[question] Everybody is screaming and yelling all at once and the ones near the smoke, they have faces all red and so many girls started already coughing and choking. So all the girls all around me started to shout and scream, my sister also is screaming, and everyone goes in a commotion, and the flames are coming along the wall and across the floor, and all of a sudden it’s like water flowing toward us but it’s flames, like a river, and all around me is just pandemonium. Now the flames go all around, every which way, and it gets hot like a furnace. But for just a moment, maybe a second but it seems longer, it’s like everybody is a statue, just frozen, but after, all the girls go in a rush, everybody trying to go out at the same instant.

[question] No, I don’t remember anyone saying to me anything about a good way to go out. I heard about the fire escape and how that was a big disaster, and those photographs are so terrible, just so terrible, all twisted and useless like that. A lot of the girls were piling into the elevator, that was a very nice man who ran that elevator, the Italian, Joey Zito, he was friendly with Sam, he always said he would teach Sam fishing, and I know he saved a lot of girls. So now the girls, they’re trying to climb across the tables, but some of them, their long skirts got bunched and they got caught in the machines and now it’s a madhouse, and everywhere the girls are running and screaming and pushing and calling and some girls were praying. Nobody could hear what anyone else was calling out. Mr. Grannick, one of the older garment cutters, he stood up on a chair. He tried to call out something but nobody could even see him except if you were close, because of all the smoke and noise. Maybe he had a good idea of what to do, I know he got out some way, but nobody could understand him plus some of those girls didn’t even speak English anyway. My sister is right with me and we are holding hands together and she is screaming but I am saying to her, Look, we have to find our own way out. There was so much smoke, and then I see a girl with her hair on fire, and I see Rose Gottlieb, she is crying and running this way and that way, and then another one goes running by me with her clothes all burning up, and she is screaming like an animal, not like a human at all, and there is snot all running down her face which is red like a beet, I still remember just what she looked like, poor thing.

[question] I don’t know who she was but I think she couldn’t have lived from that, from what I saw. Did I say yet about the Italian sisters? These sisters, I always noticed them because they were the same age as my sister and me, these girls just stood there screaming, and they’re not moving, and they were blocking the way for everyone, so I go past them, I have to push them to get by, and I never saw them again. I still feel so bad about that, to tell you the truth. I don’t like to think about this so much.