Name |
Lifeboat from Titanic |
Lifeboat to Carpathia |
Confidence Level |
Yazbak, Mrs Silanah |
14 | Collapsible D |
4.00 |
June 15, 1955 letter to Walter Lord: "All the lifeboats were being lowered. There were only 14 lifeboats. My husband and I headed for the lifeboats. He push me on and as he tried to join me, two policemen grab him as they wanted to save all the women and children first. I began yelling and crying as I wanted to join him on the sinking ship. The boat was paddled away from the Titanic so fast that I couldn't jump off and be with my husband. We were about five minutes away from the ship, but we could still see it as the lights stayed on until the Titanic sank. There were 14 people aboard our lifeboat." Her suggesting that the ship sank shortly after they left, or at least that they were fairly close to it when it sank, could indicate Collapsible C or D. The Detroit News Tribune, April 28th 1912: "'Calling to my sister to follow, he seized me by the hand and ran up to the deck. We were all in our night clothes. They were launching a boat, and an officer put my sister into it. My husband gave her the child he was carrying and then put me beside her. The other child was still in my arms. I stretched out one hand and caught hold of my husband’s and begged him not to send me away alone. I was shivering and crying, and there was plenty of room in the boat, so he stepped in beside me and sat down and put his arm around me. Then an officer – someone said afterward it was the captain – pointed a pistol at my husband and ordered him out of the boat. Of course he obeyed, and the last I saw of him he was running towards the other end of the ship. I tried to get out of the boat, and follow him, but they held me down and said he would go in another boat and join me afterward. But I never saw him again.' The girl-wife suffered terribly from cold and exposure during the four hours she was afloat. Her little nephews are six and four years old, respectively, are still confined to the hospital with feverish colds they contracted in that dreadful night." From the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader of May 4, 1912. Possibly she was in #14 and transferred to another boat? Here she was separated from her sister, but perhaps they were just transferred to different boats. As she didn't speak English, it was all through an interpreter. "She said so many crowded about the lifeboats that she feared she and her sister and the latter's own children would not be placed in the boats but she finally was put in one of them and took with her, the two children, her sister, in some manner being separated from her, having been placed in a different boat. She said there were twenty women in the boat she was in and five sailors. The boat began to fill with water after they were on the water some time and they were all finally transferred to another lifeboat." Edwina Troutt (in Collapsible D) always remembered a little foreign lady who spoke no English in her boat, crying, "Titanic! Titanic! My man! My man!" In the morning when she saw the Carpathia she started screaming the same thing again. By process of elimination (women who didn't speak English and lost their husbands), and looking at the other women in D, it appears that Mrs. Yazbek ended up in Collapsible D. Our voting shows that though we cannot be positive, it appears she left the Titanic in #14, and was one of those who transferred to Collapsible D during the night. |