Tenants Were a Step Ahead of Smoke, Flames : Evacuation: There was little time to gather belongings as fire from the woods approached rear of huge apartment complex. ‘Our whole family history is down the drain,’ a resident says.

OAKLAND —  Gregg and Stephanie Chow chose a Mazda over a Mustang, but it was a pickup truck that saved their lives in the great Oakland firestorm of 1991.

The couple was among those who fled the Parkwoods Apartments, a 433-unit complex off Highway 24.

“We started smelling smoke about 11:15 a.m.; it was so windy,” Gregg Chow, 27, an MBA student at UC Berkeley who lived in a third-floor unit, said Monday, a day after their escape.

“In the next 30 minutes there developed an intense sense of urgency that we should leave,” said Stephanie Chow, 26, who attends San Francisco Law School. “The smoke just started billowing behind our building. It leaped over our building to the next hillside, and the smoke got deeper and darker black.”

The Chows loaded their Mazda RX7 with schoolbooks and jumped in, leaving behind a cherished 1967 Mustang. They joined a nearly gridlocked procession of panicky tenants attempting to escape from the apartment complex by funneling through the narrow exit at the open end of a horseshoe-shaped canyon. At one point, the cars had to be halted so that fire engines could make their way in to fight the blaze.

By that time, the flames were beginning to lick at the cars. “We felt the heat of the fire,” Stephanie said. “It was so hot it felt as if the roof of the car was on fire.”

Fearing that they would be roasted in their car, the Chows decided to run for it. “A Caltrans worker put us in the back of his pickup and saved our lives,” Stephanie said.

Harold Friedman’s parents met and married in Oakland, where they had migrated after their family homes in San Francisco burned to the ground in the conflagration that followed the 1906 earthquake.

On Monday, Friedman and his wife of 35 years, Renee, clutched a handful of family photographs, the only mementos of the couple’s penthouse in the Parkwoods.

“Our whole family history is down the drain,” Friedman said after talking with a State Farm insurance disaster team outside Oakland Technical High School, an evacuation center for victims of Sunday’s blaze.

In the face of the Friedmans’ enormous loss--which they say included Renee’s mother’s antique jewelry from Czechoslovakia and all the client files from Harold’s law practice--the couple nonetheless considered themselves lucky. They, at least, were insured and healthy.

As of midafternoon Monday, the 1,000-plus Parkwoods tenants had not been allowed by fire officials to return to the complex near the Caldecott Tunnel to sift through charred ruins in the hope that something--a diamond ring or an autographed baseball--that might have miraculously escaped incineration.

Most, however, assumed that all was lost, and they cringed at the thought of attempting to replace, without the assistance of insurance benefits, clothes, books, sporting gear, furniture and cappuccino machines.

Gerry Karczewski and his wife, Carmel, both 28, said they had no time to gather extra clothes once they realized how near the fire was to their apartment, which was in the rear of the complex, closest to the woods.

“There was no alarm system,” said Gerry, an Oakland attorney. “We were lying in bed and heard some guy yell out to evacuate. We got up, threw on some clothes and by then the flames were right next to the building, just yards away.”

Carmel, a buyer for the Safeway grocery chain, said she did remember to pick up the album of photos from their wedding five months ago but forgot her two-carat diamond engagement and wedding ring. When she tried to return for it, the blaze drove her back.

The Karczewskis’ belongings were not insured. Gerry, in the jeans, T-shirt, sneakers and 49ers cap he had escaped in, got tears in his eyes as he looked at a six-page list of items presumably lost, including a baseball card collection started when he was 7, several autographed baseballs, wedding gifts and pictures from their Caribbean honeymoon.

Tenants who phoned a Newport Beach number for Regis Management Co., managers of the complex, were told Monday that they could expect a refund of their security deposit and a portion of October’s rent.