Water rushed in, flooding the moonlit decks and inciting chaos. Panicking passengers in drenched pajamas pushed their way to the upper deck, then huddled together as priests led prayer circles. Their luggage swooshed around in the halls below.
But despite the commotion, Jerry Reinert says he didn’t lose focus. He says he carried a dozen children down a rope ladder to safety — one by one, chest to chest, his legs flailing above the waters beneath him.
Reinert, who was 21 at the time, was one of 1,706 passengers and crew on the Italian luxury liner Andrea Doria when it collided with a Swedish ship 60 years ago in July. At least 46 people died, and the Andrea Doria slipped beneath the waters 50 miles off the coast of Nantucket Island, Mass.
Now, Reinert, 81, of Boca Raton, is doing what he can to keep the story alive as the number of survivors dwindles. “It’s almost impossible for me to believe I’ve lived this long,” he said. “I don’t know how many survivors are left. Just think: The average person who crosses the Atlantic on ships is 40. And add 60 years to that.”
As a college graduation present, Reinert’s mother bought him a trip from New York to Europe. Reinert had a plane ticket home at the end of four weeks, but said he met a woman in Rome who said she was returning home by ship. Reinert cashed in his plane ticket and instead got a small cabin on the Andrea Doria for a seven-day trip across the Atlantic.
Reinert said he spent much of the trip playing pingpong and swimming in the ship’s pools. On the last night, he went to the bar for a nightcap and dancing. About 10 minutes after 11 p.m., the band was playing the song “Arrivederci Roma” when he felt the crash.
“It felt like sitting in a room and the room getting hit,” he said. “The boat swayed back and forth two or three times.” When it settled, the boat was tilted to one side. The drapes were hanging away from the wall, and the chairs had toppled over.
The collision created a hole 30 feet in diameter at the front-right side of the ship. And because of the way the ship was tilted from the water intake, only half of the lifeboats could be used. “It was an enormous hole,” Reinert said. “If I had been in my cabin at the time, I would have been killed. I just knew that I had to help there was no question about it.”
Other vessels responded with lifeboats to help in the rescue. For the next 3 1/2 hours, Reinert said he made 12 trips up and down a rope ladder, each time carrying a child to a lifeboat. “The rope ladders were an incredible obstacle because they were swaying,” he said.
Exhausted and shaken, Reinert and another 65 people aboard the lifeboat were taken to a French liner that had come to help in the rescue. At that point, it was about 9 a.m., and the survivors were only a few hours from the New York Harbor.
Once safe on the French ship, Reinert said he finally realized the gravity of what had just happened. “I broke down, and I cried for about an hour, and another hour after that, we were pulling into the New York Harbor,” he said. “We all stood on the upper deck looking at the Statue of Liberty, and we were all crying.” It took him at least a couple of weeks to get readjusted once he was back with his family, Reinert said.
The shirt he was wearing when the ships collided, pictures of the Andrea Doria and other memorabilia from that tragic day cover his home’s walls.
“It changed my whole life,” said Reinert, who has two sons and two grandchildren. “It made me truly believe there is nothing more important in the world than today.”
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Source: Sun Sentinel
