Oscar Hetman of Bauman Pulls Away From Sinking Ship in Last Craft to Leave
Oscar Hetman (sic), a farmer of Bauman, this state, helped man one of the lifeboats when a sailor, who was supposed to take a place, fell overboard and was lost. Hetman was in the last boat to leave the ship, he says, and pulled away five minutes before the White Star Line steamship Titanic went down off of Newfoundland at about 2 a.m. on Monday, April 15, in which over 1,500 lives were lost.
Hetman also says that when the boiler explosion occurred a scene followed which reminded the farmer of what occurred in a hopper on his farm. The steerage deck, he remembered, was jammed about him with steerage immigrants and immediately after the explosion the deck gave way in the middle and people standing there fell to the bottom of the hold. The sight that followed was too awful, he said; to put into words, other than to repeat that he thought again and again of his hopper.
Most of the steerage passengers were killed, the farmer said, when the deck broke asunder. "I do not believe," he said, "they lived long enough after that fall to suffer a great deal. As I remember it the water rushed in on them immediately. For a moment the cries of the steerage men and women came up from the hold, but only for a moment."
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