There were quite a few fires. The Jews began to fear a conflagration, like the one in Crakow in 1850. But while houses sometimes burned, no one was killed or even injured until the Koscielny Place blaze. This occurred at Number 80, a large house, four stories, with many families living inside. In a single room at the front of the second story resided Professor Potash, his wife, and his wife’s unmarried brother and sister. On February 16, which turned out to be the coldest day of that winter, Madame Potash picked up armfuls of her husband’s books—the bookcase itself having long since been burned, along with the bedstead and the chest of drawers—and threw them into the stove. When the professor returned from his job at the Statistical Office and learned what had happened to his Schiller, to his Grillparzer first edition, he lost control of his senses. Off came his jacket and his shirt and his gold wedding band; with bare hands he groped in the hot iron stove. Then he began to throw the charred, red-rimmed pages over his shoulder onto the floor. Thus the tragic fire began. The rug caught first, then a mattress which lay on the rug, and then with a whoosh one of the curtains. Madame Dickstein, the sister-in-law, made the mistake of pushing open the window: freezing air rushed through like a bellows. Before you knew it the room was in flames.

The alarm went out to Smugowa Street, which was the headquarters of the Jewish Fire Brigade. The company owned two pieces of equipment: a bright red pumper, the duplicate of the one shown at the Grodno Exposition, 1922, and a ladder truck, which was steered in the back as well as the front. The members of the brigade were friends and relations of Rievesaltes, all of whom—Faybush, Bloygrund, Pfeffer, and the rest—received extra rations because of their dangerous work.

By the time the first vehicle arrived—it was the pumper, with Faybush at the wheel—the sun, already low on the horizon, suddenly dropped like a man into a manhole, and the only light on Koscielny Place came from the shooting flames. Awful vision! Jews, the tenants of Number 80, stood in the street, their faces black and scorched. More Jews were bunched on the neighboring rooftops, wringing out towels on top of sparks. From the second floor, where the fire was all about them, Madame Dickstein and Madame Potash were calling for help. One story higher, a family, the Bloomgardens, a mother and father, the four little children, were squeezed into the windowframe.

“Sisters! Sisters!” Dickstein, the brother, had just returned from his job in the millworks and was howling. “We shall be homeless!”

The pumper pulled up to the front of the burning building. Faybush jumped out, and with Bloygrund, a Rievesaltes first cousin, unwound the metal-tipped hose. Meanwhile, more firemen dropped off the back of the machine and, in their black and yellow slickers, ran without fear into Number 80’s front door. A cheer went up from the freezing crowd. “What a good thing we live in the Ghetto,” said one among them. And others nodded, saying, “Now we have our own policemen. And fire fighters who are Jews!”