It is said that historical events “pass from living memory into the history books with the death of the last survivor.” However this doesn’t detract from the tragic and traumatic stories they have to tell.
Here is a list of nine last survivors of historical events you may not know much about.
1. Alfred Anderson
Anderson, who served with the Black Watch regiment, was the last surviving witness to the Christmas Truce of World War I when he was just 18 years old and the final survivor of the “Old Contemptibles,” a group of soldiers named by Kaiser Wilhelm II.
Later, Anderson recalled the eerie silence in the trenches after months of the sounds of bullets and gunfire and the soldiers shouting: “Merry Christmas!”. He died in 2005 at 109 years old.
2. Audrey Lawson-Johnston
Audrey Lawson-Johnston was just 3 months old when she survived the sinking of the Lusitania passenger liner in 1915.
She and her brother are put on a lifeboat by their nursemaid, Alice Lines who jumped into the water to follow the children after being denied access to the lifeboats.
1,198 of the 2,000 people aboard died when a German U-boat targeted and sank the passenger liner. Lawson-Johnston passed away in 2011 at 95 years old.
3. Werner Franz
Werner Franz was a 14-year-old cabin boy aboard the Hindenburg, which exploded, burned, and crashed in 1937. Of the 97 passengers, 62 miraculously survived. Franz recalled that water prevented him from being burned.
He escaped the wreck by kicking open a provision hatch used to transfer stores onto the ship. Waiting until the Hindenburg was closer to the ground, Franz jumped from the ship to safety. He died in 2014, aged 92.
4. Donald “Nick” Clifford
Donald “Nick” Clifford was the last surviving worker from the team that carved the Mount Rushmore National Memorial in the Black Hills of South Dakota. At the age of 17, he worked on the project for three years, earning up to $1 per day.
He primarily worked cutting logs and cranking winches to raise and lower cables and was eventually promoted to driller. He died in 2019 at aged 98.
5. George Robert Twelves Hewes
An active participant in political pretests, George Robert Twelves Hewes was the last survivor of the Boston Tea Party and the Boston Massacre. Hewes sustained an injury to the shoulder during the Boston Massacre in 1770, which resulted in five deaths.
He later participated, with other American patriots, in climbing aboard three British ships docked in the harbor and dumping 342 chests of tea into the water. He died in 1840 at the aged of 98.
6. Gordon Moore
Gordon Moore and seven of his coworkers left the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory to create their own company, propelling Silicon Valley and the computer age into what we now know it as.
As of 2021, Moore was the last survivor of the group who left and went on to develop a method for building silicon chips more quickly and efficiently. He died in 2023 at the age of 94.
7. Ivan Martynushkin
As a soldier from the first group to liberate the Nazi’s most infamous concentration camp – Auschwitz, Ivan Martynushkin became the last living liberator of the camp in 2021 after the death of David Dushman.
Martynushkin was 21 years old when he and his team entered the camp, thinking it was empty, only to find 7,000 prisoners on the brink of death.
8. Matashichi Oishi
In 1954, the Lucky Dragon fishing vessel was caught in the fallout of the Castle Bravo nuclear test. Matashichi Oishi was the last survivor of the vessel, whose crew of 23 were all exposed to radioactive fallout from the nuclear test.
As a result he struggled with health problems, including liver cancer, sleeping sickness, and hepatitis C, for the rest of his life and even blamed his lasting health problems for the stillbirth of his child. He died in 2021 at the age of 87.
9. Robert Kenneth Kaufman
On September 2, 1945, Japan surrendered to American forces. Robert Kenneth Kaufman was the last surviving American witness to this surrender aboard the USS Missouri, serving as an Aide and Flag Lieutenant at the ceremony.
He participated in the 2017 Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day festivities, during which he was already the sole witness to Japan’s surrender left. He passed away in 2019.
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