I think everyone (or almost everyone) around the world was shocked beyond belief and have this moment burned into their brains despite it being more about American history.
I'll never forget how I first heard about it. I was in 8th grade and we used to have quiet reading time on Tuesday mornings (it was a mandatory thing for high school students). My form room teacher would always make sure we were actually reading books and not textbooks, and so that day I took a book that was called moonlight something. This is the only thing I can remember of the book and it was so poignant that that was the passage I happened to be reading as the first plane flew into the first tower. The story was set in the early 1940's, and the narrator was a girl was describing that her usually happy-go-lucky teacher, was in tears and inconsolable one day and it turned out that the reason was because she had just gotten word that her boyfriend was killed during the attack on Pearl Harbor. That is literally the only part of the book I remember. And I also never finished the book because I was too traumatized by the coincidence. Pretty much as soon as I was done reading the passage my friend's sister walked into the room and asked our teacher to speak to her. That's when she told her that her class had been listening to the radio and heard about what was happening in NYC. Its safe to say that the rest of the school day was a blur and we were all in a panic (adults too). We had a special assembly at like 1 p.m. and our principal explained what happened and also explained that we will all feel the blow, especially us with such close proximity with the US, not to mention that at the time we had no idea if the attacks affected any Bahamian ex-pats that may have been living in the US/NYC. By the end of her speech, although it was supposed to be for informative purposes, I was convinced that there was chance that we would be attacked too. I just figured, in my teenage way of rationalising things, if someone could attack a big country like the US, what could stop them from attacking us? What if they tried to force their way into our little country to "setup office" just to coordinate more attacks on the US? We were let out of school early and well the rest is the similar story as everyone else's. Every single channel on the TV was news broadcast, so TV was not an escape.
I don't think I will ever forget what happened that day, or what I saw on TV. The world was at standstill, and all we are left to do is to continue to pray for all those who lost loved ones that day in this brutal act against humanity.