Good Friday and the Triangle Fire

(March 25, Good Friday, is also the anniversary of the Triangle Fire in 1911.)

Late night, late March, Good Friday night and the smoke from a million incense burners in a million churches has been extinguished for the night. The believers mourn for a man who died two thousand years ago. Was he the Son Of God? I don't care. He lived like he was, that's what counts.        

 A little more than nineteen centuries later, in the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in Greenwich Village, a spark landed in a pile of rags and did what sparks do. Almost two hundred people, mostly teenage Jewish immigrant girls from the Lower East Side, went up like incense smoke into the cloudless blue sky.

The next day dozens of the police who responded turned in their badges and resigned, too sickened by what they'd seen to ever do that job again. They said most of the girls jumped from the tenth floor windows in twos and threes. The sight of them stranded on the window sills, fire behind them and sky in front, was more than anyone could take. Their bodies hit the pavement one after another too fast to count, with a sound people later prayed to forget. But everyone said that when they jumped there was no panic on their faces. They held hands or wrapped arms around each others' waists and jumped from one world to the next with no apparent fear.

The first true love of my life was a teenage Jewish girl from Brownsville, granddaughter of one of the few survivors of the fire. Every year on the anniversary he would light a yahrtzeit candle for all the friends he lost that day, but he would never talk about it. Even half a century later it was still too close for words.

I was thinking of him tonight, hoping he found some peace.