Donald Lewis was born in April 1934. In 1939, Lewis was five and on a ship in the middle of the Atlantic. His mother was born and raised in Edinburgh, Scotland. She married his father who is American. They lived in Los Angeles [Annotator's Note: Los Angeles, California]. As the war clouds were gathering, his mother took Lewis and his older sister to Scotland and England to visit relatives. Lewis does not remember much other than that it rained a lot in Scotland. He spent time with a relative that had a model train setup in his backyard. There is a locally famous street called Princes Street in the center of Edinburgh. Trains come in there and Lewis would look at the steam engines come into the station. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks Lewis to talk about boarding the SS Athenia.] He has a scrapbook that has information about it. They were scheduled to return around the middle of September [Annotator's Note: September 1939] because a lot of Americans decided to go home as fast as they could. His mother tried to get passage sooner. They were booked on a different ship out of Liverpool on 1 September, but they could not go so she booked passage at the last minute on the SS Athenia out of Glasgow [Annotator's Note: Glasgow, Scotland]. The ship was very crowded with Americans and Canadians who were fleeing the UK [Annotator's Note: the United Kingdom]. At the last minute, there were also many refugees from Central Europe who were fleeing Hitler [Annotator's Note: German dictator Adolf Hitler]. They could not speak English. They left in the afternoon for Belfast, Ireland to pick up people and then to Liverpool [Annotator's Note: Liverpool, England] for more passengers. They left Liverpool the day before the war started. People were asking each other if they thought the war was going to start and when. They had a first-class cabin and were able to eat in the first-class dining room.

Donald Lewis has no memory of the ship's cabin and knows this from his mother's written summary of their trip. [Annotator's Note: Lewis boarded the SS Athenia in Glasgow, Scotland on 1 September 1939 with his mother and sister to flee Europe.] He knows the life vests were not easily accessible from her writing. The ship had gone overnight about 200 or 300 miles into the North Atlantic. He has read there is a rock called Rockall [Annotator's Note: an uninhabitable granite islet in the North Atlantic Ocean] off of Ireland. They were south of that, heading west. They were totally blacked out with no lights at night. The ship was not in a convoy and was zig-zagging [Annotator's Note: a naval anti-submarine maneuver]. That day [Annotator's Note: 3 September 1939] was fine. Around seven o'clock in the evening, they were running separate settings in the dining room due to the large amount of people aboard. The Chief Steward handed a typed message out that said a lot of the crew had left the ship for the war effort. Lewis and his family were having dinner at an oblong table. Lewis was next to his mother. His sister was at the end of the table. His mother wrote that she had looked at her watch and it was 7:40 in the evening when there was a huge explosion. The lights went out. His mother felt the shock come from behind her on the port side [Annotator's Note: in maritime terminology, port means "left"]. She immediately grabbed Lewis. His mother did not see his sister again for another month. She took Lewis to some stairs. The floor was slippery. Lewis was carried up the stairs. Men were lighting matches to see by. Other accounts talk about the dining room being slippery and everybody pushing and shoving. They got up to their cabin. It was twilight outside. His mother wrote that the people in the next cabin, who were named McDonald [Annotator's Note: phonetic spelling; unable to identify], were just coming out with some matches. The man took Lewis and told his mother to get the life vests and to look for his sister. Lewis was carried and did not see his mother for a while. His mother got the life vests and a coat for herself. The McDonalds got Lewis into a life raft. His mother stayed behind to look for his sister. She saw him in the lifeboat and dropped him a jacket. The lifeboats could hold about 50 people. His mother stayed on the ship almost to the last minute. Lewis' sister had gotten on an early lifeboat, but they did not know that. About 20 or 30 people had been killed by the torpedo. His mother was in the last lifeboat to leave the ship an hour or so later. The ship had listed but was not sinking fast. Her lifeboat had 96 people aboard. Some boats only had 20 or 30 people in them and not many had crew members. Later on, a couple of lifeboats had motors and one had a good officer. They went around and evened up the number of people per boat. The ship did not sink until the next morning [Annotator's Note: 4 September 1939].

Donald Lewis was in the bottom of a lifeboat that was crowded [Annotator's Note: after the SS Athenia was struck by a torpedo on 3 September 1939]. His mother wrote that he was sick during the night. A lot of people were sick. They were in the Atlantic with six to eight foot waves. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks Lewis how much he remembers of being put into the lifeboat.] Lewis does not remember much and wishes he did. It was cold but not frigid. Everything was wet. His first strong memory is of the first ship to come in to rescue them. It was a Swedish yacht called the Southern Cross. It picked up a lot of people including his sister. Another ship showed up. Two British destroyers, the Electra [Annotator's Note: the HMS Electra] and the Escort [Annotator's Note: the HMS Escort], arrived. Their ship [Annotator's Note: the Athenia] had been sunk in the main shipping lane of the Atlantic, so ships were around. There was a German liner [Annotator's Note: the SS Bremen] in the area that did not respond to the SOS signals [Annotator's Note: internationally used Morse code distress signal]. Lewis' lifeboat was picked up by the Electra. He was carried up rope nets. It was tricky because of the waves. The lifeboat was banging into the ship. A number of people were killed trying to transfer. He was put with other children lying in a warm room. His mother was picked up by the same destroyer a few hours later and they were reunited. She still did not know anything about his sister's location. They were told that another destroyer probably sunk the submarine, but it turned out to not be true. They learned about the submarine [Annotator's Note: German submarine U-30] later on. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks Lewis if he remembers being reconnected with his mother.] He does not remember the moment but likes to think she was happy to see him. It took about 24 hours to go back to Glasgow [Annotator's Note: Glasgow, Scotland]. The Escort made it back before them, and they tied up to it when they arrived. His mother was at the railing of their destroyer yelling over to the other asking about his sister. A woman had been in the same lifeboat and knew they had been picked up by the Southern Cross and transferred to the American freighter, the City of Flint [Annotator's Note: SS City of Flint]. The freighter took Americans onboard to go to on to America instead of returning to Scotland. His sister was alright and heading to America. His mother was relieved.

Donald Lewis was taken to Glasgow [Annotator's Note: Glasgow, Scotland]. They were issued gas masks. In World War 1, the Germans had used gas. His family had a friend who had been gassed in the trenches. Lewis has since read that the survivors were debriefed and given hotel accommodations. His grandfather came over from Edinburgh [Annotator's Note: Edinburgh, Scotland] and took them back there for a couple of weeks. His mother obtained passage on an American ship, the Orizaba [Annotator's Note: SS Orizaba, one of many such-named ships, this one would later be renamed USS Orizaba (AP-24)]. He had spent a month or two there [Annotator's Note: in Edinburgh] before they were sunk. Lewis is unable to separate which memories are before or after the sinking. Princes Street [Annotator's Note: in Edinburgh] was sandbagged by this time. They left on a well-lit ship, which was the opposite of the blacked-out British ship. It had a large American flag painted on the sides. They had floodlights on that. It reassured the Athenia survivors. Someplace in the middle of the Atlantic, there was a false alarm and they had to go to the lifeboat stations. The trauma of that made Lewis sick. They landed in New York [Annotator's Note: New York, New York] and caught the 20th Century Limited train from New York to Chicago [Annotator's Note: Chicago, Illinois] and then the Super Chief from Chicago to Los Angeles [Annotator's Note: Los Angeles, California]. His sister had been transferred to the City of Flint [Annotator's Note: the SS City of Flint] which went to Halifax, Nova Scotia. His father met her there. They stopped in Salt Lake City [Annotator's Note: Salt Lake City, Utah] before returning home. They were in newspaper articles about surviving the sinking. The Athenia was a big deal worldwide. It was not only the first ship sunk in World War 2, but it was a passenger liner and torpedoing it was against all conventions of war. The Germans denied doing it. They were all reunited. The train station in L.A. [Annotator's Note: Los Angeles] was really cool and was called Union Station. He liked it because he liked locomotives. They went on with their lives.

As an adult decades later, there was a disaster in the Atlantic with the Andrea Doria [Annotator's Note: the SS Andrea Doria, 25 July 1956]. Donald Lewis was surprised that he choked up and got quite emotional about it. It brought back the whole traumatic time to him. [Annotator's Note: Lewis had been aboard the SS Athenia when it was struck by a torpedo on 3 September 1939.] His family must have talked about their incident. He was kept out of school for a little while. They had returned [Annotator's Note: to the United States] about a month after Labor Day [Annotator's Note: a federal holiday in the United States on the first Monday in September annually]. Lewis wishes he had more personal recollections of the incident. He and his sister did discuss it, but he cannot recall them. They were kids and things happen to you all the time when you are a kid. It is not as big a deal as it is to an adult. As adults, he and his sister looked at the scrapbook [Annotator's Note: Lewis' mother had a scrapbook and a written summary of their ordeal]. She [Annotator's Note: Lewis' sister] had more memories than him as she was four and a half years older. She had been on the City of Flint [Annotator's Note: the SS City of Flint] which was a freighter. Freighters could normally take on about six passengers and had taken on 200 or 300 of the survivors of the Athenia. His sister remembered stories about the crew building bunks. They did not have much food and got some from another ship. It might have been the US Coast Guard. The City of Flint was a fairly famous ship. It was later captured by the Germans as a prize ship and taken to Murmansk [Annotator's Note: Murmansk Russia]. There is a book about it. After the United States entered the war, it was torpedoed in the Atlantic. Lewis only realized much later that his surviving the sinking of the Athenia meant something. He is sure he must have told kids at school, but they probably would not have believed him. Much later, his own family lived overseas for five years. His son told his teacher he had lived in Indonesia, and he was sent home for lying. By the time Lewis was a young adult, he got interested in the sinking and found the scrapbook.

[Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks Donald Lewis what he recalls of hearing of news of the war when growing up.] Living in Los Angeles [Annotator's Note: Los Angeles, California] soon after the war started, a Japanese submarine surfaced and shelled an oilfield in Ventura [Annotator's Note: Ventura, California on 23 February 1942]. About the same time, there was a false alarm about a Japanese plane flying over. Lewis looked out the window at the searchlight. There were antiaircraft batteries all around because he lived near the Douglas Aircraft plant [Annotator's Note: Douglas Aircraft Company, now part of The Boeing Company]. The next morning there was shrapnel on the streets from the antiaircraft. The kids collected the metal and traded them at school. He was in first or second grade. The plane was never there, and the Japanese never tried anything in California again. His parents did not discuss the war much. His mother was from Edinburgh [Annotator's Note: Edinburgh, Scotland] which was not bombed like London [Annotator's Note: London, England]. His aunt was married to a doctor in southwest England and the war never came to them directly. His father was an Air Raid Warden and a Block Warden in Civil Defense. Lewis had his white helmet for decades. His father made Stewart pumps [Annotator's Note: type of water pump] in his garage for everyone to be able to get water to put out fires. Lewis does not remember much about V-E Day [Annotator's Note: Victory in Europe Day, 8 May 1945] but remembers V-J Day [Annotator's Note: Victory Over Japan Day, 15 August 1945] because they had gotten enough gas coupons to be on vacation in the Sierra Nevadas [Annotator's Note: mountain range in California]. Lewis was ten or 11 at the time and was fishing with his grandfather on a lake. All of the cars were honking. Most of the pictures you see around are of VE-Day.

Donald Lewis feels lucky [Annotator's Note: for surviving the sinking of the SS Athenia on 3 September 1939 when he was five years old]. There were 1,400 people aboard, 1,100 passengers and 300 crew, and 120 were killed that night. The majority were killed during the rescue effort and not during the explosion. His mother's account [Annotator's Note: Lewis' mother wrote a summary of their ordeal] does talk about seeing bodies lying around while she searched for his sister. Some passengers drowned getting in the lifeboats, but 60 or 70 were killed in the transfer procedure from the lifeboats to the ships. A tanker with lifeboats tied up started forward and a lifeboat waiting in line got chewed up by the propellor, killing about 50 people. The sinking was a propaganda disaster for Germany. They denied it through the entire war but admitted it in 1946 that it was U-30 [Annotator's Note: German U-boat, or submarine, U-30] that had torpedoed the ship. Hitler [Annotator's Note: German dictator Adolf Hitler] himself said to not let anyone know it. The Germans said Churchill [Annotator's Note: Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill; Prime Minister, United Kingdom, 1940 to 1945] had ordered the ship to be sunk to bring America into the war. That was ridiculous because it was only the second day of the war. That is what had happened in World War 1. The sinking of the Lusitania [Annotator's Note: the RMS Lusitania was sunk by a German submarine on 7 May 1915] was a contributing factor in bringing America into that war. Not many people know Lewis was a part of history. His family knows about it and has looked at the scrapbook. It is an interesting story. The scrapbook has the old kind of telegrams. The old ones had the teletype message pasted on a card. They have some telegrams from Cordell Hull, the American Secretary of State. Lewis feels that this did not affect his life at all. He was just a kid. During the entire war, he was a little more knowledgeable about the war than others in California as the war was far away. He and his family felt the war a little more. His father had been a pilot at the end of World War 1, but not in the war. He was in in 1918 and flew Jennies [Annotator's Note: Curtiss JN Jenny biplane]. There was not a big effect though.