Ruth Becker Documentary Interview

Ruth Elizabeth Becker

Second-class passenger

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When we got on, I looking in a great big window into the beautiful dining room and the silver and the linens. Everything was beautiful and new.

There were two and a half hours where all of these people could have been saved. And not enough lifeboats. I will never forget that.

Of course the first lifeboats were not filled at all. The women all said, "Well, we're not going to go out there and float around on the ocean. We'd rather stay on a boat that's safe."

They were sending up rockets for help. Yes, I remember that very plainly.

When it was going down – just slowly, not fast at all – and the night was dark, no moon, a very dark, black night – and that boat was just beautiful. All the lights in the boat were on. Just a beautiful sight. But it was going down quietly and the lights were going under the water as it went down and I remember that very plainly as it was a beautiful sight and a terrible sight because you could see that the boat was going under the water.

We saw these people, these fifteen or seventeen hundred people jumping from the decks and screaming and yelling for help, and we couldn't help them.

When the ship broke in half – of course, it broke in half between the four funnels – the stern stayed up for about a minute or so and then it went down. That's the way we saw it.

We couldn't help anybody. We had 65 or 70 in our boat. We couldn't help any and it was standing room only, and we couldn't take another soul in our boat, so we rowed away as fast as we could.

Curator's Note: This interview was compiled from clips from the 1998 documentary, Titanic: Breaking New Ground and is credited to Darrell Rooney. The date of the original interview is unknown.