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Josephine Pilat lived at 1633 34 Humboldt Blvd. in
Chicago (renamed Logan Blvd., in Logans Square).
She went to the theater with her mother, Mary Pilat,
younger sister, Gertrude H. Pilat, and a distant
cousin visiting from Wisconsin,
Cecelia Kwapil. (The Pilat family had lived in
Watertown before moving to Chicago and still had
family there.) The matinee at the
Iroquois was a girls' trip. Left at home were
Josephine and Gertrude's older brothers, Robert and
George, and Mary's parents, Joseph and Katie Pilat,
who lived with the family. The party of four was
seated in the third-floor gallery, six rows from the
front.
Josephine Pilat(1890–1903) — fatality — thirteen-years old
Josephine attended the
Yates School along with another Iroquois fire
victim,
Leigh Hovland.
Josephine's body was
identified by her father, Ignac J. Pilat
(1861–1938).* As a young man, Ignac was a butcher in
his father's meat market. As an adult, he remained
in the food industry, forming a commissioned
brokerage for eggs and poultry on the Poultry Board
with Louis H. Brink, doing business in the South
Water St. market.
Josephine's funeral was held the morning of Sunday,
January 3, 1904, and burial was in the Pilat family
plot at the Bohemian National Cemetery in Chicago.
Her name was not added to the grave marker.
Gertrude Helen Pilat (1893–1978) — survivor — ten-years old
Gertrude, who went by her middle name, Helen, most of her life was burned
on the head and hands but not badly enough to
require hospitalization. It is not known if she
followed her mother on a plank across Couch Place.
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Mary Pilat (1866–1958) survivor — thirty-seven-years old
Mary escaped from the auditorium by crawling across a plank to
Northwestern. It was reported that she had anxiously
watched the struggle to lower the fire curtain, sure
it would end the risk.
Cecelia A. Kwapil (1889–1930) survivor - fourteen-years old, from Watertown, Wisconsin
Cecelia / Celia was badly injured with burns to her
ears but recovered. She escaped by crawling between the railing irons on
the topmost fire escape platform, swinging from
there to drop onto the next lower fire escape
platform and repeating the process to drop onto a
platform at a second-floor fire escape exit, then
jumping to the alley below, fortunately not
suffering any broken limbs. A man picked her up
briefly, probably getting her out of the way of
other jumping and falling bodies. It was not
reported whether she headed west to Dearborn street
or east to State street. She first entered a crowded
restaurant but for some reason left there and went
on to a dentist's office where someone telephoned a
sister. Cecilia spent several days in bed while her
wounds were treated.
She was the daughter of Frank
and Mary Kwapil, natives of Czechoslovakia, like the
Pilats, and the sister of eleven or twelve siblings.
The Kwapil family lived nearby Ignac's parents, Anna
and Wenzel Pilat. The Kwapil family name was
mistakenly spelled as Knapel, Knopel, Kwapel, and
even Kwafril.
In the years after the fire
Gertrude Pilat attended the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT),
married Lester Stevenson in 1916, gave birth to a
Lester junior, lived in Minnesota for a while,
traveled to Europe, and spent her final years in
California, where she is buried. Her brother,
Robert, settled in California, too, and Mary joined
her children there after Ignac's death.
Plucky Cecelia Kwapil may have married Joseph
Ceurvorst in 1923, but that may have been another
woman by the same name. She worked as a stenographer
and bookkeeper.
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