Выживший после терактов 11 сентября Александр Манدل сменил карьеру ради помощи семьям реципиентов трансплантации легких

When 9/11 survivor Alexander Mandl received a double-lung transplant, he said it felt being given a new lease on life — one he knew needed to be filled with meaningful work.  But when he returned to work, he found himself discussing how his e-commerce consulting business could help a client transport chicken cages. After coming within weeks of death, Mandl said he could no longer convince himself that the work was meaningful. He redirected his career toward helping health care innovators and international companies expand across Europe. Mandl viewed his new lungs not only as a gift, but as a responsibility to the anonymous donor whose death made his survival possible. “Somebody passed, left me the lungs, and I just got them, and I feel great,” Mandl said. “I’m going to give myself a chance to try and find something which is more meaningful.” Mandl said his search for purpose also led him to host families of transplant patients and help translate medical information for them at Vall d’Hebron University Hospital, the Barcelona hospital where he received his transplant. The path to that second life began nearly 25 years ago. Mandl’s brush with death on 9/11 In 2001, Mandl was a newlywed who had traveled from France to New York for a training session at his new job with Goldman Sachs. Looking out a window one morning, he saw sheets of paper falling through the sky. For a moment, he thought it might be a ticker-tape parade. But there was no parade. It was 8:46 a.m. on Sept. 11, and American Airlines Flight 11 had just struck the World Trade Center’s North Tower. Upon realizing the scale of the attack, Mandl’s training session was abruptly canceled, leaving him to navigate the streets of lower Manhattan as the attacks unfolded. He made his way to a friend’s apartment only four blocks away from the base of the South Tower.  “In our head, it was OK,” Mandl said. “If there were more planes coming, we thought it was logical to be close to where they already hit.” Every 10 to 15 minutes, Mandl and his friend went to the apartment building’s outdoor observation deck, where they took photographs. During their final visit, the South Tower collapsed, sending a cloud of dust and debris through lower Manhattan. “We saw debris falling,” Mandl said. “Your brain is just not trained to process something like that. It took us about 30 seconds to actually realize what was going on. We took refuge in his apartment and saw the dust coming up, so we were taking T-shirts and taping them to the window to protect ourselves.” Mandl says he was comfortable in the apartment but was eventually told that the southern tip of Manhattan had to be evacuated. So Mandl walked back to his hotel on Lexington Avenue near East 33rd Street. “That was when I started to be exposed to the dust,” Mandl said. Mandl said he was told shortly afterward that conditions in the area were safe. He still needed to complete his training sessions at Goldman Sachs’ Broad Street office, where working phone lines allowed him to communicate with his family. “Walking back for two or three weeks, I suppose I had been breathing too much of it,” Mandl said. When Mandl eventually returned home to his family, his wife quickly noticed the signs. He developed a cough so severe that strangers would stop him in the street and tell him he needed to quit smoking, though Mandl said he had never smoked a cigarette.  “I was in denial,” Mandl said. “People knew I was sick. Progressively, I noticed little things.” “I used to walk my daughter to school, and there was a little hill to get to the school,” he continued. “Every day it got harder and harder to get up that hill.” The grim diagnosis By 2011, Mandl could no longer ignore the warnings. His doctor recognized that there was a problem with his lungs. Mandl said a lung biopsy performed after two years of testing found traces of asbestos. The collapse of the World Trade Center created dust clouds containing asbestos, silica, metals, concrete and glass, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Mandl’s doctors attributed his lung disease to that exposure. “It took me a long time to admit that it was connected,” Mandl said. “I was there, but I felt like more of a witness than a victim. For me, the victims were the nearly 3,000 people who didn’t make it home.” Between his diagnosis and transplant, Mandl said his physical and cognitive condition steadily deteriorated. By February 2025, Mandl said, his condition had become critical. Doctors at Vall d’Hebron University Hospital performed a double-lung transplant that he credits with giving him a second life. “Suddenly, when I woke up from the transplant, I had this moment where all this unfinished business reappeared at once,” Mandl said. “It was like a computer that had been rebooted, sort of a feeling that everything was coming back all at once.” After the transplant, Mandl decided to help people going through experiences like his. “When we came out of this adventure and realized I could run the business, I was like, ‘Why don’t we help families?’” Mandl said. Mandl said he has hosted two families for long-term stays and four for shorter visits. A full-time fitness instructor also lives in his home and provides physical rehabilitation to recovering transplant patients staying on the lower floor. “Now I work towards something which is meaningful,” Mandl said. “It’s a million times more meaningful than chicken cages, right?”