A couple who just made the decision to move in together for the first time made a chilling decision that kept them safe on the day the Twin Towers fell 25 years ago06:55, 11 Sep 2026Updated 06:55, 11 Sep 2026Just days before two planes crashed into the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, a new couple who moved in together for the first time made a chilling decision that would keep them safe. Diana Rodriguez Wallach was just 22 when she moved into a flat in Lower Manhattan with her boyfriend after finishing college in the summer.‌The pair previously lived in Times Square and began to resent the "tourist chaos" that came with living so close to a major attraction in New York City. As a result, they made the decision to get an apartment just five blocks away from the World Trade Center as after 4pm, the streets turned into a ghost town.‌But the couple only got four weeks of their dream before life changed forever overnight. We all know the horror that unfolded at 8.46am on September 11, the deadliest attack on American soil since Pearl Harbour 60 years before. Luckily for Diana and her now husband, they made the quick decision to take a last-minute trip to Prague.‌Diana said: "We were not there on 9/11. We took a vacation to Prague. I was a hotel reporter, and I was managed to get us a stay at the Four Seasons."On that Tuesday, we had lost our luggage, and we finally got our suitcase back on that Tuesday. We're able to put on clean clothes, and it was beautiful and sunny, and we walked around Prague and then came back to our hotel room."My husband's brother called - my husband's youngest of four brothers, and all of them lived in Manhattan at that time. We didn't find out what happened until after the towers fell."‌Content cannot be displayed without consentLearning of the Twin Towers tragedy abroadThe couple flew back to New York as soon as they could after airspace reopened, and arrived home on Saturday morning.Diana continued: "And when you're driving from Jersey, you can see the skyline of Manhattan. And it was dark, and you could see Midtown all lit up and uptown - all the lights on. But then Lower Manhattan was just dark because we had lost power.‌"But what was there were these like temporary floodlights, like you would see at a high school football game, and they were illuminating the pile, and all of the firemen and people who were working around the clock to clean up the site."When we got there on Saturday most of the big, heavy debris had already been cleaned up on our block. And that's partly because we lived so close to the New York Stock Exchange."Just one week before 9/11 Diana said her parents came to the city to see the couple's new apartment and they all went to the World Trade Center.‌She continued: "We were gonna go to the top, like Windows on the World. We already had these like red double-decker bus tickets for my parents. [We said] we'll do Windows on the World another time.Escaping ground zero and rebuilding life in NYC"I remember standing in that lobby with my parents, being like, "can you believe that the like 1993 bombing like happened right here? Isn't that crazy?" And then, you know, a week later, this happened."I'm grateful that we weren't there that day. I know my parents, my husband's parents, everyone would have been devastated and sick with worry. My husband only worked a block away from the towers, so he used to walk to work and I know for a fact he would have been in that dust cloud if we had been home that day."Article continues belowThe couple explained how they continued to live in the area for two years following the attack, after landlords began offering tenants between $6,000 (£4,400) to $12,000 (£7,300) to live in the area.Diana explained: "But our building was habitable. There was just a very strong military presence all around it. It also was like this time where you felt like if you moved out, you were letting the bad guys win."Like, that is what President Bush said over and over again: 'We need to show the world that New York City wasn't knocked down'. And they wanted us to ride the subway, and stay in our apartments, and go out to restaurants, and help the redevelopment of Lower Manhattan by contributing to the economy."