These two were supposedly based on a real couple, who said they wouldn’t board a life boat as long as there were younger people still aboard the ship. They both went below deck, presumably to their room, and that’s the last time they were seen.
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Isador & Ida Straus
The couple had been married for 41 years at the time of the disaster. They raised six children together, and were almost inseparable. On the rare occasion that they were apart, they wrote each other every day. They even celebrated their birthdays on the same day, although they were well apart from one another. During the sinking, Titanic’s officers pleaded with the 63 year old Ida to board a lifeboat and escape the disaster, but she repeatedly refused to leave her husband. Instead, she placed her maid in a lifeboat, taking her fur coat off and handing it to the maid while saying, “I won’t need this anymore”. At one point, she was convinced to enter one of the last two lifeboats, but jumped out as her husband walked away to rejoin him.
When last seen by witnesses, they were standing on deck, holding each other in a tight embrace. Their funeral drew some 6,000 mourners at Carnegie Hall.
A monument to them still stands in a Bronx cemetery, it’s inscription reads: “Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.”
why wasn’t the movie about them
why wasn’t the movie about them
Another few bits of trivia:
Both were Jewish, and Isidor was one of the co-owners of Macy’s.
The maid, Ellen Bird, went to their family to return the fur coat, specifically to their eldest daughter, Sara Straus Hess. She was gently refused, with Sara telling Ellen that Ida had given her the coat and she should keep it.
When her husband urged her to get into a boat, Ida told him “We have lived together for many years. Where you go, I go.”Her words were witnessed by those already in Lifeboat No. 8 as well as many others who were on the boat deck at the time. Eyewitnesses described the scene as a “most remarkable exhibition of love and devotion.”
Long story short, there should absolutely be a movie about them.
