25 years on: the poignant 9/11 museum that everyone visiting NYC must see

The enormity hits you first, as you descend into the bedrock beneath what remains of the Twin Towers' foundations. In the cavernous Memorial Hall, the 9/11 Museum's largest objects bear witness to the magnitude of destruction: mangled steel columns that once spanned several storeys, one bent into a horseshoe shape that might, in any other museum, be mistaken for a giant sculpture.

The Ladder 3 fire truck, crushed like a toy. A chunk the size of a car ripped from the North Tower's 100-metre broadcast antenna.

Dwarfed by artefacts so large the museum was built around them, you begin to grasp the physical reality behind the headlines. There is nothing sensational, no theatre. Just this hushed, cathedral-like space and the weight of what happened here.

Like many in this 25th anniversary year, I've come to the 9/11 Memorial & Museum for the first time. To be honest, I'd avoided it until now; it can feel easier to sidestep such a sad place.

There's no doubt that the 83,000-plus objects, photographs, videos, oral histories and artworks displayed in the underground exhibition halls add up to an intense experience - overwhelming at times.

The Historical Exhibition, where the day's horrors unfold in unflinching detail, is perhaps the most confronting. You can hear voicemails to and from victims and see (in a separate alcove signposted with warnings) the devastating images of people jumping from the burning towers.

But the museum never wavers from its chief intention: to remember and honour the 2977 people who lost their lives that day.

We linger longest among their belongings, recovered from the debris. These small, broken, everyday objects speak with wrenching eloquence. The passport case carried by 20-year-old Japanese student Toshiya Kuge, flying home after his big American adventure; the pager carried by 24-year-old Andrea Haberman on her first trip to New York; a $2 note, one of a pair carried by 55-year-old South Tower worker Robert Gschaar and his wife Myrta ever since their engagement.

In the Memoriam exhibition the numbers become people, in photographs and stories of every victim. The youngest was just two years old; the oldest was 85. Nearly 3000 lives, each with a name, a face, a family.

The writer travelled at her own expense