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The Our Lady of the Angels School Fire
🕑 Added 2023-05-02 10:15:01 +0000 UTCThere’s a lot to this story – and not all of it could fit into this video. Here are just a couple of notes on parts of this disaster that I couldn’t include…
John Jajkowski
In the aftermath of this fire a lot of shocking images appeared in newspapers around the world. One in particular soon became emblematic of the horror of the fire: that of firefighter Richard Scheidt carrying the body of fifth-grader John Jajkowski out of the burned wreck of the school.
The image appears online in pretty much any search relating to the fire. You can see it on Wikipedia, here – although bear in mind that it is quite an upsetting image.
The photograph appeared on the cover of an issue of Life Magazine that covered the fire and its aftermath, and was later made into a fire prevention poster. It’s not hard to see why – the image, though simple, really captures the devastating consequences of a fire.
The stories of survivors
A great many people lived through this fire. At the time the school was very well-attended. Due to the baby boom which followed the end of World War II, there were likely many more children present in the school building that there might have been in previous decades.
This means that there are many, many accounts from survivors to be found online. Some of them are collected on this website, which memorialises the fire.
If you’re interested in learning more about this disaster, I’d strongly recommend reading some of these accounts. They not only give a picture of what the fire was like to live through, but also a glimpse of what came after: the recovery, the hospital stays, and the gradual, painful return to normality.
Comments
Fascinating Horror
How interesting. Sometimes disasters are a real part of the local history of a place... and sometimes they're something that gets rather forgotten - which seems to be the case with this one.
Fascinating Horror
It's been pretty eye-opening covering all these stories. Looking back now it's hard to believe that something as simple as outward-opening doors weren't always a thing!
It never ceases to amaze me how many devastating fires have occurred in order to make the fire proofing and escape routes we now have in public buildings
baerae
Weirdly enough, I live in the Chicago area, and they don’t teach this in school, probably because of how tragic it is and that picture being there, I only learned about this a few years ago when I started watching your channel and went on a deep dive. I found out that John Jajkowski was buried in a cemetary in my town.
