“No single day,” as the poet Virgil wrote in words burned into the wall of a 9/11 Memorial and Museum, will erase the victims of the attacks “from the memory of time.”

But on the 23rd anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the families who gather each year in Lower Manhattan for the annual remembrance ceremony are grappling not only with the grief for the loved ones they lost, but also with the fear that the significance of the day is fading from public memory.

On Wednesday morning at the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum, grieving families held up photos of their loved ones as bells tolled at key moments of the attack, beginning at 8:46 a.m., when hijacked American Airlines Flight 11 struck the World Trade Center. The toll continued to mark the moments when the South Tower and the Pentagon were hit, the Twin Towers collapsed, and hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania.

After all these years, relatives who attended Wednesday’s memorial told amNewYork Metro that they fear future generations will forget the impact the catastrophic attacks had on the country and millions of people.

“It’s not just 9/11. I live every day with pain, with the emptiness of my brother in my heart,” said Anthoula Katsimatidis, who lost her brother John Katsimatidis that morning. “There seems to be a new wave of people who weren’t there 20 years ago, and it’s scary. This was the largest terrorist attack on American soil that has ever happened in this country. It’s not something that happened anywhere else. It happened here, and we’re in the place where thousands of people lost their lives. If we don’t educate people, we’re doomed to let history repeat itself.”

Katsimatides remembers her brother as a cheerful, spirited and funny 31-year-old bond broker who worked on the 104th floor for Cantor Fitzgerald. He was one of more than 600 Cantor Fitzgerald employees killed in the attack.

The sheer vibrancy of his personality gave her comfort and hope that he would come home on that terrible morning of September 11. She held on to that hope for a month, but he never came home, one day he was simply gone.

“I knew he would come home – I had no doubts. I remember crying and falling to my knees when the towers fell, because I was crying for my city. I was crying for all those people who were killed that day and still had hope that he would come back. I think I held on to that hope for a month. We never received anything,” said a tearful Katsimatis, who then argued for the meaning of the annual commemoration.

“It’s important to hear the names of our loved ones because it makes the world population watching this event realize that these were real people. This is where they lost their lives. This is where they lost their souls,” she added.

Magaly Lemagne also emphasized the meaning of the phrase “never forget.” She mourns her brother, Port Authority official David Lemagne, who was killed in the September 11 terrorist attacks after making the ultimate sacrifice to save others.

David Lemagne, 27, had been on the job for only nine months when he saw the first plane hit the North Tower from Exchange Place in Jersey City. Also, working as a paramedic with experience from the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, he resisted orders to deploy to Liberty State Park and instead ran headlong into the Twin Towers, where he lost his life.

“He says, ‘I know what I’m doing. I have to go there.’ So he responded here in a car with someone else, and we got pictures of… I think we got it two years later… of him saving someone. But when the second tower collapsed, he died,” Lemagne said. “When we got that picture. He wasn’t scared. He was doing his job. He was carrying a woman, and they used a door as a makeshift stretcher.”

Lemagne brought her 13-year-old son to the memorial. He was named after his uncle, she said.

“He did what he loved to do, and that was save people,” Lemagne said. “He made a sacrifice that day, so I will always be there on September 11th.”

In addition to the families of the 9/11 victims, President Joe Biden and the two candidates who want to succeed him in the November elections: Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, were also present at the ceremony on Wednesday.

Former mayors Mike Bloomberg, who now chairs the board of the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, and Rudy Giuliani, who oversaw the Sept. 11 attacks, stood alongside Biden, Harris, Trump and other dignitaries at the start of the ceremony.

Mayor Eric Adams, who tested positive for COVID-19 earlier this week, laid a memorial wreath at Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s official residence.