Pikesville girl who survived a German torpedo

As the world careened toward a second world war, the SS Athenia, of the Donaldson Atlantic Line, an affiliate of Cunard-White Star, sailed from Liverpool two days after the German Army invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939.

On Sept. 3, the Athenia was bound for Montreal with 1,100 passengers, including 500 Jewish refugees and 311 Americans, among which were six from Baltimore and Maryland. At 7:30 p.m, the passenger ship was torpedoed, 200 miles off the Hebrides by a German U-boat that mistook the liner for an armed merchant cruiser.

It was the first British vessel to be sunk in World War II.

Traveling with her governess Jean McVittie, of Govans, was 9-year-old Joan Hecht, a fifth grade Park School student and Pikesville resident who was the great-great-granddaughter of Samuel Hecht, founder of the department store that bore his name.

She climbed down a rope ladder from the sinking liner, and when she was near the bottom, it broke, skinning her knees and spraining an ankle as she plunged into the cold Atlantic waters. A sailor pulled her and her doll, Pedro, which she had not lost in her fall, into the lifeboat.

The castoffs, including McVittie, drifted for 11 hours before being picked up at dawn by the HMS Escort, a destroyer, which landed them at Greenock, Scotland. Some 118 souls had perished in the incident.

The SS City of Flint, a Baltimore freighter, had heard the Athenia’s desperate cries for help and rushed to its side, rescuing more than 200, whom it landed in Nova Scotia.

Arriving in New York on Sept. 27 aboard the Ward Line’s SS Orizaba, the young Hecht was reunited with her anxious parents.