So loud, like an explosion and something breaking all at once! So I turned around, and my sister next to me, she turned around too, and what did we see? Flames! They were just outside the window on the Greene Street side, they were right there behind me. The flames were coming up from the eighth floor but we didn’t know everybody on the eighth floor was already in a commotion and escaping because that’s where the fire started, and a lot of those girls got out before that big noise which was the windows breaking from the fire, mostly they got out from the eighth floor, but we were on the ninth floor, that’s where I worked already for a year with my sister, we learned English so fast and we had these good jobs and our life in America was a big adventure for us. We thought it was fortunate to work on the ninth floor where the bosses gave a little more pay and the really skilled girls, the fastest workers, they had their machines. Maybe that was never true and it was the same on the eighth floor but this is what we thought. Nobody on our floor knew what was happening right underneath us until those windows blew out. More people could have got out if we knew, but nobody told us. They knew on the tenth floor and they all got out, but one. A lot of people below us and everyone above us got out. Only on the ninth floor it was unlucky to be, because nobody told us.

And so first we had this big explosion and we saw these flames and the girls all around me started to shout and scream, my sister also, and everyone was in a commotion and the flames got bigger at the window and then the flames, they were inside with us, coming along the wall and across the floor like water flowing, I’ve never seen anything like that and I am thinking this is very bad—and the next thing you know the flames were around us, and right next to us, and we can feel this heat like a furnace and at first there was the screaming but nobody was moving, everybody was frozen for a moment, but then there was a rush of all the girls trying to get across the room at once, but they were blocked by the machinery because the big rows of sewing machines were on these long tables with no gaps, they took up so much space and there was no way to pass except at the ends of the rows of tables, and some girls tried to crawl under but there was no room with the pedals and the machinery and they were pushing and there were girls climbing across the tables with their long skirts bunched and getting caught in the machines and they were falling and shoving and everyone was shouting and pushing and grabbing and calling out, and the Italian girls were praying and screaming to each other.