I had to sit down on the curb, I was so weak, and there was blood running past me over my shoes, it was water from the fire hoses mixed with blood, it was like a river of blood running past me, it was so terrible, and I just sat there letting it run over my shoes and I couldn’t even open my mouth anymore like I forgot how to talk English and I just watched. Everywhere on the street there was money. Coins from everyone’s pockets, because it was payday and so in their pockets and their stockings they had their money, and it fell out from the pay packets or wherever they were carrying it, and it was all over the street. They told us before we came here, in America the streets are paved with gold, and this day it was true, but so terrible, to see this money in the gutter. For what did they work so hard, but to have this money?

There were three girls Sam helped to step up onto the sill, one at a time, it was like slow motion suddenly even though it was all in a minute, and it was very narrow, not such an easy place to stand, and you could see there was hardly any window ledge, and there were flames behind them shooting out of the window, and he helped each one of them get up to the sill, he would give her a hand and help her to stand up straight and calm and steady and then he would let go each one of them, and each girl would just fall away and then the next girl would come in her place, and they were just falling out that window, one after the other, with Sam to help them, three times he did this, and then I looked at the window again and what did I see but Sam, he was a good man, such a decent man, and there was my sister standing beside him. And he helped her up and then she waited for him and he got up onto the ledge too, and he took her arms and he put them around his neck like to hold on in the ocean, and he put his arms around my sister, and they kissed each other, and then together they jumped.

That’s it. I have said all I remember about that terrible day until the next thing I know, when I am waking up in the hospital with the pain and there are all the clean white sheets on me, and the doctors and the nurses are telling me how lucky I am to be alive, how lucky it is that my baby is safe inside of me, and also they are telling me what I already know, about Sam, and about my sister, that he is dead and that my sister Pauline is dead, and I am alone.

—Transcribed recollections of Esther Gottesfeld, from Remembering the Triangle Factory Fire Fifty Years Later, March 25, 1961, commemorative booklet published by the ILGWU, New York City