Witness: No, I said it was like a nightmare. That’s what it was. A nightmare.

Steuer: Thank you very much, Mrs. Gottesfeld. Very good. Now, will you tell us again about your experience of the fire in the Triangle Waist Company?

Witness: What do you mean?

Steuer: Tell us everything you have just told us.

Witness: All over?

Steuer: If you can. In your own words of course. You are telling your story in your own words?

Witness: I got all my own words to tell this story. Even if my English isn’t so excellent. You think I borrow somebody else’s words? This is what happened. I am sewing at my machine, and there are just two left sleeves to finish and then I am done. Mr. Jacobs just gave us our pay packets for the week’s work, so that’s what I am doing, putting them into my stocking to be safe, when there is a big noise behind me, like nothing I ever hear before, some kind of explosion. And what do we see everywhere? Flames! And now there are windows coming apart from the fire, and everyone is screaming, and there are flames everywhere on the walls and they come across the floor, like water flowing, like a river of flames. And first everyone is quiet for one moment like a statue but then everyone is trying at once to go out, and the girls, they are climbing up on the tables to get out, and their skirts are getting caught in the machines, and everywhere is people going on fire and stuck and not able to get out. It was a madhouse.

Steuer: And then what happened?

Witness: Mr. Grannick, he’s a cutter, like I told you before, he gets up on a chair to announce a plan maybe but nobody can hear, with the noise and confusion. And there are these Italian sisters just screaming and praying, so I push past them, I’m sorry, but I had to, I never seen them alive again after that, and I see all these girls with their hair on fire and their clothes on fire, and everyone is coughing and choking, and the smell is so terrible now, you can smell the burning hair and that smell of burning flesh I will never forget the rest of my life, and then I see all these girls at the Washington Place door. This door, it opened in, we all knew that, but with all the panic and pushing, nobody could open the door. Everyone was in a panic with the smell of everything burning, hair and clothing and the black smoke everywhere, and everyone is choking, and they were all pushing at once, all the girls. So then I got this thought about the other door on the Greene Street side, by the freight elevators, those elevators, they didn’t run on Saturday and so maybe that is why nobody else thought to go that way. So I go right through the flames to get across to go there by that door, because I see Morris Jacobs with a waist wrapped around his face so he can breathe, and I follow him. I don’t know why nobody else thinks of this but I don’t remember any other girls behind me. He unlocks this door with a key, I don’t know where he got the key, and he goes in the door, and then before he can close it tight from the other side I push in right after him.