Tag Archives: RMS Titanic

The RMS Titanic and Lebanon

As many of us were going to sleep yesterday, the idea that 100 years ago, 2000 people were going through an ordeal stranded in the middle of an ocean escapes us. 100 years is surely a long time – but for many, the whole tragedy of the Titanic has become a laughable matter.

How so? It was turned by Hollywood into a movie, which later on became a common area of jokes. For many, the word Titanic nowadays is followed by the word “meh.” We fail to remember that for many, especially Lebanese, we’ve had great-grandfathers, great-uncles, aunts & family on that ship, many of whom died, either by drowning or by getting shot.

I grew up listening to the story of Daher Chedid, a man who was trying to escape the Ottomans in Lebanon only to find death at the hands of the Atlantic ice. I couldn’t escape the haunting stories of the people from Hardin, how they prayed and danced Dabke until their very last moments. The people of Kfarmishki lost 13 people on the Titanic – how could we call that funny?

A man from Zahle saved his wife and swam away, losing hope with every second of being saved. He wasn’t. Two men from Zgharta got shot for wanting to survive – they left families behind.

How could we ignore all of those stories and act as if the Titanic is one big popular event that happened, got turned into a cliche and shouldn’t be talked about?

Lebanon lost many people on the night of April 14th-15th, 1912. The least we can do is to honor their memories by telling their stories, at least on the centennial anniversary of their passing.

For many, their interest will only be transient, as is our interest in many things. And when it comes to the Titanic, although worse tragedies have happened over the years, we – as Lebanese – should feel involved because we have lost many people there. Some say as much as 93 – in a country as small as ours, at a time where the population was very little, 93 is a tragedy.

They say people truly die when they’re no longer in anyone’s memory. This is my attempt, at least briefly, to get the Lebanese of the Titanic back into people’s memory so they’d be alive on the 100th anniversary of the ship sinking.

There are many more Lebanese whose stories I couldn’t tell. Perhaps I’ll tell them later on. But for those stories that I told, I hope they made an impact – even if it’s in a small number of people.

Many asked me if those stories were correct or made up. Many asked for my sources. Many accused me of stealing them from Al Arabiya. To those I say: these stories are not exclusive to any news service. They are not written by anyone as a novel, they were not first reported by Al Arabiya and they won’t stop with a report from MTV. These stories were written with the lives of the Lebanese passengers that went on that ship, seeking a better life for themselves and their families, away from the oppression in the country.

My sources were from books I had bought back in 1998 about the tragedy, newspaper articles that I had saved over the years, as well as stories that I was personally told when I was young.

Today, most countries are holding events to remember their deaths aboard that ship. Lebanon, who lost more people than most of those countries, is not.

May the victims of the Titanic generally and the Lebanese especially rest in peace.

Stories of Lebanese on the Titanic – Part 5: The People of Zgharta & Choueir

For part 1, click here. For part 2, click here. For part 3, click here. For part 4, click here.

Sarkis Moawwad was a 35 year old man from Zgharta, preparing his papers to travel to the United States. While on an excursion to Tripoli, a palm reader told Sarkis he’d die drowning. Believing the superstition, Moawwad almost stopped his travel plans, which involved a ship. His friends, however, convinced him otherwise by reminding him that the ship he was boarding, the RMS Titanic, was supposedly unsinkable. God himself cannot sink this ship, they said.

Aboard the Titanic, and on the night of April 14th when it hit the iceberg, Moawwad raced to the ship’s deck and was faced with a dilemma. One part of him told him that women and children ought to go on the boats first. The other part of him begged him to get on a boat – every shred of him was begging to fight for survival. Moawwad succumb to the latter part and got on one of the rescue boats.

The captain of the Titanic looked at him. Within a few seconds, the captain had held his gun and shot Moawwad, killing him instantly. The palm reader was not right. Sarkis Moawwad didn’t drown. He was shot, leaving behind a family of four.

Sarkis Moawwad

Another man from Zgharta was Tannous Keaawi, a 21 year old married man. Tannous was a fighter. When in 1912, some Ottomans raded his friend’s farm and took over his cattle, it was up to Tannous to get them back. So he took a riffle and, with his blood boiling, raced to where the Ottomans lived and waited for them until the got home. Once they did, he held the riffle to their heads and asked them to give back the cattle. They refused. So he shot them one by one.

After his actions, Tannous couldn’t stay in Lebanon so his friend gave him enough money to secure a trip to New York for him and his family. On their way to the Titanic, his family got held up in Marseille because his daughter had chickenpox. His wife decided to stay behind with their children while he continued.

Once on the Titanic, Tannous also tried to get on a rescue boat, along with Sarkis Moawwad. And he met the same fate as Sarkis, at the hands of the same gun by the same man.

Of the three men from Zgharta that were on board the Titanic, only one survived. His name was Hanna Makhlouf. Hanna also tried to get on a rescue boat with his two other friends. The difference was that he was lucky enough to have found a large enough skirt for him to hide. And hide he did and watched both his friends get shot before the boat was lowered into the water and taken away to sea. He later on went to Waterbury, CT where he settled down.

Mona, the wife of Tannous Keaawi

In another side of Lebanon, in the Metn town of Dhour el Choueir, Adele Kiame was summoned by her father to join him in New York where he had started a silk-work company. In a letter that her father, Najib, sent to Lebanon to ask to send his daughter to America, he asked her to bring with her some Turkish carpets which are much better in Lebanon. He also asked her to get him some fancy tobacco seeing as the kind he was smoking in New York was nowhere near as good.

Adele left her hometown with a woman named Latife Beaaklini who also took her daughters with her, to follow her husband who had opened a pharmacy in the United States.

One of the letters that Najib Kiame sent

Once news of the Titanic sinking reached them, Adele, Latife and her daughters went to deck and got on a rescue boat. However, Adele decided to go back to try to rescue whatever she could of her belongings, including some amount of money she had hidden in socks. She didn’t stop with at the socks. She tried to get some dresses and other belongings with her. The crew refused and threw them all away.

Adele

Meanwhile, Latife took her daughters and put them in waterproof bags that she dangled off the sides of the rescue boats. A man gave way for Latife to get on the boat and he helped her tie her daughters to the side. He then went back to the ship where he drowned. When Adele returned, the boat was full. So Latife started shouting, as the boat was being lowered, for them to stop and let Adele on. She was screaming in Arabic. The crew couldn’t understand and there was nothing they could do – the boat was already full.

Adele, stood stranded on deck: a 16 year old minor who didn’t know the language.

She caught the eye of the person you’d least expect: John Jacob Astor, the ship’s wealthiest man. So he carried Adele and gave her to his bride whom he had secured on one of the recue boats. Astor’s wife then took off her coat and gave it to Adele who was afraid and shivering.

Once they reached New York, Adele’s father hosted the survivors. Latife’s youngest daughter, Eugenia, contracted pneumonia due to the cold that night and died soon after. Latife then gave birth to a boy named David, on January 28th, 1913. She raised her family and died year 1962.

Latife, in the 1940s

Adele, on the other hand, got married in Brooklyn and had two children: Mitchel and Layla. She then fell ill and died, at the age of 26. The year was 1924.

The story of the people from Dhour el Choueir is not this simple. Doubts arose over the years about whether Adele went back to her cabin because she was stingy, as people had said, or because Latife had asked her to. Moreover, some doubt that it was really John Jacob Astor who saved her.

Either way, we can never be sure of some things when it comes to stories that are over a hundred years old. Both women went on to live for years and have families.