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A review by marilynw
Ash Wednesday by Paula McLain
4.0
Ash Wednesday (A Point in Time #2)
by Paula McLain, Malcolm Hillgartner (Narrator)
You must choose the right time to read/hear this short story, not that there can ever be a right time for such heartbreak. This is fiction but based on a real life tragic event, the Collinwood school fire, one of the deadliest school disasters in US history. The author has imagined what real life school janitor, Swiss German immigrant Fritz Hirter, must have thought about his move to the US years ago, how his dreams when coming to the US did not bear fruit, and how he felt about working in the fire trap of a school that he was tasked to keep clean and running to the best of his ability. As the only adult male who worked at the school, so much fell on the shoulders of this almost invisible janitor, who saw so much but had so little say about the changes made to the school, in order to fit more immigrant children inside it's unfit walls.
Fritz does the best he can to keep the school's boilers running. It's a job for more than one man but it's always been just him. When a fire starts in the basement, Fritz's five children are in this school, along with hundreds of other children and just a few women teachers. All the fire drills in the world couldn't prepare any of them for the reality of a school added on to in such a way to make it impossible for fleeing humans to survive.
There is no happy ending here. Almost two hundred people died, almost all of them children. So many families lost more than one child. It was a plaque in the author's community that brought this disaster to her attention. With her story, Fritz and the others are not forgotten.
A short story from the A Point in Time collection of stories about the pivotal moments, past and present, that change lives. This is a Kindle Unlimited audiobook selection.
by Paula McLain, Malcolm Hillgartner (Narrator)
You must choose the right time to read/hear this short story, not that there can ever be a right time for such heartbreak. This is fiction but based on a real life tragic event, the Collinwood school fire, one of the deadliest school disasters in US history. The author has imagined what real life school janitor, Swiss German immigrant Fritz Hirter, must have thought about his move to the US years ago, how his dreams when coming to the US did not bear fruit, and how he felt about working in the fire trap of a school that he was tasked to keep clean and running to the best of his ability. As the only adult male who worked at the school, so much fell on the shoulders of this almost invisible janitor, who saw so much but had so little say about the changes made to the school, in order to fit more immigrant children inside it's unfit walls.
Fritz does the best he can to keep the school's boilers running. It's a job for more than one man but it's always been just him. When a fire starts in the basement, Fritz's five children are in this school, along with hundreds of other children and just a few women teachers. All the fire drills in the world couldn't prepare any of them for the reality of a school added on to in such a way to make it impossible for fleeing humans to survive.
There is no happy ending here. Almost two hundred people died, almost all of them children. So many families lost more than one child. It was a plaque in the author's community that brought this disaster to her attention. With her story, Fritz and the others are not forgotten.
A short story from the A Point in Time collection of stories about the pivotal moments, past and present, that change lives. This is a Kindle Unlimited audiobook selection.