2024-04-01 11:35:24
Mid-April 1912, the clock showed less than half an hour before midnight. The bow of the RMS Titanic began to sink to the bottom of the sea. In less than two hours, the cruise ship, described as unsinkable, was lying in half in the depths of the Atlantic. Among others, the little Navrátil brothers survived the disaster. Their father, who came from Slovakia, was not so lucky. He died on the ship.
The destruction of the Titanic, which the British designer Harland and Wolff began to build exactly 115 years ago, was one of the biggest shipping tragedies in history. Hollywood made a famous movie about the accident, leading writers wrote dozens of books. Yet one story stands out.
Brothers Edmond and Michel Marcel Navratil boarded the giant steamship in Southampton at the age of two and three. Their father Michel Navratil took them on a cruise.
A surname of Slavic origin is no accident – Michel Navratil the elder was a Slovak. He was born in 1880 in the west of Slovakia in the city of Sereď, which is about 60 kilometers from Bratislava. In his youth, however, he left for a better living in France, where he worked as a tailor.
He did not survive the sinking of the Titanic. But both of his sons did. Like the other passengers, they were rescued by the steamer Carpathia. The elder of the brothers Michel later recalled the moments before the sinking of the ship: “My father entered the cabin where we were sleeping. He dressed me very warmly and took me in his arms. The unknown man with whom he came into the cabin did the same to my brother. When I think about it now, I feel emotional. They knew they were going to die.”
The curly brothers became a media sensation after the shipwreck. As the only children from the Titanic, they were rescued without a parent or guardian. The siblings thus earned the nickname “Titanic orphans” and their photos flooded the world press.
False identity
That they survived the shipwreck was only part of their strong life story. He and his father went on a voyage on the Titanic after he kidnapped them from their mother, Marcella Navratilova, who was from Italy. She married Michel Sr. in 1907, later Michel and Edmond were born to them in Nice, France. Five years later, however, the couple separated and the children fell into the care of their mother.
Michel Navratil – father of the boys. | Photo: Titanic Wiki
The father came to borrow them one Easter weekend and never returned the boy. He took his sons to Southampton and boarded the second class of the Titanic with them under a false identity. He wanted to bring them to the United States, where the steamer was headed. But he had no idea that the ship would hit an iceberg on the fifth day of the journey.
Titanic was claimed to be unsinkable, the designers equipped it with fifteen steel bulkheads for emergency cases. In total, about 2,200 passengers traveled on it, about 1,500 of them did not survive. There were 110 children on the ship, roughly half perished. However, there are no exact data.
“My children, when your mother comes for you—and she surely will—tell her that I loved her dearly and still love her. Tell her that I expected her to come to us so that we could all live together in peace and freedom in the New World,” Michel remembered one of his father’s last words.
Michel Navratil Sr. was later buried at the Baron de Hirsch Cemetery in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. A place in the cemetery was designated specifically for the Jewish victims of the Titanic. The father bought the ship ticket under the Jewish name Louis M. Hoffman, changed the children’s names to Lot and Louis.
According to some accounts, he was afraid that someone would find out that he was traveling with the kidnapped sons under a false identity. It is said that he did not have much fun with anyone on the ship, and there are also unconfirmed reports that he took a loaded revolver with him on the steamer.
“These are my sons”
Even though the siblings were extremely lucky, it was still a month before they could return home to France. At first, their distraught mother Marcelle had no idea where her ex-partner had taken them. But even she could not escape the articles about the alleged two orphans from the Titanic.
When she saw a photo of her sons in the newspaper, she faced a difficult task – to convince the authorities that they were really her children. Her plans were complicated by the fact that the children were traveling under false names. In the end, however, the authorities believed her.
In the meantime, American Margaret Hays, who also sailed on the Titanic, took care of the boy. She took care of the boys, also because she didn’t want them to have to go apart. She lived with them in the USA until their mother came for them on May 16, 1912. The three then returned to France together.
Michel and Edmond Navratil with their mother after they were successfully reunited. | Photo: Library of Congress
“Sort? We have roots here?”
Edmond later became a builder. But life’s vicissitudes never left him for good. He fought in the French army during World War II and was captured. Even though he managed to get free, the heavy fighting took a toll on his health. He died in 1953 at just 43 years old.
Michel, who embarked on the path of a philosopher, became the longest-lived man among those who survived the Titanic disaster. He died in January 2001 at the age of 92. He left behind four daughters, including Élisabeth Navratilová. She wrote a book about the fate of the family during her father’s lifetime Children of the Titanic.
Both Michel and Edmond resented the Slovak city of Sereď. Michel went there for the first time only in the 1960s. “But when they came to the city and from afar they saw the Nickel Smelter (today a dilapidated factory in which metal was produced under socialism and which was “famous” as an extreme polluter of the environment, editor’s note), they turned around. They were surprised at what a disgusting city they have roots in,” Magdaléna Papánková, whose grandfather was a cousin of Michele Navratil the elder, recalled in 2012 for the Slovak daily SME.
According to her, perhaps then, in 1912, the father wanted to travel with his sons to Chicago, where part of the family from Seredi lived. But this is just speculation, Papánková has no proof.
Michel Navratil Sr. is the only confirmed Slovak who traveled on the steamer. Whether the steamer also carried any Czechs was never 100% verified. Even though several names were mentioned.