Black Man on the Titanic. Serge Bile

      Sinking of the Titanic. The lifeboats row away from the still lighted ship on April 15th 1912.

      “Striking the water was like a thousand knives being driven into one’s body. The temperature was twenty-eight degrees, four degrees below freezing.”

      —Charles Lightoller, Second Officer aboard Titanic

      In the general panic that followed the collision between the Titanic and the iceberg, the Laroche family had been split. Juliette and Simone had miraculously found themselves on a lifeboat, while Joseph was still struggling on the deck with Louise, who was close to suffocating in his arms. In the indescribable scramble for survival, he protected the child by giving elbow blows and pushing back the crowd in order to make his way through. And then there was a loud exchange with a crew member, as Joseph tried to make him understand, with desperate gestures, that he had to take Louise to the lifeboat where her mother was waiting. Because there were not enough boats for everyone, the sailor would not have any of it. He was completely overwhelmed by the circumstances, but Joseph insisted. He yelled. He implored. He begged. Another sailor finally understood him in the widespread panic and grabbed Louise to bring her down.

      Upon seeing his loving family reunited in the lifeboat, all ready to go, Joseph yelled a few words of relief to his wife. “See you soon, my love!… There will be space for everyone, in the boats… Take care of our little girls… See you soon!”

      Those were his last recorded words.

      On boat No. 825, Juliette, Simone, and Louise Laroche disappeared into the cold night, a few other lifeboats behind them. On boat No. 10, Antonie Mallet was holding her son André. Albert, her husband, had not been permitted to come with them.

      The wait then started, between anguish and hope.

      Hours later, flares lit up the sky. They were coming from the Carpathia26. The ship had changed course after receiving the distress signals from the Titanic.

      “From all the small boats raised a rumbling. Passengers now understood that relief was near. Soon, all the survivors of the Titanic were aboard the Carpathia. Seven hundred or so. Rare were those who, among these survivors, had not left a father, a brother, a son, or a husband aboard the sinking ship,” Juliette recounts. “When we asked news from the officers of the Carpathia, they replied: ‘Don’t worry! Other ships went by the Titanic, and are right now headed toward New York, where you will find your loved ones.’ Thus, they hid the truth to the end. Not until our arrival in New York did we learn it in whole, in its horrifying reality.”

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      In April 1996, on the Cherbourg dock where she is paying homage to the victims of the sinking, Louise knows that she’s alive today because of her father, the hero. Since the tragedy, she’s suffered from the absence of her savior. She can no longer remember the sound of his voice, the smell of his cologne, the feel of his hugs. She cannot remember the shape of his mustache, and she still misses him terribly.

      Louise never married, and neither did Simone, both haunted by the memory of their savior, unable to overcome the loss. Louise will not often speak of it, but deep in her soul, she believes that no tenderness will ever equal that of her loving father.

      Claude Carrer, the Mayor’s representative, turns toward Louise and highlights in a few simple and touching words the life of this woman, one “that dramatically changed in Cherbourg.” In a short speech, hiding once again behind the collective suffering of her family to avoid talking about her own pain, eighty-six-year-old Louise confides that they’ve all been left with terrible emotional scars. Her mother had the hardest time talking about the tragedy, and the atrocious images of that night remained with her until she died. “For example,” Louise says as she stares at the headstone erected in front of her, “my mother raised us with an obsessive fear of travels.”

      This explains why she didn’t attend the reunion organized in Boston by the Titanic Historical Society27. The Society did not take offense at Louise’s absence. Incidentally, the president and founder, historian Edward Kamuda28, is here at the Cherbourg tribute. He’s heading a delegation of twelve members of the Society who, like him, traveled from the United States for the occasion.

      For Carrer and for all the other people surrounding Louise, the Cherbourg tribute is important because only eight survivors of the Titanic remain in the world—two of them in France—to bear witness to the catastrophe. In the Laroche family, only Louise is still alive. Her sister, Simone, passed away in 1973. Their mother died in 1980.

      The only other French survivor who is still alive is not present on this day. His name is Michel Navratil29. He was three and a half years old at the time of the tragedy, almost the same age as Simone Laroche. He was also traveling in second class with his father and his younger brother Edmond, two years old.

      Michel and Edmond Navratil’s father had boarded the Titanic under a false name. He had kidnapped his two sons from their mother, whom he was divorcing. After his death in the sinking, the two brothers became “orphans” in New York because no family came to claim them. The international media was immediately enraptured by the mystery surrounding these children. Who were they? Where were they from? Who were their parents? A daily newspaper in Quebec speculated that they were the children of… Joseph Laroche, going as far as masculinizing the names of the two biracial girls to assign them to the two white boys. On April 22, 1912, La Patrie30 called the boys Louis and Simon. “New York authorities believe that Mr. and Mrs. Laroche might have been French, or maybe Canadian-French,” the reporter wrote, “as they have been unable to gain information from the two boys who do not even know their last name.”

      Eventually, Michel and Edmond Navratil’s mother, who lived in Nice, recognized her children from a picture published in the papers. On May 8, 1912, she embarked from Cherbourg to get them and bring them back home.

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      The Navratil boys had met the Laroche girls on the Titanic. But Michel and Louise had not seen each other again since the tragedy. He lived in Montpellier, and she lived in Villejuif. It was not until July 2005, six years after the Cherbourg tribute, that they met again in Paris with another survivor, the English nonagenarian Millvina Dean.31