Pulaski Street fire victim speaks out, thanks firefighters for saving her life

“If those guys did not come, I think I would have died. There was so much smoke, I couldn’t breathe. I’m very grateful they saved me.”

Krystyna Borowska, who lived in a second-floor apartment at 522 Pulaski Street, vividly recalls the traumatizing events that changed her life on the morning of Jan. 25.

In an interview this morning, the thin, soft-spoken Polish immigrant, speaking through an interpreter, told RiverheadLOCAL she wanted to make clear what happened that morning because there’s been a lot of speculation following recent comments by Supervisor Yvette Aguiar.

“And I am very, very grateful for the firemen, because I know I would not have survived,” Borowska said.

MORE COVERAGE: Firefighters battle blaze on Pulaski Street

She was in her the downstairs neighbor’s apartment that morning. The two women had been saying their morning prayers, as they usually did together each day, Borowska said.

They heard noise outside. It sounded like people shouting, Borowska said.

“I thought it might have been a car accident,” she said, “because there were a lot of accidents at that corner.”

She went to a window to look outside, while her downstairs neighbor, Krystyna Zielinska, opened the door to the outside. There, she found a woman who works at Gadzinski Insurance across the street yelling that there was a fire upstairs.

Borowska said she could only think of her cats, Klakier and Kaya, who were both in the upstairs apartment.

Borowska said she and Zielinska left the building through the side door to Zielinska’s apartment. Borowska then ran around to the back of the house where the entry door to her apartment upstairs was located.

“I ran upstairs to find my cats,” she said.

“There was a big, big fog of smoke,” Borowska said. “It was hard to breathe.”

She heard Zielinska calling to her that one of the cats made it out. She figured the cat who ran out was Kaya, who was more adventurous of the two cats she’d adopted from the Riverhead Animal Shelter. Klakier always liked to hide in the bedroom, so she found her way through the smoke to the bedroom to look for him. She did not find him and was having trouble breathing, she said.

Borowska said she went into the bathroom, where the smoke didn’t seem as thick. As she did, she saw the flames at the front of the building. She tried to open the bathroom window to get some fresh air.

Then out of the smoke, a man appeared, maybe two, she said.

Borowska said she doesn’t know if they carried her out or ran down the stairs with her, but the next thing she knew, she was outside. “Everyone was asking me if I was OK,” she said.

Soon EMTs were there, examining her.

“They were trying to convince me to go to the hospital,” she said. She refused.

Firefighters found Klakier’s body in the bedroom, under the bed. Kaya, unharmed was located outside, she said.

Borowska, 76, lost everything in the fire.

Polish Town resident Wanda Wilinski took the two women into her home. A friend started an online fundraiser to help them get back on their feet. The people of St. Isidore’s Church also raised money for them, she said.

Borowska lived temporarily in East Quogue but has since resettled in Riverhead, where she’s lived for decades.

Zielinska, who ran the Polish travel services agency located in the front of the building where they lived, has moved back to Poland, Borowska said.

Riverhead Fire Department First Assistant Chief J.R. Renten and Firefighter Frank Greenwood, who are both Riverhead Town Highway Department employees, were part of a crew repairing sidewalks on Pulaski Street on the morning of Wednesday, Jan. 25. They heard shouts of “Fire! Fire!” and Greenwood saw flames coming from an upstairs window.

The two volunteer firefighters ran to the house, shouting “Call 911!” Told that there were people upstairs, they opened the back door, where a staircase led upstairs. The second floor was “completely covered in smoke,” Greenwood told RiverheadLOCAL the following day. Through the smoke, they saw a woman on the stairs. They ran up and got her down and out of the house. As they were asking if anyone else was inside, Greenwood saw someone at an upstairs window, “banging on the glass.”

The two firefighters raced back into the smoke-filled house. “We held our breath, went into the room. We pulled her out,” Greenwood said. “We both pulled her down the stairs and got her out,” he said.

“We just did what we are trained to do,” Renten said.

MORE COVERAGE: Riverhead Town highway workers, both veteran volunteer firefighters, save two women from burning building in Polish Town

Though Renten and Greenwood both downplayed their actions, their bravery in going into a burning building without any protective gear did not escape the notice of State Senator Anthony Palumbo. Last month, Palumbo honored both firefighters with the Liberty Medal, the highest honor awarded to a citizen by the New York State Senate.

The firefighters’ account of the events of that morning became a controversy after Riverhead Supervisor Yvette Aguiar during a public Town Board meeting told Council Member Tim Hubbard she was not attending Palumbo’s medal ceremony that afternoon.

In between discussion items on the Town Board’s agenda, Hubbard asked Aguiar whether the meeting would be over in time to get to the ceremony. The microphone on the dais caught their conversation.

“I’m not going to that,” Aguiar said. “Do you know the circumstance of that? They never — yeah, everybody was out and they made all these claims in the newspaper,” Aguiar said. “So the community in Pulaski is up in arms about it. So that’s why I just sent a certificate of appreciation,” Aguiar told Hubbard.

Aguiar did not respond to RiverheadLOCAL’s questions regarding the source of her information or apologize to the firefighters.

MORE COVERAGE: Aguiar: Riverhead firefighters who rushed into burning building to save two elderly women made false claims about rescue

The supervisor’s comments during the June 15 meeting were magnified by reports in other media casting doubt on the firefighters’ version of events, citing anonymous sources who said they witnessed the two women exit the building on their own.

Riverhead Fire Department Chief Joseph Hartmann wrote a letter to the supervisor expressing his dismay about her comments, which he said were without merit and insulting to the department. He told the supervisor the two firefighters and the entire department deserve her apology.

Gosia Bryla of Riverhead, a friend of Borowska’s, told RiverheadLOCAL that, when she read about the questions being raised about how her friend was rescued by the Riverhead firefighters, she told Borowska about it. Her friend doesn’t read English well and doesn’t read the newspapers, Bryla said.

Borowska wanted to set the record straight, Bryla said. Bryla contacted RiverheadLOCAL to set up a meeting.

“She wanted to publicly thank the firefighters for saving her life,” Bryla said.