Colorized (2024)

The Waifs Of The Deep

When the Titanic went down in the Atlantic ocean in the spring of 1912, two bright-eyed children were left stranded in New York City. Their father perished on the trip to the States, and their mother was nowhere to be seen. Lost in America without any family to speak of, the two boys became a kind of sensation, and the troubling reminder that innovation often comes with casualties.

The story of the Titanic orphans, Michel Marcel Navratil, Jr. and his brother, Edmond, is darker than their survival of the sinking of the Titanic. Stolen from their mother by their father, the boys didn't know that they'd been kidnapped until later in their lives. The saga of the Titanic Orphans has it all, death, destruction, and the triumph of the human spirit.

Before Michel Marcel Navratil, Jr. (born in 1908) and his brother, Edmond (born in 1910) were two of the final survivors of the sinking of the Titanic they were just two brothers living with their mother in Nice, France. In 1912, the boys' father, Michel Navratil Sr. convinced his estranged wife to let him take the children for a long Easter holiday. He never planned on returning them.

Navratil Sr. took the boys and registered as second-class passengers on the Titanic under false names (Lolo and Mamon) and set out for a new start in America. Prior to the sinking the boys enjoyed their time on the ship. Michel Jr. later said:

I remember looking down the length of the hull – the ship looked splendid. My brother and I played on the forward deck and were thrilled to be there.

As the ship went down on April 12, Michel Sr. and an unknown man burst into their cabin to grab the two brothers and place them on lifeboats before perishing in the freezing waters. Michel later said that he remembered being lowered into the lifeboat, stating:

[Michel Sr.] handed us over to a pretty American. I remember the plop the lifeboat made as it hit the water. I went to sleep in the boat. Then when I woke up at dawn our lifeboat was moving away from the icebergs, and I didn't see them.

Louis and Lump

Michel and Edmond were the only two children to survive the sinking of the Titanic without a parent or guardian to help them along, and when they were rescued along with the rest of the survivors no one knew what to make of them. Neither of the children spoke English, and they didn't even know their own names so they were first dubbed "Louis and Lola" before the public settled on "Louis and Lump."

The story of these two lost French boys became a media sensation in the states, with one paper referring to them as the "waifs of the deep." The best that anyone could figure was that the children were from France, but that was it. The boys stayed in the home of another survivor, Margaret Hays, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, while authorities searched for their mother.

Michel Sr. found a final resting place in Nova Scotia

Unlike many of those who perished on board the Titanic, the body of Michel Sr. was recovered by authorities dragging the waters. After searching his pockets and finding his ticket with a false name it was believed that he was Jewish, so he was buried in the Baron de Hirsh Cemetery in Halifax, Nova Scotia, a final resting place for people of the Jewish Faith. Michel Jr. finally visited his father's grave in 1996.

Mother to the rescue

With newspaper articles about the two boys circulating around the world, their mother, Marcelle, was freaking out. Her husband had disappeared with the children and was nowhere to be seen. She realized that the boys had been kidnapped, but this being 1912 and all she couldn't just hop on social media and ask if anyone had seen the kids.

It wasn't until she saw one of the articles about her children that she realized the awful truth about what had happened. After touching base with authorities in the states she traveled across the Atlantic to reunite with her boys in the Big Apple on May 16, 1912. Once Marcelle had the boys safely in her grasp they all returned to France together.

Home again

Once Michel and Edmond made it back to Nice with their mother they stayed in France, they'd had enough adventure for two lifetimes. Edmond went on to become an interior decorator and architect before joining the French Army in World War II where he was taken as a prisoner of war. Edmond escaped his captors, but his health went downhill in the early 1950s and he passed away at the age of 43.

Michel became a professor of philosophy and lived the rest of his life in Montpellier, France. In 1987, he traveled to Wilmington, Delaware to honor the 75th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. This was his first time back on U.S. soil since he was rescued from the sinking ship. On January 30, 2001, he passed away at the age of 92, making him the final male survivor of the Titanic.