The Ghost of the Grand Banks

It was close to midnight on a moonless April night when lookout Frederick Fleet spotted the giant iceberg in the path of the great ship. The berg loomed out of the dark, calm sea like a phantom. He rang the bell in the crows-nest three times and then telephoned the bridge of the Royal Mail Ship Titanic where Sixth Officer James Moody was on duty.

“What do you see?” asked Moody into the handset

Fleet replied “Iceberg right ahead!”

Moody relayed the message to First Officer William Murdoch who ordered “Hard a’starboard!” and he also rang “Full Astern” on the ship’s engine order telegraphs. The process of setting the engines in reverse as well as physically turning the ships’s tiller took precious minutes as the berg loomed into view. It would have probably saved the great ship had Murdoch simply turned the wheel while maintaining the forward speed. The forward momentum with the change in direction would have caused the Titanic to miss the berg by several feet.

Sadly, this is not what happened. Instead, the ship hit the massive berg with a glancing blow to the starboard side. It is now thought that a large underwater spur of ice caused sections of the hull to buckle at the seams which caused a fatal amount of water to enter the ship. Scientist in recent years have put the blame on the iron rivets that were used to hold the plates together. It was discovered that the iron used in the rivets was an inferior quality and was in fact quite brittle. Continuous immersion in near freezing sea water did little to help this situation.

It was all over by 2:28 A.M. when the stern section of the RMS Titanic disappeared under the frigid North Atlantic. All told, one thousand five hundred and fourteen souls went to their deaths that dark April 15^th night. Either drowning in the ice cold salt water or freezing to death as they bobbed on the surface.

One hundred years later to the day, the sinking of the RMS Titanic remains a maritime tragedy that continues to haunt and fascinate us to no end. Hundreds of books, films, and songs commemorate the appalling tragedy like no other. In terms of lives lost, the Titanic was nowhere near some of the later disasters that struck. In 1945, the MV Wilhelm Gustloff was sunk by a Soviet submarine with a loss of over nine thousand lives and more recently, the passenger ferry MV Dona Paz collided with an oil tanker and sank with the loss of over forty three hundred lives in 1987.

But it is the sinking of the Titanic that continues to haunt our collective imagination for a hundred years now. Many have pointed to the sinking as a metaphor for the end of the Edwardian era with its ferocious class distinction; in death all are equal. Multi-millionaire John Jacob Astor IV went to his death on the Titanic along with hundreds of second and third class passengers. At the time, Astor was the wealthiest passenger aboard.

Today, the wreck of the great ship lies on the sea bed of the Atlantic Ocean in a little over twelve thousand feet of water. Up until 1985, it was assumed the Titanic sank in one piece, however Robert Ballard discovered the wreckage had in fact split in two and was in much worse condition than anyone could have guessed. It has since been decided that the bow section of the ship broke off and plowed into the mud of the sea bed going about 40 MPH. The stern section continued to float for a short while before corkscrewing its way to the bottom. Much of the superstructure was sheared off during the decent which created a massive debris field around the wreckage. The bodies of the victims settled into the debris field as well and over time nothing remained except their leather tanned shoes, which have resisted decay and scavengers. Photos taken of a pair of shoes lying on the ocean floor are a mute witness to the human cost of the tragedy. Recent expeditions to the wreck of the Titanic have revealed that iron-eating bacteria are rapidly reducing the superstructure of the ship and it has been estimated that in less than fifty years time, the entire wreck will collapse as a pile of rust on the sea floor. Fortunately at the urging of Bob Ballard, UNESCO has declared the shipwreck a world heritage site that will protect the remains from future scavenging by souvenir hunters. Perhaps now at long last, the great ship can rest in the watery blackness that has been her grave for a hundred years.

Holocaust Remembrance Day

On April 19th, we observe Holocaust Remembrance Day in the US. The date comes from the Hebrew calendar and coincides to the 27th day of Nisan. It marks the anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising which began on April 19th through May 16th 1943, which was the largest single revolt by the Jews during the Holocaust. In the end, the uprising was brutally crushed by the Nazis with some 13,000 Jews killed during the fighting and the remaining 50,000 residents captured and sent off to concentration and extermination camps, notably Treblinka.
In protest of the inaction of the western governments to intervene in the wholesale destruction of the Jewish people, Polish socialist politician and a Jew himself, Szmul Zygielbojm committed suicide in London to draw attention to the slaughter. His final statement was “I cannot continue to live and to be silent while the remnants of Polish Jewry, whose representative I am, are being murdered. My comrades in the Warsaw ghetto fell with arms in their hands in the last heroic battle. I was not permitted to fall like them, together with them, but I belong with them, to their mass grave. By my death, I wish to give expression to my most profound protest against the inaction in which the world watches and permits the destruction of the Jewish people”.
Last week, I was fortunate enough to be in attendance at a talk given by Holocaust survivor Israel Arbeiter, who painfully recalled his experiences at Auschwitz when he was in his early teens. Izzy, as he is known, was the sole survivor of a mass killing at the camp when an entire building full of people, 85 in all, were liquidated by the Nazis….he was number 86. He expressed his very sincere appreciation and thanks to the liberators of WW2, several of whom shared the stage with him.
Remembrance of the Holocaust began even when the fighting was still going on in Europe. As the camps were discovered, the allies began a careful and thorough documentation process, much of which was used as evidence in the Nuremburg Trials. The camps themselves, in many cases, were left standing as a permanent memorial to the largest crime in human history. Today, the remaining concentration and extermination camps are protected as UNESCO World Heritage Sites and stand as a stark contrast to those who would deny the Holocaust happened.
Aiding in the remembrance of the Holocaust is the testimony of the people who were at the camps and ghettos as well as the veterans who liberated these charnel-houses and saw for themselves what human beings are capable of. In one extreme case, US troops from the 157 Infantry Regiment of the 45th Division were so horrified and sickened by what they saw when they liberated Dachau that they rounded up and shot close to 50 German guards in a tearful rage. The young G.I.’s had never encountered anything like this before, but they would carry it with them for the rest of their lives. My late grandfather helped to liberate a sub-camp of Dachau and refused to speak of what he had witnessed there.
Ironically, it was the Nazis themselves that provided some of the best evidence of the Holocaust in the form of meticulous records. Today, these records are a chilling, but effective example of a planned genocide that targeted a specific group of people. It wasn’t some random crime of hate, but a very deliberate attempt to depopulate much of Europe’s Jewry.
At the end of his talk, Izzy Arbeiter uttered the statement that the Holocaust must “Never, ever be allowed to happen again!”, but sadly genocide continues in the 67 years since the end of the Second World War. During the 1970’s it was Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia, in the 80’s it was El Salvadorian death squads killing thousands of innocent people, in the 90’s it was Rawanda and the Balkans and more recently it was Dafur. Granted, none of these events reached the level of the Holocaust of the 1940’s, but genocide still continues to be a tool of war in many parts of the world where stability is lacking and warlords are allowed to run amuck. Perhaps the greatest monument to the Holocaust we could ever build would be the complete elimination of genocide in any form. I would like to think that some day in the future we can look back upon these dark events and truthfully say “Never Again!”