A Titanic Letter

18/4/12

Dear Hettie:

I’ve arrived, rescued and my-self safe at New York. I suppose you heard about the “Titanic” and I suppose you thought I was drowned, but, thank God, I just managed to escape.

I will explain how the accident happened. At 10-30 we were all sent to bed, lively shouting and singing and doing everything. About 11:45 we were awakened as about a dozen crewmen came by our decks. We did not take the slightest notice and went to bed again, but we were awakened by the sailors to put on lifebelts. I did not have any because I could not find one, and still I was making a lark of it and people were singing and playing the piano’ the band was also playing.

I went on the Third Class Deck and saw great lumps of ice and realized we had struck an iceberg. But we still did not realize there was any danger.

Later things looked serious and I knew that it was time to fend for myself. I realized that I had to find a lifebelt which I did. I went back to my birth to find some of my belongings and as I walked through the gangway, I was told by some merchant seamen that things were serious, so I decided to go back on deck.

While walking on the deck, I saw quite a few people praying and holding rosaries to be saved. I thought to myself, I will pray when I am rescued.

It was then about 200 feet high from the water where I was standing. As I was not afraid of the danger, I knew I must do something. I was standing near the davits with ropes hanging down climbed on the davits, crawled across and jumped for one of the ropes. I was wearing gloves and that saved my hands partially. I had to jump 5 feet horizontally to reach them.

I clutched the ropes and when I got to the end of these, I still found I had to jump into the sea and was kept up by my lifebelt. After being in the water for several minutes, I was picked up. The boat that rescued me had children and women but was not filled to capacity. Our boat picked up several men from the water. I believe one or two died of exposure.

Then the bung of my lifeboat began to leak, so my job was to bale the water. We sailed through the night in a calm see. We were lucky and every star we saw in the sky we thought theses were lights from boats, but we were only seeing mirages.

At about 7:00 a.m. when it became light, we saw a boat in the distance, which we found out was the CARPATHIA. When we reached the CARPATHIA, we had to climb on board this boat by rope ladder.

I had lost all my money, barring a few coppers, but my valuables was with the purser, which included a farewell watch from my boys club which I belonged.

Gus

(Gershun Cohen, 19, to his girlfriend. From Letters of the Century, eds. Lisa Grunwald and Stephen J. Adler.)