In an emotional segment looking back on 9/11, the ladies of The View recounted where they were when news broke of the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. While Whoopi Goldberg was returning from filming Hollywood Squares that morning and Sunny Hostin was presenting a case, Joy Behar revealed during Thursday’s (Sept. 11) broadcast that she was backstage of The View with Barbara Walters, watching news coverage of the attacks.

“We were in the makeup room,” Behar explained after Goldberg asked if The View was on the air when the attacks occurred. “We saw the plane hit, we thought it was just a rogue plane. Barbara was there and everybody.”

She added, “My daughter was on a plane and she was going to school and I called her and I said, ‘Get off the plane.’ Because you didn’t know if there were more planes. And they didn’t want her to get off the plane, they were locked down. And she got off the plane.”

She continued, “I was worried about that. It was a terrible, terrible day. We only thought it was one rogue plane but then you saw the second plane, and then, you know.”

Hostin also recounted how “terrifying” that day was for her.

“I am old enough to remember that day because I was in front of a Grand Jury presenting a case and I remember the U.S. Marshalls coming in flack jackets and leading us out into an underground system of tunnels that I didn’t know existed in D.C.,” she told her co-hosts.

“And my family was in New York, and my husband was in Pennsylvania,” Hostin recounted. “The phones went out and you couldn’t reach anybody. It was terrifying.”

Sara Haines noted that she was working as a page at NBC at the time, where she remembered seeing the “overwhelming” smoke coming from downtown. But there was a silver lining, she said.

“As tragic as it was, there was this biblical togetherness afterwards that I said if I had walked up to a stranger without any hello, I could have embraced them and they would embraced me back,” she shared. “That lasted for a while, and it was the most beautiful I’d ever seen New York.”

Alyssa Farah Griffin remembered the same, noting that this is an important result of the attacks that should be highlighted for younger generations.

“I think reminding them of that togetherness afterward, it didn’t last forever. We had the global wars on terror, we had the division that came with that, but there was a period in this country where we were one united America,” she said.

The View airs on weekdays at 11/10c on ABC.