On the night of April 15, 1912, three-year-old Michelle and two-year-old Edmond boarded the last boat from the doomed Titanic. But the fact that they left the lost ship was not yet a happy ending to their story.
In 1907, the Slovak émigré Michel Navratil Sr. married the Italian Marcella Carreto. Soon the couple moved from London to Nice, where their two sons, Michelle and Edmond, were born.
However, this marriage did not last long - already in 1912 Michelle and Marcella divorced. In accordance with the court's decision, the boys stayed with their mother.
A couple of days before Easter, Michel took the boys to his place. Marcella had no idea that she might never see her sons again.
Abduction and escape
No one knew that an insidious plan had ripened in Michel Navratil's head. Grabbing the boys, he decided to go to the USA and start a new life there.
On April 10, 1912, a man and two sons boarded the Titanic in Southampton, England.
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Fearing police harassment, he purchased second-class tickets in the name of Louis M. Hoffman and registered his sons as Louis and Lotto.
Michel told his fellow travelers that he was a widower. During the entire journey, he did not let his sons out of sight for a minute and did not trust anyone to look after the children.
When the fatal collision of the ship with the iceberg occurred, the boys were already asleep. The father and a stranger pulled the kids out of their beds and carried them onto the deck. There, Michelle Sr. put them on the last boat, whispering goodbye so that they tell his mother that he still loves her and hoped that she would come to them in the USA.
The man drowned in the icy waters of the Atlantic. His body was later buried in the Baron de Hirsch Jewish cemetery in Nova Scotia due to an assumed last name.
Orphans of the Titanic
So the boys escaped, but ended up thousands of miles from their mother under an assumed name.
They were too young to tell anything about themselves, and besides, they did not speak English at all.
The boys were taken home by the surviving first-class passenger Margaret Hayes.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Marcella realized that Navratil Sr. had disappeared with the children, but she could not even imagine that they had sailed away on the ill-fated Titanic!
And only when American newspapers reached Europe, in one of the photographs, she saw her boys.
The woman immediately rushed to New York on a long, but undoubtedly less dramatic sea voyage.
Finally, on May 16, 1912, she was reunited with her children. Marcella took them back to France, where they all lived until the end of their days.
Despite the fact that at the time of the disaster, Michel was not even four years old, he realized how great the stratification of the poor and rich passengers of the Titanic was.
Judge for yourself - 201 out of 324 first-class passengers survived, while only 181 out of 708 third-class passengers were able to leave the ship.
Later, he said more than once that if they had not been swimming then in second class, they would have had no chance to escape.
Edmond Navratil died in 1953, and Michelle Jr. in 2001, for a long time being the last of the men to escape the Titanic on that fateful night.
