How This Jewish Steerage Passenger Saved Himself
This article was published in the Yiddish-language Forward on April 20, 1912.
A Jewish man, Abraham Hyman, a steerage-deck passenger on the Titanic, tells a remarkable story about how he rescued himself:
“I was asleep when the ship collided with the iceberg. Twenty minutes later, I was out of bed. By the time I got to the deck, they had already seated passengers in lifeboats.
“The thought ran through my mind that I had to get a seat on a lifeboat. The third-class passengers had no chance to be saved. I broke through to the deck where the first-class passengers were standing. Nobody stopped me.
“I went toward a lifeboat. The men around me were not rushing to get ahead. They thought there was no danger. I went to the end of one of the lifeboats, and when they let it down, I jumped in, and nobody stopped me. The nearest officer was far away, and had enough to watch after besides me.
“In the lifeboat, there was room for 10 or 15 more people, but nobody wanted to get in. The people on deck waved their hands and shouted, ‘Good bye!’
“I saw from the lifeboat as the ship sank. The night sky was lit up with stars. From far off, we could see everything that happened to the Titanic.”
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
