Brooklyn teachers who witnessed 9/11 as children reveal what they want the next generation to remember

When Americans mark 25 years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks on Friday, Kathleen Palladino will remember the day through the eyes of a New York City 6-year-old who did not yet understand what she was seeing.

Palladino was a kindergartner when classmates suddenly began being called over the school PA system to go home.

Eventually, her mother arrived to collect Palladino and her older sister, and as they walked home, the little girl looked toward Manhattan.

“It was like a dividing line,” Palladino recently told Fox News Digital. “From the bridge backwards was just blackness.”

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The other side of the afternoon sky remained clear and blue.

“Mommy, why is the sky black?” Palladino remembers asking. “She just kept squeezing my hand, and we just kept going,” she said.

A quarter-century later, Palladino teaches nursery school at St. Patrick Catholic Academy in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where her 3-year-old students were born more than two decades after the attacks that shaped their teacher’s childhood.

She is one of several educators at the school whose memories of 9/11 stretch back to their own school days.

As the nation remembers Friday, they are teaching children about an event that remains deeply personal to them but that their students know only as history.

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Their principal, Kathy Curatolo, carries an even more personal connection — she watched one of the towers collapse from a school roof that morning, unaware her youngest brother, 31-year-old FDNY firefighter Robert Curatolo, was underneath it.

For Palladino’s young students, the lessons begin simply.

“I don’t go into the events of 9/11,” she said. “They are too young, and the scope of what happened is just beyond their understanding right now.”

Instead, she teaches them what they can do when someone is hurting.

“Can we clean up our toys without being asked? Can we go give them a hug?” she said. “Anything to show the ones that we love that we’re here for them.”

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For fourth-grade teacher Elizabeth Giacchino, 9/11 begins in her memory with a ringing telephone.

Giacchino was a sixth grader at Our Lady of Guadalupe School in Brooklyn when her teacher answered a call and told the class something had happened involving the Twin Towers.

“So many of my classmates around me just started screaming and crying because they had family members that were working in the city,” she said.

Outside the window, Giacchino could see smoke. Parents began arriving, but Giacchino and her older sister remained because their mother worked at the school.

“All I wanted to do was just be with my family at that time,” she said.

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Years later, after becoming a teacher herself, another memory took on new meaning. Giacchino remembered how calm her own teacher had remained while children cried a