Titanic Survivor, 81, Vividly Recalls Icy Horror : Disaster: The 7-year-old and her mother watched as the ‘unsinkable’ ship slipped beneath the water, with her father and more than 1,500 others still on board.

It was 81 years ago and she was just 7 years old, but Eva Hart remembers the sinking of the Titanic as if it were yesterday.

She is the only survivor who clearly remembers the tragedy that claimed more than 1,500 lives when the liner struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York in April of 1912.

“I saw the ship going down. . . . The worst thing I can remember are the screams of people jumping into the water,” she said.

She watched in horror from a lifeboat with her mother as the supposedly unsinkable ship slipped beneath the water, with her father still on board. Afterward, there was nothing but silence.

“It seemed as if once everybody had gone, drowned, finished, the whole world was standing still. There was nothing, just this deathly, terrible silence in the dark night with the stars overhead.

“I saw that ship sink. I never closed my eyes. I didn’t sleep at all. I saw it, I heard it and nobody could possibly forget it.”

The last memory she has of her father is when he lifted her into the lifeboat. “He made no attempt to get in that boat. He just helped women and children and then he stood back, and that was the last I ever saw of him.”

Hart is not the only living survivor, but the others are extremely old or were less than 3 years old at the time and do not remember it.

For more than 15 years after the sinking, Hart, who had been traveling on the Titanic with her parents emigrating to Canada, could not speak about it because the memories were too vivid and she was haunted by nightmares.

After her mother’s death when she was 23, she went to sea and cloistered herself in her cabin for four days. The nightmares never returned.

Hart never married; she lives alone in quiet retirement in Essex, southern England, not far from where she was born. She has had a varied, full life, as a singer in Australia and London, in industry as a welfare officer and as a magistrate.

She has also traveled widely talking about the Titanic, advising on books and films and reminding people of the needless tragedy that changed her life.

“The fact that we were allowed to go to sea with lifeboats for only 800 and with 2,200 people on board is the greatest tragedy,” she said.

One of her latest appearances was at the premiere of “Titanica” at the National Museum of Film, Photography and Television in Bradford, England. The film shows the wreckage of the liner on the seabed 400 miles south of Newfoundland, Canada.

Shots of teacups and other items from the ship on the ocean floor do not bother her. But she still cannot look at footage of the vessel’s launch as the flagship of the White Star line and the most famous ship of its day.

When the wreckage of the Titanic was discovered in 1985 by Robert Ballard and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, Hart said she “went cold with horror.”

She was reassured when Ballard contacted her and told her he would not disturb the wreck, but she has reservations about the latest attempts by the French to find owners of the 15,000 items that have been dredged up.

“It’s the French that I’m up against. I call them grave robbers and vultures and a few other things. . . . I am very opposed to it,” she said.

The continuing fascination with the sinking of the Titanic, even after all these years, does not surprise her.

“It is the one and only disaster where there was no excuse for anybody to die. If a ship is torpedoed, that’s war. If it strikes a rock in a storm, that’s nature. But just to die because there weren’t enough lifeboats . . . that’s ridiculous.”