The Cleveland Holocaust.

Waipawa Mail, Volume XXVIII, Issue 5249, 21 April 1908, Page 4

The Cleveland Holocaust.

Details by the Mail. Children Trapped and Incinerated. Outcry Throughout America. Improved Construction Demanded. The London Daily Telegraph of March Oth, publishes the following' from its New York correspondent in reference to the school disaster at Cleveland “ Tho lives of 180 children, ranging in ago from 5 to 12 years, were sacrificed in yesterday’s terriblo disaster. 1 have visited North Collinwood to-day, and seen scores of blackened corpses and bits of human remains. I have seen parents dazed with grief and heard tales of pathos, tragody and heroism worthy of an epic poem. Truly ono might accentuate almost indefinitely tho details of Borrow and despair, but such a task would be undesirable. Almost every house in North Collinwood to day mourns the loss of a little one. The tragedy was so sudden, so appalling in its attendant scenes, that the village so far hardly realises the full bitterness of the situation. “ Parents and friends who stood around the blazing edifice yesterday, helpless, and maddened by the cries of their children, to-day seem dumb, nerveless, overpowered. It is certain that over 150 of the children wore killed in the narrow hall of the burning school building, where a pile of prostrate little bodies, sft high, had accumulated, and that tho crush might have been largely prevented if the doors had opened outwards instead of inwards; it is equally certain, as I gather from a personal investigation, that tho death roll might have been largely reduced if, at an early stage of the firo, some ono with an axe had gone to the rear of the building, and there broken in the back door. Within half an hour, however, from the moment the first alarm was given, nothing remained of the school-house except a few blackened walls, surrounding a cellar filled with corpses. There hud been scarcely time for willing men to think, much less to act, before the children had either been burned or trampled to death. There is much talk to-day that the fire did not originate with an overheated furnace in the basement, as the caretaker himself confessed, hut was the workof three little girls who were playing with fire under tho wooden staircase just for fun. They are searching for these little girls, of whom, it is said, they ran away from tho basement when they saw the caretaker approach; but, in the meantime, most people, adhere to their first theory of the outbreak.

Americans to-day, not merely in the State of Ohio, but throughout the country are demanding that a repetition of this holocaust be made as near impossible as human ingenuity can devise. Tho local county and State officials to-day are making an inquiry, and are rigidly investigating with that special object in view. Collinwood Schoolhouso despite its brick walls, was a. veritable fire trap. Henceforth Americans declare no school doors must open inwards, and in this age of cement, stone, and steel construction, wooden stairways, narrow hallways, and floor beams of wood, instead of metal, should no longer be tolerated. That is the chief lesson which I cable you to-day from stricken Collinwood, and it seems in this sorrowful hour indefinitely more important than a duplicate from an inexhaustible mass of material—the tales of horror and I sacrifice already reported. Collin-1 wood will probably lead the way for I

such a vigorous inspection of Bchool buildings hereafter that they shall be made at least as Bafe as the average, which is far from the case in many oountry places to-day in America, where the safety of the children is occasionally mado subordinate to architectural effect.

To-day parents who wept and fainted as they passed along row upon row of blaokened remains laid out in the Lake Shore Railway machinery shop tried, for the most part vainly, to identify their dead. The human charnelhouse gave no due in most cases except such as was furnished by articles of clothing, generally boots, or by trinkets, very often by little finger rings whiob American mothers love to give their children on their birthdays. So far 170 bodies have been recovered. Much indignation prevailed against Herber, the uerman-Americau caretaker, who asked and has Dow received police protection. Herber himself lost three children in the fire.

According to the New York f Varld'n special correspondent of Cleveland, the front doors of the school were locked when the fire started in the basement, and swept up the wooden stairway through the building. The children became massed inside the narrow passageway before the workmen from tho railway carshops near by were able to break down the doors. The rear stairway was so narrow, and the spread of the flames so rapid, that most of the children who tried to escape that way. were quickly in a crush from which no human power could extricate even one of them Penned in the narrow hall-way by doors that only opened inwards, the little ones died by fire, by siTuike, and beneath the grinding heels of their panic-stricken playmates. The supreme horror of the disaster was that the fathers and mothers of many of the Children stood before the doors, and saw the flames creep up and blacken the faoes of their screaming children. With white faces and little hands stretched out in supplication, the doomed ones begged to be saved, but rescue was impossible. Mothers fainted were they stood. Others tried to get to their children, but the volunteer firemen and police held them back. Then the fire crept up to the mass, and silenced the cries. Nothing could bo done to save the children, although the rescuers were at the doors many minutes before the fire reached that point.