Three

STRUGGLE

IRENE MORDARSKI was seated patiently at her desk in the back of Room 208, listening to Sister Canice’s history lesson, watching an electric wall clock above the blackboard tick away the final half-hour of school.

Like many of her classmates, Irene’s parents had been born in Europe and survived World War II. Her father had served in the Polish army, had been taken prisoner by the Germans, and had later escaped from a concentration camp. Still, Irene had little liking of history, even though she herself was a naturalized citizen of the United States. “It’s my least favorite subject,” she would often remind her girlfriends.

Sister Canice had already told her pupils there would be a history quiz later in the week, and Irene knew she would have to study. She was hoping something would happen so they wouldn’t have to take the test. Her wishful thinking was suddenly interrupted when the room’s two wooden doors started rattling.

“Must be ghosts,” whispered one boy, and some of the girls giggled. Another boy sitting near Irene stood up from his desk, curious to see what was causing the strange sound. He walked over to the back door.

“There’s smoke in the hallway!” he exclaimed.

Sister Canice walked to the front door and opened it. A cloud of black smoke swirled into the room. She slammed the door shut, but almost immediately more smoke began seeping in through the partially opened glass transoms and cracks around the two doors. Irene and her forty-six classmates stopped giggling. As more smoke poured into the room, they started rising from their seats, looking nervously at their nun.

“Just sit tight,” said Sister Canice. “The janitor’s probably done something with the furnace.”

The nun’s speculation, of course, was in error—the coal-burning furnace in the basement was working just fine. The truth of the situation at that moment was much more fearsome. The janitor was running into the rectory, yelling to the housekeeper to call the Fire Department, as flames and smoke roared unchecked up the back stairway adjacent to Room 208.

Within seconds the scene inside the classroom began to change rapidly. Smoke passing through the transoms was turning thicker. The children began coughing, confused by the sudden turn of events.

For the moment everyone was silent. Sister Canice could feel her heart starting to pound as her mind raced for answers. A fire was burning somewhere in the building. But how? The fire alarm had not sounded, even though at that moment it no longer mattered. The hallway outside was already impassable. The only way out now was through the windows. Stay calm. Maintain order. Don’t lose control. The Fire Department will come. Everything will be all right.

The room was quickly turning warmer and darker. The children were getting nervous. Sister Canice clutched the silver crucifix hanging from her neck. “We mustn’t panic,” she said. “Get down on your knees. Say a prayer. The firemen will come.”

The nun meant well. It was a natural reaction for her, at first, to have her pupils seek divine help. But as conditions inside the room quickly worsened, prayers were discarded, replaced by the instinct for survival. One boy jumped up from his desk. “I’m not staying here any longer.” Impulsively, he and the others rushed to the four windows overlooking the alley. Sister Canice followed. So did Irene. But the girl’s approach to the last window on the west end of the room was blocked by a crowd of classmates who had jammed themselves in front of the sill. Those nearest the windows threw up the sashes and leaned out into the fresh, clean air. They began screaming. “The school’s on fire! The school’s on fire!”

The room was growing hotter with each passing second. The old paint covering its worn, wooden walls was changing color—from white to tan to brown. Irene was gasping for air. She yanked a handkerchief from the breast pocket of her navy blue uniform and pressed it against her face, trying desperately to breathe through it. That day was the first time she had ever worn nylon stockings to school, and in the morning, she had slipped on a pair of bobby socks over the stockings to keep out the cold. Heat in the classroom was becoming unbearable, and she could feel the nylons melting to her legs.

Suddenly the big round globe lights that hung from the ceiling began popping from the intense heat, sending shards of glass crashing to the floor. The students dropped to their knees, terrified. Irene now became aware of the crescendo of screams coming not only from her room but from the other classrooms in the stricken school. The screams were loud, chilling. Irene would remember them for the rest of her life.

Then it happened—a bright orange flash followed by a loud, thunderous boom. The fire exploded into the room. It crashed in the doors and burst through the walls. Flames swarmed unhindered across the flammable ceiling tile, spilling like a molten waterfall down to the floor, devouring everything in their path. They ate away at the old wooden flooring and swallowed up desks, tables, and wall hangings. The fire started grabbing the scrambling figures trying to outrun it.

Irene fell to her hands and knees. She could feel her skin burning. She had only seconds to get out of the room. Thoughts of her parents flashed through her mind. Stanley and Amalia Mordarski, Polish and Austrian by birth, had brought her to the United States in 1952, when she was just six years old. She thought of her little sister, Monica, a first-grader downstairs.

I’ve got to get out for them, Irene reasoned with youthful logic. If I die, what will they do?

With a sudden surge of energy, the girl sprang up and pushed her way through the pile of children bunched in front of her, stepping over those who had passed out or were already dead. Crawling over desks and chairs, she made her way to the window. Then she felt a tug on her shoulder. It was Sister Canice.

“Quick,” the nun beckoned. “Get up here!”

A high radiator sat next to the windowsill, and with the help of her nun Irene managed to climb up and gain access to the ledge. Dense smoke was obscuring her vision. She couldn’t see her classmates descending the ladder placed at the room’s east window by Mario Camerini and Max Stachura. At least one boy had already jumped from another window near the front of the room, breaking a leg as he landed on the sloping roof of a basement window enclosure that shortened his fall.

Irene looked down at the hard gravel and asphalt surface twenty-five feet below. The drop was daunting. A neighbor had propped another ladder directly beneath the windowsill. But it was a few feet short. That’s okay, she thought. I’ll use it anyhow. She stood up on the ledge and pivoted her body around. Then, dangling from the sill, she reached down with her toes, attempting to get a foothold on the ladder’s top rung. Just then the hot fire gases building inside the room ignited and blew out through the windows. The blast caught Irene square in the face, knocking her unconscious. She dropped off the sill, falling straight down, scraping her face all the way against the building’s rough brick wall. She hit the pavement with a crash, shattering her pelvis.

When Irene awoke she was in a daze. She found herself sitting against the north wall of the blazing school, inexplicably clutching a string of white rosary beads. The beads had been in her uniform pocket when she plummeted to the ground; she had no idea how they came to be in her burned hands. Nor did she know how long she’d been lying on the ground—seconds or minutes. She couldn’t remember if she had fallen from the window or was pushed out by Sister Canice.

Irene looked down at her feet. Both of her black suede shoes were missing.

“Oh, my new shoes,” she murmured. “They’re gone.”

Her entire body was numb and hot. The fresh, cold air felt good against her skin. She was drifting euphorically into shock and began to feel an overwhelming sense of relief in having escaped the inferno above. Still, she didn’t feel right; she knew something was wrong.

Her face was cut and bleeding from rubbing against the wall. Her pelvis was fractured in two places. Both her legs were covered with second- and third-degree burns—from her knees to a point just above her ankles, where her bobby socks had provided some protection against the searing flames. Her face, arms, and hands were burned.

She looked up dazedly at several of her stunned classmates who were gathering around her.

“Somebody, please help me,” she cried.

IN ROOM 209, Gerry Andreoli was sitting in the second row of desks, near windows overlooking the U-shaped courtway separating the school’s north and south wings. Sister Davidis was teaching a math lesson, charting figures on the blackboard. At full capacity Room 209 held sixty-three students—”wall-to-wall kids,” Sister Davidis would say with resigned good humor. But because of absences there were only fifty-five pupils in place that Monday, thirty-four boys and twenty-one girls.

The first sign of trouble came when Danny Patano rose to begin his daily chore of collecting waste paper from his classmates. When he walked over to pick up the metal basket near the back of the room, the basket for some reason felt hot. At the same time Richard Sacco, another student sitting near the back door, raised his hand.

“Yes?” inquired Sister Davidis.

“Sister, I think I smell something burning.”

Gerry Andreoli and the other eighth-graders turned to see what was happening. Sister Davidis was standing at the front, or west end, of the room and had not detected the odor herself.

“Let’s check it out,” she said.

It was a little before 2:30.

Sister Davidis moved toward the front door, Richard Sacco the back door. The boy was closer, and when he grabbed the knob and opened the door, a mass of heavy smoke looking like large bales of black cotton rolled into the room. When the nun reached the front door, she touched the metal knob but withdrew immediately. It felt red-hot. She and the children were becoming aware of the fire tornado gathering force in the ten-foot-wide hallway separating the upper classrooms in the north wing.

Sister Davidis quickly sized up the predicament she and her students were facing. She knew the odds were against trying to escape through the hallway. If she started her kids out that way, chances were they’d get lost in the smoke, maybe even pass out and be trampled to death. She couldn’t chance it. Her street-smarts took over. She moved into action.

“All right,” she announced. “You boys start gathering up books and start blocking up the cracks at the bottom of the doors. The rest of you stay put.”

The boys responded, grabbing books off the desks and stacking them around the doors to keep out the smoke. When the job was finished, Sister Davidis directed her students to the south windows overlooking the twenty-foot-wide cement courtway.

Gerry Andreoli felt the room growing warmer as he and his classmates crowded near the four windows. In his haste to reach the window on the west end of the room, he had climbed over his nun’s desk, knocking a stack of papers to the floor. He managed to stake out a small space for himself, and it was only then he realized that the occupants in the classrooms across the courtway, in the south wing, were still unaware of the unfolding situation.

“Call to them!” Sister Davidis said.

The eighth-graders began yelling as loud as they could. “The school’s on fire! The school’s on fire!”

Kathy Meisinger was one of those in the opposite classroom. She was staring out her second-floor window, trying to pay attention to a music lesson, when she noticed students across the courtway in the north wing jumping up and down on their desks, looking like they were having a party. It was then she and her classmates heard the screams. They began evacuating their room just as smoke started drifting into the south wing. The fire alarm had not yet sounded, and the occupants in the room directly below Kathy’s remained oblivious to the excited shouts. Sister Davidis told her students to start throwing pencils at the lower windows. When the teacher there heard them bouncing off the glass, she knew something was wrong. Sister Davidis’s students were not in the habit of hanging out windows, throwing pencils.

At that moment Sister Davidis heard a loud crack. She turned to see that the glass transoms above the doors were shattering from the intense heat. A wave of flames came pouring into the room, spreading across the acoustical wheat-fiber ceiling tile. A small canopy was located a few feet below the room’s back window. Eddie Maggerise turned to his nun. “Sister, it’s not far. Can I go?”

Sister Davidis yelled back. “If you can make it, jump.”

He could and did. After dropping himself to the canopy, the boy jumped down to the ground. He looked up to his nun in the smoke-filled window. She leaned out to shout him an order. “Go get help!”

Eddie ran to the front of the courtway. He climbed over the high iron picket fence and took off running.

Sister Davidis stayed with her students at the windows. The smoke was getting worse, obscuring her vision. The heat was intensifying. The flames were flowing across the ceiling. The room was growing dark. She feared one of her charges might stray from her sight. She felt herself losing consciousness. She forced her head out the window, gasping for air.

“Smoke’s coming through the floor!” yelled one of the boys, more astonished than frightened as he pointed to an opening around a radiator pipe.

“Just keep your heads out,” the nun said.

Gerry Andreoli had spent all his grammar school years at Our Lady of the Angels. But behind his shy demeanor was a sense of fierce determination, one that would carry him through his ordeal. He would be one of the last pupils to escape the inferno inside Room 209, and one of the most critically burned students to survive the catastrophe. With time slipping away and flames bearing down, he glanced at the forbidding cement courtway two and a half stories below. It looked awfully far.

SAM TORTORICE had just returned home to his two-flat on Hamlin Avenue, directly across the street from Our Lady of the Angels Church. He had spent the day shopping, and he was reaching inside his car to collect his grocery bags when he noticed the pungent odor of burning wood. Tortorice, forty-two, was short, dark haired, and wore glasses. He looked up in the direction of the smell. It was strong. He took only a few steps before he saw a cloud of black smoke rolling from the top of the parish school. Inside were his two daughters, thirteen-year-old Rose and eleven-year-old Judy.

Tortorice took off running for the burning building. When he reached the front of the school on Avers, he looked up to the smoke-filled windows overlooking the courtway. There was Rose among the frightened faces crowding the far window of Room 209.

“Rose,” he screamed, “wait! I’m coming!”

Tortorice ran around to the Iowa Street doors, where he entered the school and, dodging children making their way down, ran up the stairs to the second floor. There he made his way into the annex corridor, then crawled to a set of windows overlooking the courtway and directly adjacent to the windows in Room 209. Tortorice threw up the sash, then swung his left leg over the ledge. Straddling the windowsill, he reached over with his arms and began swinging the panicky eighth-graders into the annex.

“Rose,” he yelled, “come closer!”

Try as she might, Rose could not reach the rescuing hands of her father. She was stuck behind the others lined up at the window. With smoke pouring over her head, she pleaded for help. “Daddy!” she cried, “come quick!”

Tortorice knew he had to reposition himself. He swung his legs over the window ledge, lowering himself down onto a small canopy roof set over a doorway directly beneath him. Another neighbor had tossed a ladder over the fence into the blocked courtway. Tortorice dropped down to the pavement and grabbed the ladder, using it to climb back up onto the canopy. “Hold on,” he shouted to the kids above.

At about the same time Father Joseph Ognibene was driving east on Iowa Street, returning to the rectory after lunch with friends in a neighboring parish. As he neared Avers Avenue, the south wing of the school came into view, and Father Ognibene could see smoke pouring from the building and children being led outside onto the sidewalk.

Tall, dark-skinned, and athletic, “Father Joe” was thirty-two, the senior curate assigned to the parish. He was popular with the students and active in the school’s physical education programs. During spring and summer months he could often be found on neighborhood ball diamonds, wearing a T-shirt and old slacks, shagging fly balls with boys from the parish. The older children were especially fond of him; they enjoyed it when he came out to play ball with them, and they were impressed to find that he was pretty good at it too. The girls in the parish liked him as well. They thought he was “cute.”

Immediately Father Ognibene screeched his car to a halt, curbing it in front of the convent, then darted across the street and entered the school through the front doors on Iowa Street. It was approximately 2:40 p.m. The first call to the Fire Department had yet to be made.

Bounding up the stairs to the second-floor landing, Father Ognibene was met by a scene of crowded confusion. Some of the students gathering in the hallway were frightened by the thickening smoke. Father Joe didn’t fully realize what was happening, but he knew he had to hurry them down.

“Let’s get going,” he shouted. The priest began shoving the students one by one toward the stairs. One of the children having difficulty was a sixth-grade girl. She had polio, and the heavy metal braces strapped to her legs were causing her to struggle. Father Ognibene scooped the girl into his arms and carried her down the stairs. He didn’t care that her braces tumbled off when he did so. After handing the girl off to a nun, he raced back up the stairs to the second floor. It was then Father Ognibene realized that something more terrible than he imagined was unfolding.

Unable to stand up because of the worsening smoke, he dropped to his hands and knees and began crawling through the dark abyss of smoke filling the tiny annex corridor, headed for the doomed classrooms of the north wing. He was able to go as far as the end of the corridor, but that was all. Beyond him in the smoke were raging flames, which cut off further access. On his left were the two corner windows facing the courtway. Father Ognibene looked out and saw Tortorice standing on the ladder, trying to lift children out of Room 209. “Here,” the priest yelled, “swing them to me.”

Quickly Father Ognibene doffed his black suit coat and clerical vest. Thus unencumbered, he hoisted himself up to the ledge of the corner window adjacent to Room 209. Straddling the window frame, he leaned out, placing himself in a position to help Tortorice by reaching for students hanging from the adjacent window. Together the two men proceeded with their daring joint rescue: Tortorice yanking the children from the burning classroom, Ognibene reaching out and swinging them into the annex.

Gerry Andreoli watched as the two men pulled his classmates from the corner window. Smoke inside the room was getting worse. Unable to breathe, Gerry dropped to the floor and curled up in a ball. He was losing track of time. He noticed his girlfriend, Beverly Burda, lying next to him. Her white sweater was turning color. “I’m getting out of here,” he yelled to her.

Gerry got back up and grabbed onto the windowsill, stepping up to the ledge. As he mounted the sill he was being enveloped by flames and smoke shooting around the window frames. Suddenly a whoosh of flames crashed down through the ceiling. Fire was now shooting from the sides of the windows, burning Gerry on the head, arms, and shoulders. His vision became clouded, but he could still see well enough to spot—for the first time—a ladder resting just below the windowsill, short by about two feet.

Gerry wavered on the ledge, feeling dizzy, like he might fall back into the flames or straight down to the concrete below. He somehow managed to maintain his balance, long enough to lower his feet onto the ladder. The flesh on his hands had been peeled back, resembling bloodied pieces of raw meat, and his elbows were burned to the bone. Yet he was able to slide his feet down far enough to reach the top rung. Then, in an awkward, forward fashion, he descended the ladder, hooking his feet around the rungs and working his way down, one step at a time.

Once on the ground he could see only a few feet ahead of him. He felt he was about to collapse but managed to stagger the few feet to the iron fence. Firefighters who had managed to break down its gate were running into the courtway carrying ladders and life nets. Children bunched up at the windows were jumping like crazy, bouncing off the pavement. Firemen were trying to catch them or break their falls.

Gerry thought of walking to his father’s clothing store on Chicago Avenue when his endurance finally gave out. He looked—for the first time—at his hands and began to realize the seriousness of his injuries. His face had swelled up and his body felt sunburned. His white shirt was tattered, disintegrated by flames; only the dangling cuffs remained intact.

He stumbled to the front of the courtway.

“Get me some help,” he pleaded to a fireman, who directed him to an ambulance parked on Avers Avenue.

SISTER SERAPHICA could feel her heart skip as the rock came crashing through the middle window in Room 210. She was busy handing out a homework assignment to her fourth-graders and walked to the window to look outside. Standing below in the alley was a handful of adults, each pointing and shouting, trying to get her attention.

“Sister! Sister! The school’s on fire!”

The nun looked to her right. “Oh, my God!” she shrieked, raising her hand to her mouth.

Smoke and flames were licking out the back stairwell enclosure. More smoke was billowing out the open windows of Room 208 next door, and children inside were climbing out onto the ledges. By the time the startled Sister Seraphica returned to her desk at the front of the classroom, smoke was already seeping through cracks around the doors. She tried to catch up with the scene. Why isn’t the fire alarm ringing? There had been no warning. She looked at her little fourth-graders, then made a decision.

“Listen, everyone,” she said, feigning a smile, trying to look calm. “There’s a little fire in the stairway. Everyone say a ‘Hail Mary,’ and when the firemen come we can leave.”

Vito Muilli didn’t understand. The twelve-year-old had arrived in the United States from his native Italy the previous June, and because he spoke little English, had been placed in the fourth grade. He turned to a girl sitting next to him who spoke Italian.

Cosa dice, lei? “What is she saying?” he asked.

La scuola è infuoco. Bisognamo di pregare. “The school’s on fire. We have to pray.”

Vito laughed. Why, he asked himself, does she want us to pray if there’s a fire?

He didn’t wait for an answer.

Sister Seraphica was a petite woman whose diminutive size in no way hampered her authoritarian reign in the classroom. But as noxious smoke continued to fill the room, her hold on the students began slipping. Struggling to maintain control, she ordered them to gather in a semicircle around her desk. They began reciting the Rosary, one of the longest prayers in the Catholic church. Vito and another boy got up and lunged for the back door. When they swung it open, a hot blast of smoke crashed through like a hammer, knocking them back.

Unable to enter the hallway and reach the front stairs that led to Avers Avenue, the boys scrambled to the open windows, joining their classmates at the sills. The gasping fourth-graders were several deep. They were stacked on top of each other, fighting for space. Pandemonium reigned as an ocean of smoke, followed by raging flames, poured inside the room through the open door.

Conditions in Room 210 deteriorated rapidly as flames swarmed across the ceiling, engulfing the entire room. Children at the windows were hysterical, pulling and clawing each other in a mad fit to reach safety. With temperatures climbing to furnace-hot levels and flames bearing down, the children began jumping to the ground. But not all of the little fourth-graders could reach over the high windowsills that stood more than three feet off the floor. Those too short—or too weak—to pull themselves up onto the ledges fell to the floor, where they were trampled and left to die.

Diane Traynor had been sitting in the row of desks next to the windows at the back of the room. The nine-year-old would not recall hearing the fire alarm until Room 210 was entirely filled with pitch black smoke. Diane was just over four feet tall, and after running to the window she found the high ledge difficult to reach over.

Suddenly flames burst through the ceiling in the front of the room, and Diane knew she had to get out. She turned and saw one little redheaded girl sitting at her desk, frozen in fear. I’m not going to die like that, Diane thought to herself. I’m getting out. Maybe not yet. But I’m going.

She didn’t wait long. Diane was struggling to reach over the windowsill when she saw one of her classmates, a boy, climb up onto the ledge next to hers and jump off. He struck the pavement hard, breaking both of his ankles. Then another little girl leaped into the air, fracturing her spine and hip when she hit the ground.

Diane’s patent-leather shoes started smoking. She kicked them off. Her white socks caught fire and her hair started burning. Flames swarmed down from the ceiling and began devouring her back and shoulders. If she didn’t jump immediately, she’d burn to death.

“Oh God. Please help us,” she screamed.

Using her final ounce of strength, Diane pulled herself up onto the window ledge. Then, with smoke blocking her view, she somersaulted out the window.

Fortunately for Diane Traynor, her fall was broken when she glanced off the shoulders of a man standing below in the alley. She tumbled to the pavement, landing on her back. Somehow, amid the chaos in the alley, she managed to get to her feet and walk to the candy store next door. She went into the back room and telephoned her mother.

“Ma,” she said, “the school’s on fire, but I’m all right.”

Diane left the store and sat on a wooden bench just outside the front door next to the sidewalk. She was going into shock. She got up from the bench and started to walk away.

“Grab that girl!” a woman yelled.

Someone threw a blanket over Diane and carried her to a waiting police car parked in the street. Diane felt like she was burning up inside. Her entire body ached. She was placed in the back seat of the squad car along with two other children. A policeman jumped in and took off to the hospital.

Meanwhile, for the rest of Diane’s classmates still trapped inside Room 210, time had just about run out. The scorching heat was nearing its flash point and smoke had reduced visibility to less than a foot. From his spot at the window, Vito Muilli glanced one last time into the room. He couldn’t see his nun or the other children at the adjacent windows. Like Diane, Vito knew he had to jump. Flames were dancing around the window frames but had not yet engulfed the center. The boy reached for the sill and pulled himself up. Suddenly he felt something hit his hand and the room exploded in flames.

Someone had placed a ladder at the window, but it was about three feet short of the ledge. Vito swung himself around and hung himself out backward. He was trying to set his feet on the top rung, but when he let go of the ledge, he missed the ladder and slid down along its beams, striking his side on the pavement.

Vito felt his body go numb. He was covered in soot and his ears felt like someone had stuck him with a thousand prickly needles. A clump of his bushy black hair was missing, burned off by flames, exposing his scorched scalp. His arms were burned and bleeding. When he looked around him he saw other children on the concrete. Some were screaming. Others lay still, motionless. At the windows above, scores of other youngsters were jumping off ledges, tumbling to the ground. Thump. Thump. Thump, they landed.

For a second Vito shut his eyes. This can’t be happening, he thought. It’s too unbelievable.

A policeman was dragging kids out of the way, setting them against the wall of Barbara Glowacki’s store when he spotted Vito lying on his back. “Hang on, kid,” he shouted. “I’m coming.”

But the frightened youngster didn’t understand what the big man had said. He didn’t want to. He was scared of police. He was scared of everything. He wanted his mother. Just then he regained some feeling in his legs and jumped up. He took off running, headed for his home and his bed two blocks north.

FROM BEHIND HIS DESK in the back of Room 212, John Raymond looked over to the windows, making sure the sun was still out, that clouds had not invaded the deep blue sky. He shifted his eyes to the clock on the wall next to the flag. It was 2:30. He knew it wouldn’t be long before he could run home and ride his new bike, leaving all to hear the clackity-clack of the playing cards he had pinned to its spokes.

His nun, Sister Therese, was busy teaching a last-minute geography lesson to the fifty-five fifth-graders. Even though she was strict, the students adored her. Among all the sisters she displayed a delicious sense of humor. On the day before, the young nun had decorated the school’s bulletin boards for Christmas. Afterward, when she returned to the convent, she crayoned a message to Sister Andrienne, her roommate, on a medicine chest mirror.

“Today is Recollection Sunday,” it read. “We can’t celebrate, but tomorrow we’ll make whoopie.”

It was a whimsical, lighthearted thought that was never fulfilled.

John was still daydreaming when another boy jumped up.

“Sister,” he said, pointing to the door. “There’s smoke!”

At the edges of the transoms, over the doors, black smoke curled into the classroom, fanning out along the twelve-foot-high ceiling.

That’s odd, thought the nun. Maybe the chimney’s backed up.

She walked to the front door and handled the doorknob. It felt unusually hot. Another boy rose from his seat and opened the back door, allowing a wave of smoke to pour inside.

“Close it,” yelled the nun. “Everybody be quiet.”

For a moment, Sister Therese was dumbfounded. The smoke was too dense for a backed-up chimney. It must be a fire.

They couldn’t leave the room, certainly not until the fire alarm went off. That was the rule: “Never leave the building until the fire alarm rings.” She remembered it from earlier fire drills and knew that it took about three minutes to evacuate the entire building—lining up the students and walking them down the stairs. What she didn’t know at that moment was that the primary means of escape used during those orderly, efficient fire drills was being cut off by roaring flames and smoke in the corridor outside.

Sister Therese returned to her desk. The students looked at her, seeking direction.

“We can’t go until we’re told,” she said. “Let’s pray.”

Sister Therese crossed herself. “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost….”

Precious seconds were ticking by. The nun looked to the doors. Smoke passing through the transoms was growing denser, the smell of burning more acrid. The children were starting to cough. It was getting darker, hotter.

“… pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”

More seconds ticked by. Still no fire alarm. Suddenly the heat in the corridor shattered the large glass transom over the front door, sending a thick current of black smoke billowing into the room.

“Get to the windows!” Sister Therese screamed. “Now!”

The children obeyed, jumping up from their desks and scrambling to the four windows overlooking the alley below. They threw up the sashes, gasping for air. Smoke rolled out over their heads. There was no turning back.

“Get out on the ledges!” commanded the nun. Then, seeing no other way out, she started pushing them out. “Go! Go! Save yourselves!”

John Raymond didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t believe what was happening. Just a few moments before he was daydreaming about his bike. Now he found himself in the midst of a deadly panic, a bit player in a tragic production. Somehow he ended up on the floor. He started to crawl. It was like being in a tunnel. There was air near the floor and it was easier to breathe. He was crawling around desks, snaking his way toward the front of the room. He didn’t know where he was going or why he was doing it, he just did it.

Where’s the light? he wondered. It’s getting dark in here. When he reached the front of the room, all he could see were figures. Kids were screaming for their mothers. Others were calling for the nun. She was embracing them. She was surrounded by kids, just draped with them. They were hanging from her.

“Sister,” they shrieked. “Help us. Where are you?”

John looked up at the big globe lights. They probably had five-hundred-watt bulbs, but he could hardly see them. The smoke was that thick. He looked toward the windows. Outside it was bright and sunny, but he could hardly see daylight. He turned toward the front door and could feel heat at his face. It felt like being under a sunlamp.

At that point John took in a lungful of smoke. He was losing control, unable to breathe. He started to panic. “Please, God, help me,” he said. He kept saying it and saying it and saying it. He was ready to pass out. “Please, God, help me. Please, God, help me.”

Then he jumped up and sprang for the window. He pulled kids out of the way. Pushed them away. Dragged them away. Then he dove out. He had to. He was going to die.

Floating through the air, John felt a strange sense of relief. He knew he was falling, that he might be hurt, yet it was the greatest feeling in the world because it was air and he could breathe. He landed hard on the pavement, on his right side, and a sharp pain shot through his body. But whatever damage the fall had caused didn’t matter. He was just glad to be out.

The scene in the alley where he had landed was one of utter chaos. Blood from the broken bodies of other children marked the pavement. Frantic neighbors and parents were running in all directions. They were screaming to students hanging from the window-sills, pleading with them not to jump, to wait for firefighters’ ladders and nets.

John crawled the few feet to Barbara Glowacki’s candy store, meeting another boy from his class. The youngster had also jumped, breaking both his ankles. He was crying; his face was turning grey.

“Jimmy,” John asked. “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

When the boy didn’t answer, John figured he was in shock. He just stared into space, his mouth hanging open.

Barbara Glowacki appeared with a blanket. She threw it over the two boys. “Stay here,” she cried. “The ambulance will come.”

John sat with his back against the bricks. His side was hurting and his throat felt like he’d swallowed a jar of tacks. He looked up at his burning school. The sights and sounds jolted his senses.

There was screaming. Women screaming. Children screaming. Kids were hanging from the sills and dropping to the ground. They landed with dull, hollow thuds, sounding like sacks of potatoes smashing on concrete. He saw a girl on fire coming down to the ground. She just stood up on the windowsill and jumped. She landed head first, cracking her skull. He saw one man break the fall of a boy, and then saw him go down after he was hit by the next falling child. He didn’t get up.

When the smoke cleared for a second, John could see Sister Therese in the window. A handful of girls clutched her sleeves. Just then smoke puffed back out and they disappeared behind its oily black curtain.

John felt light-headed, like he wanted to faint. He was sick from smoke, drifting into shock, losing touch of his whereabouts. One of his aunts lived across the street on Avers. He looked over and saw people carrying injured children through the front of the building. John stood up, deciding to go there. Staggering like a drunkard, he teetered out of the alley, oblivious to the crowd of frightened faces and the terror they conveyed. Instead all he saw were mental images of his father, his two brothers, and his younger sister. Had they made it out?

EARLIER THAT AFTERNOON Sister Helaine had told her class that the pastor needed about ten boys to help load donated clothes onto a truck parked outside the church. Thirteen boys in Room 211 raised their hands to volunteer their services. “All right,’’ the nun said, “all of you can go.”

About an hour later, as the class was working on its English lesson, a girl who temporarily had been out of the room rushed in the back door and went to the nun’s desk. She was coughing loudly. “Sister,” she said, “there’s a lot of smoke in the hallway!”

Some smoke had already entered the room when the girl opened and closed the back door. Sister Helaine got up from her desk and told the students to stand and walk calmly to the front door. When the nun opened the front door, she and the eighth-graders were driven back by black smoke.

“Try the back door,” Sister Helaine ordered. The rear door was opened with the same result: hot smoke poured into the room.

With both doors closed and with Sister Helaine unwilling to risk sending her pupils into the hallway in an effort to escape down the front stairs only a few feet away, the same pattern of behavior occurred in Room 211 as in other rooms in the north wing. The nun ordered her students to the windows, then started saying Hail Marys. The children joined her in prayer, but not for long.

FATHER CHARLES HUND was feeling ill.

The twenty-seven-year-old priest had celebrated Mass that morning in the parish church, and after lunch had decided to retire to his second-floor room in the rectory. It was his day to be on duty, and the effects of the flu had left him tired and sluggish. He laid himself across his bed and went to sleep.

Inside the house it was empty and quiet; his fellow religious were out. Father Alfred Corbo and Father Joseph McDonnell were away visiting patients at nearby Walther Memorial Hospital, and Father Joseph Ognibene was having lunch with friends at a neighboring parish. Monsignor Cussen, the pastor, was roaming outside on church grounds, overseeing the parish clothing drive, while the two other monsignors who shared the house, Joseph Fitzgerald and John Egan, were downtown on church business.

It didn’t take long for Father Hund to nod off. He’d been napping for more than an hour when the first screams came filtering through the wall.

“Help! Please help us!”

The priest stirred and sat up, damp with sweat. He rubbed his eyes and looked at the clock. Two-thirty. Some dream, he thought. He lay back down and closed his eyes.

He heard it again.

“Help! The school’s on fire!”

That, he knew, was not a dream. It was real, and it sounded close. He bolted upright in his bed. What the hell’s going on?

The sole window in Father Hund’s dimly lit quarters was next to his bed and faced the back of the school. He leaned over to peer through the curtains. What he saw sent him reeling. Crowding the windows directly across the narrow gangway were a dozen or so terrified faces of students, smoke pouring over their heads. The children were banging on the window frame, shouting, “Father! Save us!”

The children, he knew, were in Room 207, the “Cheese Box,” so called because of its small dimensions. The classroom had once housed the school’s library. It was located near the southeast corner of the north wing, next to the building’s only fire escape. But Father Hund could see that the fire escape door was closed, that no one was coming down. He sprang from the bed, threw on a leather jacket over his T-shirt, and ran down the stairs. As he passed through the kitchen and headed out the back door, he could hear Mrs. Maloney on the phone, wrestling with her brogue, trying to describe the fire’s location.

Father Hund ran into the gangway and looked up. Smoke was pouring out of the school. “Hang on,” he shouted. “I’m coming.” He slipped through the back door of the school’s annex and bounded up a flight of stairs to the second floor. When he reached the landing he found the smoke so thick that he couldn’t see more than a foot ahead. He remembered what he had been told as a child: If you’re ever in a fire, stay near the floor. That’s where the air is.

Instinctively he dropped to his knees and began crawling through the dark, narrow corridor, inching his way forward, trying to get into the north wing. But even here, near the floor, he couldn’t escape the choking effect of the smoke. Heat from the fire was pressing against his face, making his eyes water. Black mucus started dripping from his nostrils. The smoke was pushing into his lungs, making him gag and cough. It felt like someone was shoving a hot rag down his throat. He thought he might vomit. He started to panic, and for a second he felt he would pass out. He knew he had to get out. To go any farther would be crazy. He’d never make it.

The young priest backed out of the corridor and retreated down the stairs, all the way to the basement. He was arguing with himself. He had to get back up to the second floor. But how?

He dashed through the chapel at the bottom of the north wing, then through a door in the boiler room that opened into the small area at the foot of the northeast stairwell where the fire had originated. Curiously, the flames here had subsided a little, though the area was super hot, with fire licking through the stairs themselves. Father Hund decided to try them anyway. He rolled up the bottom of his baggy black trousers, then started up. But he didn’t go far; the inferno engulfing the upper part of the stairway stopped him short. Any farther and he’d light up like a torch. He was turning to leave when flames suddenly flared up underneath him, catching his shoes on fire. It was so hot in the stairway that he thought it would explode at any second. He had to get out, fast.

He ran back into the basement, cut off but still determined somehow to make the second floor. He returned to the annex and raced back up the same staircase he had tried the first time. His second attempt was successful, and when he reached the landing he was surprised to see the smoke had cleared a bit, though the ceiling above was now burning pretty well.

Father Hund was ducking burning embers and falling debris when a harried face appeared in the darkness. It belonged to the janitor, Jim Raymond, and he looked horrible. Raymond too had worked his way up to the smoky second floor, managing to open one window, using his flashlight to break out another. But in breaking the window he had caught his arm on a piece of jagged glass, slicing open his left wrist. He was bent over, squeezing it with his right hand, trying to stop the flow of blood.

Father Hund grabbed his arm. “What the hell’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” Raymond replied, confused from blood loss.

The priest motioned to Room 207. “Why can’t they get out?”

“They can’t. The fire’s too bad.”

“What about the back door? By the fire escape?”

“It’s locked.”

“You got a key?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Then open the damn thing.”

MATT PLOVANICH was lying on his back, watching smoke fill up the Cheese Box.

The fifth-grader was slowly losing consciousness, contemplating the oddity of dying at ten, trying hard to remember what his nuns had always preached. “You never know when God is going to come calling on you. Always be ready for Him.”

It’s not that Matt wasn’t ready. He was. It’s just that it seemed unfair. He and his classmates hadn’t done anything wrong. They were good kids, tried to do good deeds. They obeyed their nuns, listened to their parents, did their homework on time, never skipped school. They said their prayers and went to Mass, asking for God’s forgiveness when they sinned. And now they were burning up in their classroom.

It was strange, but Matt felt dying wouldn’t be so bad after all, just something that happens to everyone, a natural occurrence in the cycle of life. Still, he was feeling sorry for his parents. His father, Rudy, was a policeman, and his mom, Irene, a housewife. If he died, he knew they’d be sad. He hoped God would watch over them. He thought of his three brothers. Jimmy was four years old. Mike was a seventh-grader in the south wing. Danny was downstairs in the first grade.

The smoke was getting worse. It was thick and toxic, filling up the ceiling, making it harder to breathe. Matt could feel himself drifting away, like being on a life raft, floating alone in the middle of the ocean. The panic that had gripped him only moments before had dissipated, replaced by a comforting sense of serenity. Some of his classmates were still kicking and scratching each other, crying for their mothers, trying to escape the room. To Matt it seemed futile.

What good does that do? he thought. We’re trapped. We can’t get out.

His teacher, Sister Mary Geraldita Ennis, was somewhere inside the room, lost in the darkness amid her forty fifth- and sixth-graders. When smoke first invaded the classroom around the door cracks, she rose to investigate. The front door faced the burning stairway, and when she opened it, a wall of flame was blocking the exit.

Sister Geraldita was just five feet tall. She was strict but fair, with a good sense of humor. After closing the front door, she started quickly for the room’s back door. The back exit opened into the narrow, coat-lined hallway separating Rooms 207 and 206, and led to the building’s only fire escape.

But when Sister Geraldita grabbed the door knob, it didn’t turn. It was locked. She reached into her pocket, feeling for her key. It was empty. She closed her eyes, remembering now that she had been running late that morning and had left her keys behind in the convent.

Matt was sitting at his desk next to the back door. When he looked up at his nun, he saw the look of absolute terror cross her face. He knew what it meant: he and his classmates were trapped, their means of escape cut off.

“Come here,” waved Sister Geraldita, gathering the students in a semicircle near the back of the room. “We’re in trouble. We must pray for help.”

She began leading the class in the Rosary, but as the room turned pitch black, all control was lost. Soon the children, especially the girls, started screaming in terror. They were huddled in the back corner of the room, Matt among them, pressing their faces against the smooth wooden floor, trying to breathe. A few broke ranks and rushed to the windows overlooking the small gangway behind the school. They flung up the sashes and cried out.

“Help! Help! Save us! Save us!”

One boy picked up a planter and hurled it out the window, against the wall of the adjacent rectory. Another boy leaped out the window, landing on the fire escape below. The rest of the class stayed down on the floor, waiting uncertainly.

Smoke was banking down to the floor. Matt couldn’t see. It was like nighttime. Orange flames were burning through wooden panels on the front door. It wouldn’t be long now.

Just then Matt heard a tearing noise, like someone ripping apart an old T-shirt. There in the smoke stood the janitor, Mr. Raymond. Father Hund was behind him. “C’mon!” they yelled. “This way! It’s clear!”

When the pair had reached the classroom, Raymond used his key to unlock the door. But he still had to push it open, for the opposite side was blocked by cardboard posters taped across the inside of the doorjamb.

For little Matt Plovanich, it was like the cavalry coming; the men might have been wearing blue hats. It was that dramatic, that close. They were on their last breaths. Time had just about run out.

Smoke rushed out the open back door as Matt and his classmates climbed to their feet. They were sluggish, unsteady, slow-moving. “Let’s go!” yelled Father Hund. “Faster! Faster!” The men started grabbing the children by their collars, pulling them up off the floor, shoving them out the door.

Raymond followed them out. He was shaking, sweating, holding his bloody wrist. Squeezing his way between the children, he moved to the front of the line, then shoved open the door leading to the weighted steel fire escape ladder that dropped down into the gangway behind the school. But the youngsters, frightened and hesitant, balked. Intense heat inside their room was blowing out the windows above them, and the sound of shattering glass was scary.

“Keep going!” shouted Father Hund.

The line started moving. Soon they were down. Sister Geraldita was the last person to leave the classroom. As soon as she exited, it burst into flames. When she reached the top of the fire escape, she too hesitated. Her face was reddened and she was coughing on smoke. She turned to Father Hund, making a move to return to the room. “I can’t go! They’re not all out!” she screamed.

Father Hund was not entirely sure himself that all the students had made it out safely. But it no longer mattered. It was too late. The room was awash in flames. There was no turning back.

“No!” he barked. “Keep going!”

He grabbed the frightened nun by the arm and together they fled down the ladder, praying—but not yet knowing—that all the students had indeed escaped, that Room 207 would be the only second-floor classroom in the north wing not to record a fatality.

TEACHERS AND STUDENTS in the school’s south wing were the farthest from the fire and the last to learn of the calamity occurring in the other side of the building. Although no deaths or serious injuries would occur in the south wing, escape from second-floor classrooms was nonetheless made difficult by waves of thick smoke drifting through the hallways.

Seventh-graders in Room 201, located in the southwest corner of the wing, were busy reading about the life of St. Joan of Arc when the tragedy struck. In her prologue, Sister Mary Andrienne Carolan described the torment of the French heroine, telling how Joan had been condemned to death and burned at the stake. The youngsters were stirred by the story. The drawings in their texts showed the Maid of Orleans perishing impressively in the flames.

Sister Andrienne had a knack for storytelling. She liked to use anecdotes to paint word pictures for her students. She was thirty-five, Irish, and proud of her heritage. “The name used to be O’Carolan,” she’d smile. “Same as the last of the Irish bards.”

She was in her eleventh year at Our Lady of the Angels, had charge of the altar boys, and helped supervise children who remained at school during luncheon recess. And though she was small—she weighed only 105 pounds—she still had a way of dealing with “disciplinary problems,” a fact evidenced by the number of troublesome boys who were shunted to her care. But if she was strict, she was also compassionate. She had a soft spot for the children of troubled West Side families, often lending a sympathetic ear to one in need.

One girl she was particularly fond of was Mary Ellen Moretti, whose father, Michael, a former Chicago police officer, was serving a life sentence for murder at Stateville Penitentiary in nearby Joliet, Illinois.

The Moretti case had been a sordid affair, widely publicized in the press. One night in August 1951, after getting his fill in a tour of several South Side taverns, Michael Moretti had gone on a rampage, firing his gun into a parked car, killing two youths and wounding a third. Moretti, then a city patrolman assigned to the state’s attorney’s office, said the shootings were in the line of duty. But evidence corroborated by the survivor led to Moretti’s indictment and conviction. “È brutto,”—It’s ugly, he mumbled in Italian when the judge in the case sentenced him to life. After his conviction, three of Moretti’s brothers were found guilty of attempting to bribe and intimidate the major witness against Michael. Six years later the family was shaken by more tragedy when another brother, Salvatore Moretti, fell victim to an unrelated gangland murder.

In the fall of 1958, at the urging of Sister Andrienne, Mary Ellen Moretti had enrolled as a transfer student at Our Lady of the Angels. The two had met during a summer religion course that the nun taught to Catholic students from local public schools. Sister Andrienne was sympathetic to Mary Ellen’s plight, and their friendship blossomed. “You can’t blame the children for the sins of their fathers,” she’d say.

In time the two developed a pleasant rapport, and when the term began, Sister Andrienne had wanted Mary Ellen in her classroom so she could provide the emotional support she knew the girl needed. But when September arrived and Mary Ellen was assigned to Sister Canice’s room in the north wing, Sister Andrienne was disappointed. Her lingering regret would turn to grief later that afternoon when the body of Mary Ellen Moretti, blond, blue-eyed, and only twelve years old, was pulled by firefighters from the charred ruins of Room 208.

But for now Sister Andrienne was finishing her talk on Joan of Arc: “On May 30, 1431, she was led into the marketplace at Rouen to be burned at the stake. She was not quite twenty years old. Her ashes were tossed into the Seine. She is the patron saint of France and of French soldiers. She is portrayed in art as a bareheaded girl in armor, holding a sword and wearing a banner with the words ‘Jesus: Maria’ on it.”

A few boys in the room scheduled for afternoon patrol duty were getting up from their desks, putting on their bright orange patrol belts, when the fire alarm started to ring. They and Sister Andrienne looked out the windows. Nothing unusual, just a few bare tree branches reaching over the neighboring rooftops. The nun looked at the clock. It was too close to dismissal time for a fire drill. Besides, they rarely had them in such cold weather. Maybe a prankster was up to no good.

The patrol boys rushed to the door on the east end of the room. They tried pushing it open. Strangely, it wouldn’t budge.

“What’s the matter?” the nun asked.

“It’s stuck.”

Sister Andrienne looked at them, puzzled. “I’ll get it for you.”

The nun stepped between the boys and began pushing on the door herself. It seemed to weigh a ton. She didn’t know that the door was being held shut by the tremendous draft flowing through the hallway—the fire was sucking all the fresh air from the south wing.

“C’mon, give me a hand,” she said to her boys. Together they pushed against the door with all their might. It let go, sending them tumbling into the hallway, right through a cloud of thick black smoke. They realized immediately the alarm was no prank.

“Hurry, go tell the others,” said Sister Andrienne, motioning the boys to neighboring classrooms. She reentered her own room. “Let’s go. Everybody up.”

When the students saw smoke swirling in the hallway, they became frightened. Sister Andrienne lined them up, and one by one they headed out the door for the nearby staircase. Visibility diminished rapidly. It was getting dark. They had to feel their way along. “Get on your knees,” said the nun. “Start crawling!”

Heat from the fire was now at their backs, and the youngsters were coughing and gasping for breath. Some were hiding their eyes. When they reached the landing, they panicked. They were becoming disoriented and, like a bunch of frightened horses, refused to budge. In the haste of the moment, Sister Andrienne began shoving them down the smoke-filled stairway. “Don’t be afraid,” she urged. “Nothing will harm you.”

The group started moving, and when all had reached bottom, Sister Andrienne followed. But, unknown to her, during the ensuing panic one of her girls had stayed behind in the classroom, slamming the door shut. The other fourteen students still inside the room reacted by scrambling to the windows.

Outside on the Iowa Street sidewalk, Sister Andrienne sensed that things didn’t seem right. There were seventy children in her class, but the group seemed thin. Suddenly she realized that not all had gotten out. When she looked up to the windows, her fears were confirmed.

“Stay there!” she shouted to the students at the windows. “Don’t move!”

The nun darted back into the building, running up the stairs to the second floor. The smoke in the hallway had turned decidedly worse. She dropped to her knees, feeling her way along the wall. When she reached the room she started calling for the students to follow her voice. “Hang on to each other,” she said. On hands and knees they began snaking their way through the dark classroom, out into the smoky hallway. When the procession reached the stairway, Sister Andrienne stood to the side, making way for the youngsters. “Go!” she ordered. The first girl balked and the nun nudged her down. She began rolling the remaining children down the stairs like logs. One by one they bounced to the bottom. Neighbors rushing inside scooped up the youngsters and carried them outside.

When the last of the children had made it to safety, Sister Andrienne limped down the stairs herself. Smoke had penetrated her lungs, making her hack and gag. She had strained her back, and her left leg throbbed from where the children had clutched her.

Outside, above a crescendo of shouts and screams, the fire alarm was still ringing, and a siren grew near. A single fire truck, its red lights flashing, was turning the corner onto Iowa Street, trying to pass through the crowd of people in the streets. At last the firemen had arrived. But, unknown to them, they had been given the wrong location. In the confusion of the moment they were told that a blaze was burning in the rectory on Iowa Street, not in the school around the corner on Avers Avenue.