried to care for, men he watched suffer and die. What he could not have known was that somewhere thousands of miles away there were families waiting for those men, and that one day the words he was putting onto those pages might give one of those families something they had been searching for.
The journalist who helped bring that part of Anthony's story to a much larger audience was Wayne Drash. Wayne wrote an extraordinary piece for CNN about Anthony, his diary, and the Vogel family's search to learn what happened to Jack. Years later, our own paths would cross because of Anthony, and I am grateful that Wayne will be with us in New York for our Second Sunday Conversation, where we'll talk about veterans, journalism, memory, and what it means to preserve these stories while those who lived them are still here to tell them.
Perhaps that is another one of those unexpected places this journey has taken me. I could never have imagined, standing before those fences at Ground Zero with my theatre students, that years later I would be writing and performing the story of a man whose small wartime diary had given another family an answer to a question they had carried for decades.
History records what happened. But families remember who was there. And sometimes a photograph on a fence, a name written in a diary, or a few words preserved by someone who understood that a life mattered can keep a person from disappearing into history.
There are days when history stops being something we read about and becomes something we remember exactly where we were when it happened. September 11, 2001, is one of those days for me.
My children were still very young. I was home that morning, working on a biography of Thomas Edison, when my wife came rushing in and asked if I had heard what was happening. I hadn't. I turned on the television and, like millions of people around the world, watched something I could hardly comprehend. Twenty-five years later, I still remember that morning.
But yesterday, on the anniversary of September 11, I found myself thinking about another moment—one I could never have imagined back then. Last August, while Bill Doll, the director of the show, and I were in New York for the Off-Off-Broadway run of Undesirable Secrets at Theater for the New City's Dream Up Festival, we visited the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. It was one of those unexpected experiences that comes with taking a play somewhere. You arrive to perform one story and suddenly find yourself standing inside another.
It wasn't my first time at the site. Years earlier, when I was teaching theatre in Michigan, I brought a group of students to New York. Ground Zero was still a very different place then. I remember the photographs. The handwritten descriptions. The flyers that still hung on fences asking if anyone had seen a husband, wife, son, daughter, brother, sister, friend.
I remember the stillness. And I remember thinking about the people who had put those flyers there. They were waiting for someone to come home. Years later, Anthony would bring me back to that feeling.
During my early research for the play, I began to understand that Anthony's diary was more than a record of what happened at Berga. For some families, those pages contained something they had spent decades searching for. One of those families was the family of Bernard “Jack” Vogel, who died at Berga. Anthony recorded Jack's death in his diary, and decades later, what he had written helped the Vogel family learn more about what had happened to the man they had lost.
That discovery eventually became one of the moments in the play that affects me most deeply. Anthony could not save Jack Vogel. As a medic, there was very little he could do for so many of the men who were dying around him. But he could write down Jack's name. He could record what happened. And without knowing whether anyone would ever read those words, Anthony preserved something that, many years later, would finally make its way home to Jack's family.
That was a connection I fully understood when I first stood at Ground Zero all those years ago, and one I understand even more deeply today. I had seen the photographs and the flyers still hanging from the fences. I had read the handwritten pleas asking whether anyone had seen a husband, a wife, a son, a daughter. I understood then that behind every photograph was someone waiting, someone wondering, someone hoping that the person they loved might somehow still walk through the door. And when that hope was gone, there remained another need that was just as human: to know what happened.
Years later, Anthony's diary brought me back to that same place in an entirely different way. The families of the men at Berga had also waited. Letters stopped arriving. Sons, husbands, brothers, and fathers disappeared into a war thousands of miles from home, while the people who loved them were left with questions. Some of those questions would remain unanswered for years. Others, perhaps, forever.
That is why Anthony's diary matters to me in a way I don't think I completely understood when I began writing this play. Anthony wasn't sitting in Berga thinking about preserving history. He was writing down the names of men he knew, men he tried to care for, men he watched suffer and die. What he could not have known was that somewhere thousands of miles away there were families waiting for those men, and that one day the words he was putting onto those pages might give one of those families something they had been searching for.
The journalist who helped bring that part of Anthony's story to a much larger audience was Wayne Drash. Wayne wrote an extraordinary piece for CNN about Anthony, his diary, and the Vogel family's search to learn what happened to Jack. Years later, our own paths would cross because of Anthony, and I am grateful that Wayne will be with us in New York for our Second Sunday Conversation, where we'll talk about veterans, journalism, memory, and what it means to preserve these stories while those who lived them are still here to tell them.
Perhaps that is another one of those unexpected places this journey has taken me. I could never have imagined, standing before those fences at Ground Zero with my theatre students, that years later I would be writing and performing the story of a man whose small wartime diary had given another family an answer to a question they had carried for decades.
History records what happened. But families remember who was there. And sometimes a photograph on a fence, a name written in a diary, or a few words preserved by someone who understood that a life mattered can keep a person from disappearing into history.