Dumbfounded: The last survivor to realize Titanic was gone

Most of the people who left Titanic's sloping decks on April 15 did not realize the peril that they and their fellow passengers faced until they rowed away and watched the great ship sink lower and lower. Indeed, for some, the seriousness of the situation wasn't clear until the ship disappeared completely. Still, they help out hope that other ships had reached the site and rescued loved ones. As one survivor recalled in her diary, it wasn't until the Carpathia reached New York that most of the survivors realized there were no other survivors. It was a great shock and the grief began anew at that moment.

There was one passenger, however, who truly missed the entire immensity of the tragedy until after she reached land. One immigrant woman, about 18 years of age, boarded a lifeboat and promptly fell asleep. When she woke up, she was on board the Carpathia. Not able to speak English and having slept through the Titanic's end, she simply assumed that ocean travel was like train travel. She assumed you only sailed part way on a ship before being transferred to another. Imagine her suprise when she learned that she'd survived what, at the time, was the worst maritime disaster in the history of the North Atlantic.