Titanic & Grandpa
My mother and I went to see James
Cameron’s movie Titanic, and she talked about how her father often
mentioned the incident over the years. She said the Titanic disaster had not
been so much on people’s minds since WWII in Germany, because they had been
occupied with other sea disasters even more horrific.
There were the incidents of a
German refugee ship, the ‘Gustloff’, that was heading for Germany from some
Russian occupied territory in 1944 and was torpedoed by a Russian submarine,
with the loss of about 6000 lives - mainly women and children; as well as the
‘Arcona’, a ship with thousands of Concentration Camp refugees.
My grandfather, Carl Fraass, born
24.11.1884 in Lübeck, Germany, for many years was a seaman - as far as I can
remember from appr. 1900 until the start of World War I in Sept.1914. I
think he was last employed by the Bremer Lloyd, but it can also have been
Hamburg-Süd or Hapag - exclusively on passenger liners, working in the galley
(the kitchen).
The ship names on which he was working that I remember were the
names of the Kings and Queens of the period, especially the Hohenzollern and
the Crown Princess Cecily (Kronprinzessin Cäcilie). On one of these ships he was
on the 14th of April 1912 in the Atlantic waters, close to where the Titanic
tragedy took place.
He used to tell us often of this night, saying that many
ships had been close to the Titanic; some that close, they actually saw
their flares on the horizon, but they thought there was a ship having
some great big party!
Carl used to point out that in the
days when he was a sailor, radio communications were in their infancy. In fact
it was normal for the radio station to close down at night and to be unmanned
from appr. 8,00pm or 9,00pm until the early morning. Apparently it was only
shortly after the Titanic disaster that a rule was implemented internationally,
to keep radio communications live around the clock.
After seeing the movie, on the same night
my mother and I also watched a documentary about the Survivors of the
Titanic disaster - and a couple of days later The Mystery of the
Titanic.
In these docos it was confirmed that the reason why the earliest
ship, the Carpentaria, only came to the rescue after about four hours was
because other ships in the vicinity, like the California (which was much
closer to the Titanic than the Carpentaria) had their radios shut down for the
day.
In fact the California tried to visually communicate with the Titanic on
the night - their lights were indeed seen from the Titanic - but when they
didn’t receive a reply, they too thought there was a party happening on the
Titanic; a miscalculation for which their captain was much criticised later.
In
any case, while some sixteen ships had actually received Titanic’s radio
messages - among them the very first SOS calls in maritime history - survivors
talked about a ‘Mystery Ship’ that sailed by at close range in the night of the
disaster, without stopping, and their radios apparently not switched on.
Grandpa had said they were sailing
much further South than the Titanic - the reason being the wellknow situation
with the icebergs at that time of year. They did change their course
immediately when they learnt of the disaster (theirs was the only German ship
involved in any rescue attempts) and sailed North.
They arrived a day later -
only to be faced with debris, some of which they salvaged, but no people, dead
or alive.
Opa repeatedly talked about how horrified they all were at the time
in the knowledge that most shipmates working under deck in the service areas
(like himself) or in the engine rooms would have had no chance of survival,
since the Titanic was equipped with the watertight doors that would
automatically have locked them in alive; and which, of course, had been
designed to safeguard the ship in that sort of emergency.