1 / 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 - like the incident 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, that they
actually saw their flares on the horizon, but they were thinking 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.