TENEMENT TRAGEDY.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXIX, Issue 3742, 15 January 1907, Page 4

TENEMENT TRAGEDY.

A tenement house fire, involving a terrible domestic tragedy, occurred in New York last month, when a mother and her four young children were burned to death on the spot, while two children belonging to another woman have since succumbed to their injuries, making the fatality list seven, while many frantic persons were taken from the blazing structure more or less hurt. Finally, Moritz Ginspan, of the dead woman and father of her four children, has gone mad with grief. The Ginspans, who came here from Russia three years ago, occupied two small rooms on the third floor of the crowded tenement, five stories high. A fire broke out on the second floor, where some parafin had been spilt, and within a few moments the flames had enveloped the stairway and spread in all directions. One of the little Ginspans was playing on the second floor at the time, and she ran up the stairs to her mother shrieking. Her cries alarmed everybody on the upper storeys, and straightway forty panic-stricken people dashed to the windows, where iron ladders, provided for such an emergency, gave access to the street below.

Mothers and children were in this mad panic. Some of them were caught by the flames and injured before the windows were reached. Most of them, however, got to the ground safely, and others were rescued by the firemen, who used long ladders. But in the scramble the Ginspan family were overcome, and their dead bodies were found on the stair landing of the second floor. The eldest girl, Martelle, aged 7, was a little ahead of the others, as if she had been showing the way. The mother and the other three children, ranging from six months to five years, were discovered in a charred heap, the poor woman’s arms still tightly encircling her baby boy, while the two other children, both girls, had evidently died tugging at the maddened woman’s skirts.

The other surviving children, Ida Ginspan, aged seventeen, and Lazar, aged fifteen, who work at a factory close to the tenement, returned home in time to see the bodies of their mother and their little sisters and brother removed. Mr Ginspan, who is forty-five years of age, did not return for two hours afterwards, and with difficulty was restrained from committing suicide.

Misfortune has dogged the Gispaus for years. In Russia the father was connected with the Revolutionary movement. He is a well-educated man and on his arrival in New York he tried to get employment as a teacher. Failing in this he picked up a precarious Jiving as a street pedler. Sober, honest and industrious, Mr Gispan denied himself everything, and saved up his pence so as to secure enough money to bring his family from Russia." This plan he was able to carry out six months ago. His prospects seemed on the point of mending when this last overwhelming tragedy overtook his family.