He Survived 9/11. Now His Kids Fight an Even Deadlier Enemy.

FDNY Captain Jay Jonas was leading Ladder Company 6 up the burning north tower of the World Trade Center when a woman whose clothes had burned off descended past them.

Jonas saw that a man had given the woman his sport coat and was helping her down towards safety.

“That was the spirit in the stairway all the way through,” he would later say. “We were facing something terrifying and we were going to get through it together.”

Jonas and his were continuing on up when an earthquake-like rumbling signaled that the south tower had collapsed. He told his men that the time had come to turn around. They had just started back down when an official order to evacuate came over the radio.

Near the 20th floor, Jonas and Ladder 6 came upon a woman who needed their assistance. They brought 59-year-old Josephine Harris down even though it slowed them down. And in what Jonas would later call “a freak in timing,” they were unknowingly saving themselves by saving her.

Had the firefighters been just a few steps faster, they would not have been at a particular spot on the fourth floor of the stairway when there came a far bigger and louder rumbling. They survived unhurt in a void as 106 stories fell on top of them. An improbable ray of sunlight showed the way as they climbed out of the rubble with the woman they came to call a “guardian angel.”

In a realm transformed into twisted steel and acrid smoke and choking dust, FDNY Chief Jim Riches came up to Jonas.

“He asked ‘Did you see Engine 4 today?’” Jonas would later recall. “I said, ‘No, I haven’t.’ He said, ‘My son was working Engine 4.’ That was the first indication of how bad this was going to be.”

Riches’ son, Jimmy, had been killed. Other fathers had lost sons and sons had lost fathers and brothers had lost brothers among the 343 members of the FDNY who had died trying to save the thousands in the towers. Jonas understood how lucky he was to be one of those who lived to return home to his wife Judy and their three kids, 15-year-old Jennifer, 9-year-old John, and 5-year-old Jane.

“He scooped us up and gave us all a big hug,” Jane would recall.

On that day, Jonas could not have imagined that in 19 years, little Jane and John would serve on the front lines as the city faced a prolonged catastrophe that would kill many thousands more than perished on 9/11.

“Who could have seen that coming?” he asked. “I’m proud of them the way they handled it. They not only handled it, they attacked it.”

When the pandemic hit, John was in his third year as an FDNY Emergency Medical Service EMT in the Bronx. He worked some of the same streets his father had as a young fireman when the Bronx was burning.

Only for John it seemed like the Bronx was dying as his ambulance became one of the hundreds whose sirens filled the city around the clock last year. The daily number of 911 emergency medical calls in New York exceeded the record of 5,500 set on 9/11. Calls topped 6,500 three days in a row that March.

“It was just constant,” John told The Daily Beast. “You’d get a call and as soon as you got one, they had another 20 calls they would just hand out to you.”

He responded to one call where another crew had handled a COVID-19 death on the very next floor just a half-hour before. The hospitals became so full that the crews were ordered not to bring in even symptomatic COVID patients if they were stable.

“You kind of told people, ‘You have to stay here now, you can’t go right in because of how bad it is at the hospital,” John recalled.

And COVID-19 was not like other illnesses.

“You could see people’s pulse-oxygen super low and they were talking to you and it was weird they were even able to speak,” John remembered.

He had to administer CPR again and again.

Over and over, he arrived to find the patient was beyond saving—that all he and his partner could do was pronounce the person dead.

“You kind of get numb to it because we did it so often,” he remembered. “I couldn’t even give you a number.”

At the same time, Jane was working as a fledgling nurse at a Manhattan hospital. She was assigned to a step-down unit attached to the medical ICU.

“Dealing with people that were choosing not to be intubated,” she said. “They were coming to us pretty much to die.”

She and her fellow nurses would suit up in full PPE.

“We are all having our fireman moment, getting head to toe in our gear before going into a COVID room,” Jane said.

In what felt like a revival of the universal admiration for first responders after 9/11, people began taking to the streets, windows and rooftops every evening at 7 p.m. to cheer frontline workers such as Jane and John.

“That felt so good,” Jane said. “It really felt like we were going into a war zone and people were cheering us on and it helped.”

The virus raged on and Jane’s step-down unit became part of an expanded medical ICU. Some patients who otherwise would have died got a chance at survival with an ECMO machine that does the work of the heart and lungs. There was also equipment for around-the-clock dialysis to do the work of failed kidneys.

“We were keeping certain people alive, which was nice,” she said. “We were finally seeing some people who could get through. But there are only so many ECMO beds. We were doing our best. We were saving some.”

One constant worry for John and Jane along with all others in the fight against COVID was catching the virus themselves and then giving it to their family. Their mother, Judy, worked as a physical therapist in a nursing home, which put her already at risk. And both she and their father were of an age where they were more susceptible to serious illness. Their father’s lungs had never been the same after the north tower collapsed around him.

John and Jane took to staying with their older sister, Jennifer, who is a school teacher. That lessened worries about their mother and father, but Jay and Judy remained as worried as any parents might be with a son and a daughter on the front lines.

“Those are my babies,” Jay Jonas later said. “As a parent, it’s tough to recognize they’re adults and they’re handling things. You just have to let it happen, let them go with it. ‘They’re serious. They take precautions.’”

He thought back to his own early years.

“Kind of reminds me of what I went through as a young fireman in the South Bronx; ‘Yeah, I went to five fires last night, doesn’t that happen to everybody?’” he told The Daily Beast. “When you’re young like that you want to do more. Every time you go to a fire, ‘All right, when’s the next one? I want to go to the next one?”

Hope was coming in the form of the vaccines, and health-care workers along with first responders were to be among the first recipients. Jay Jonas was now a chief in the FDNY and was, in his own words, “very pro-vaccine.”

But a week before the vaccinations began, he became ill.

“All of a sudden, he’s just not feeling well. ‘I’m going to lay down,’” Jane remembered him saying. “And all of a sudden, he had a fever.”

Her father tested positive, as did her mother the same day. Jane had seen more than enough at work to know what the virus can do.

“I was just so worried,” she said.

The mother held steady and seemed likely to get through it. But the father was having a harder time.

Jane and John took time off from work and became their father’s personal front line. Jon stood ready to provide whatever assistance might be needed as Jane constantly measured her father’s blood oxygen level and used a nebulizer and did whatever she could to keep him out of the hospital.

“I was just afraid he was going to fall down into that rabbit hole,” she later said.

She found herself talking herself off the ledge, telling herself, “All right, we’re going to be fine.”

The pandemic was teaching her the value of the same ability that had kept her father steady in the north tower, enabling him to pause and help a woman during the evacuation rather than just rush on down the stairs.

“If there’s anything I’ve learned during this time it’s that the people who get anxious are not the people who are going to do well,” she said. “You have to stay calm and breathe.”

With Jane and John on the case, their father survived and stayed out of the hospital, as did their mother.

“This was extra impressive,” Jay later said. “When I was sick, when I was in bad shape, she and my son took charge.”

He became all the more proud of Jane when someone so new and young as she was periodically was made the charge nurse on her unit.

“She earned respect,” Jay said.

But in the city streets, Jane and her brother and their fellow health-care workers no longer heard the nightly cheering.

“It was very nice, but people stopped,” she said.

Jane figured people may have grown weary of it and just wanted to return to normal. And where the 9/11 feeling of unity had once spread from New York across the whole country, an alarming divisiveness began to creep into the city.

Jane saw evidence of that when she was off duty, taking her father into her hospital for a CAT to check his lungs, which had been doubly impacted by 9/11 dust and then by COVID. She went off to fetch lunch and encountered some anti-mask protesters right outside the hospital.

“They were telling people to take off their masks, that everybody was like dogs with muzzles,” Jane recalled. “It was infuriating, right outside where people were fighting for their lives. I came back and sat down with my parents and I just broke down in tears.”

Jane kept on as the second waves subsided with the help of masks and social distancing and the vaccines, which the whole Jonas family got as soon as possible. Some in New York dared to think that the pandemic had all but passed.

But too many people in other parts of the country shunned the vaccines and masks in the name of personal liberty even as they were derelict in what Jane believes is their public duty to protect those around them. She witnessed the result of shirking this duty after she joined her boyfriend in moving to Georgia and took a travel nurse position at a small, 100-bed hospital outside Atlanta.

“I went to the land of the unvaccinated, I’ll tell you,” she later reported.

Last month, a record COVD surge hit the hospital, which has no ECMO beds at all.

“People are just dying,” she said.

At least 15 in three weeks in her hospital. Younger people, many with no previous medical problems. “I’ll ask when they’re admitted if they’re still able to talk to me if they’ve been vaccinated,” she said. “It’s always, ‘No.’”

She is more tired than she has ever been.

“But I don’t think I could do something else right now, even though it’s almost like I don’t want to do this any more,” she said. “I need to be doing this.”

She figures that some of what made her become an ICU nurse is the example her father and his fellow first responders set two decades ago.

“9/11 definitely did play a part in that,” she said.

The travel nurse who was 5 on 9/11 is now left feeling a little like her father would have felt if people had just sauntered into the burning towers, insisting it was all a hoax.

“It’s like firemen are trying to get people out of the World Trade Center and people are running in,” she told The Daily Beast. “It’s frustrating and mentally harder dealing with people who could have avoided it.”

Jane has been left to wonder what happened to the spirit that, she has been rightly told, united the whole country in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.

“On 9/11, everyone was doing what they could,” she said. “We need to do that now.”

“Just doing your public health duty, protecting people in your community,” she said. “Even if it means giving up that freedom of choice if you get the vaccine or not.”

On the 20th anniversary of the attack, Jane will be back in New York. As in other years, she will join her family at an annual observance at the Firemen’s Memorial on Riverside Drive in Manhattan. Her brother John will attend as a new member of the Middletown Fire Department.

Everyone in the Jonas clan shares the memory of that big hug when Jay Jonas miraculously returned home after being inside the north tower when it collapsed. They will solemnly mark the loss of so many others who were not so lucky.

The marble memorial is flanked by sculptures representing Duty and Sacrifice, which have sent firefighters racing into danger through the years, never more so than on 9/11. They lost 343 members while meeting absolute evil with absolute good and for a time their spirit united the whole nation.

But Duty and Sacrifice have given too much sway to Disregard and Selfishness as we now face a national calamity that has killed more than 600,000 Americans. The one day total has reached 5,077, approaching double the 2,977 who died on 9/11.

And those who persist in shirking their public health duty risk sacrificing not only themselves but those around them. That makes them too much like the hijackers and too little like the first responders so many anti-vaxxers purport to support.

Some of them will be seeing Jane as patients at the hospital, where she will return after the anniversary, at her breaking point, but still keeping on, her father’s daughter.

“I don’t break easy,” she said.