As the names of the World Trade Center dead were being read at Ground Zero yesterday, Terry Rockefeller and David Potorti stayed away.

Rockefeller lost her sister, Laura, 40, who was working at Windows on the World restaurant last Sept. 11. Potorti lost his brother, Jim, 52, who worked in the North Tower.

"I've made my peace with that place," Rockefeller told me, explaining that a visit she made to Ground Zero shortly after the attack was enough.

While the city held a grand memorial service in a windswept pit, and the president swept into town to lay a wreath, Terry Rockefeller planned to attend a church service in the morning and spend the afternoon with her elderly parents in White Plains.

"I feel like my mission is what I'm doing here," she said Tuesday night, standing among the thousands who came to a peace vigil in Washington Square Park to say that the murder of 2,801 people a year ago shouldn't be used as a pretext for a war.

Each day new threats come from Washington about a pending war against Saddam Hussein. George W. Bush and his cabinet say Hussein is amassing terrible weapons that he could use against the United States, so we must destroy him before he strikes. These claims are made despite the skepticism of most of the world's leaders, and despite the conclusion of the UN's top weapons inspector just this week that Hussein, dreadful as he is, possesses no such weapons.

"It's personally upsetting right now to have it discussed so heatedly at the occasion of this anniversary," Rockefeller complained.

The war talk upsets Potorti, too.

"I'm always hearing the same thing, that we have to use this anniversary to continue more violence," he said.

The two drove here from Boston the other day, where Rockefeller lives and where Potorti had spoken on a panel on alternatives to war. Britain's Tony Blair came on the radio, trying to link the Iraqi leader to the crime that killed their siblings.

"He was taking advantage of our emotions to justify an invasion of Iraq," Potorti said. "I haven't been angry very often, but that made me angry. Like most of the world, I do not understand why we have to get Saddam Hussein."

A slender man with a narrow, sensitive face, Potorti last fall organized people from around the country who lost relatives a year ago. Called "September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows," the group is trying to put a human face on war, to resist the impulse to retaliate for their loved ones' deaths by inflicting violence on innocent people elsewhere.

"We remind people that when we talk about Iraq, there are 23 million Iraqis, and only one Saddam Hussein," Potorti said.

Feeling no need "to walk into the pit and be handed a rose" yesterday, he instead scheduled a series of interviews with foreign journalists, who've told him that the only voice they seem to hear from the United States these days is George W. Bush's.

On the eve of yesterday's activities, Washington Square Park filled with parents and their children, high school and college students, the middle-aged and the elderly, who believe that a time of national mourning shouldn't be hijacked by warmongers.

Sitting on a park bench, Rockefeller told me about her sister, Laura. She was an actress, Rockefeller said, who had performed in a number of Off-Broadway shows, while doing freelance jobs during the day. She'd graduated from Syracuse University's theater school and had lived on Manhattan's West Side for 19 years. She was single, walked her dog in Riverside Park, had a beautiful singing voice and a large community of friends.

"She was my only sibling, and I find it amazing that, at 52, I'm now an only child," she told me.

Of his brother Jim, Potorti said, "He was my big brother. We all shared a room when we were kids, and he would make up these imaginary stories that would make us laugh. After he died, I remembered him teaching me to ride my bicycle, pushing me in my go-cart on the street where we used to live. A couple of times people wanted to beat me up in school, and he saved me."

"The really sad thing is that I have a 2-year -old son who my brother was just getting to know. My son has one less person to love him now. I have one less person to love me."

Copyright © 2002, Newsday, Inc.

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