Rose: This young man came in. He was a volunteer on the ambulance. The ambulance was full of bodies. And the ambulance could not pronounce them dead. It had to be a physician. They wanted the physician to go out and pronounce them. At that time, we had a very tall desk as you came in, and he was leaning against the door. He was totally pale and almost passed out because within the ambulance they had a whole family, I don’t know how many, including children. There was somebody and I don’t remember who, what, where, when who had described the bodies as charcoal because they were so blackened, burned, and little babies, adults, and people. And, I said no I don’t want to go out and see it. I don’t need to see that. But the doctor had to go out and said, yeah, these people are dead there’s no question about it. It was a tremendously horrific time in Hoboken and nobody was ever ever ever held responsible and that to me was the worst thing.

Rose: We couldn’t do anything and again that Pinter Hotel is the one I remember the most. There was no way out. We were across the street, but there was a young boy at the window, banging at the window, and screaming. And there was flames behind him. But there was no way to get to him. The bodies looked like charcoal, that they were barely human. They were all, like, burnt. I get chills even thinking about it. The firemen always did their best, but there’s sometimes nothing you can do. You know, they did their best to save people.

Rose: When I retired, I just knew that I wanted to know more and explain more because many of the young people that came in, they had no idea of what was there before this big fancy schmancy building was, that you could never prove anything. No one was ever, not even accused of this. Never. So it was this silent disaster. I just felt that those things had to be memorialized. And it was not to blame or point fingers at the new folks. Because many of them, like, Elaine (Elaine Thomas is a Hoboken fire chaplain that assisted with creating the fire victims memorial in 2023) had said, there was somebody that was on that tour that she took. And the girl said, I didn’t know, because where she was living was a site of one of those fires.