August H. Weikman

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Of the 2,223 passengers on board the Titanic, only 706 made it to New York City alive. Here are a few of their stories:

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Hair-owing tale

The chief barber told him to put on a life jacket.

“What sense is there in that?” laughed Harry Widner, the rare-book collector from an esteemed Philadelphia family. “This boat isn’t going to sink.”

But New Jersey barber August H. Weikman, who groomed the elite on board, knew better.

When the first explosion came, it was his life jacket that saved him.

Bobbing in the icy darkness, Weikman grabbed hold of floating deck chairs, according to his tale in “Sinking of the Titanic: Eyewitness Accounts.” He watched a second explosion rip the mighty liner in two.

Two hours went by before a hand reached out and hoisted him onto a crowded raft, he said.

The raft began taking on water, and the barber watched other helpless souls cling to flotsam.

“One by one, as they became chilled through, they bade us good-bye and sank,” he recalled. “In the bottom of the raft was a man who I had shaved that morning.”

Once aboard the Carpathia, Weikman scribbled messages on dollar bills in his pocket. On one, he wrote, “This note was in my pocket when picked up out of the sea.”

RR Auction believes the survivor’s token, which goes on the block this week, will command $30,000.

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Startling Starlet

One silent-film starlet walked off the RMS Carpathia into a costume change.

“I was fortunate enough to have a chum just my size, who fitted me out as soon as I landed in New York,” local actress Dorothy Winifred Gibson told the New York Dramatic Mirror.

“A white silk evening dress will do to escape in from a sinking liner, but it would look rather queer on the street in the afternoon.”

But she put that snowy gown on again — soon after the tragedy — to star as herself in a film called “Saved From the Titanic.”

Released just 29 days after the shipwreck, the film drew ire from critics who thought the silent stunner acted too soon.

A critic in the Dramatic Mirror called it “appalling” and “revolting, especially at this time when the horrors of the event are so fresh in mind.”

Gibson, who abandoned acting years later, was involved in several scandals, including becoming a Nazi sympathizer in World War II.

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I want my baby back

Ten-month-old Philip “Filly” Aks shivered in the arms of his mother Leah Aks, 18, when a pregnant Madeline Astor, wife of the wealthiest passenger aboard, John Jacob Astor IV, stripped off her shawl and swaddled the tiny passenger in the expensive fabric.

In the ensuing chaos of the evacuation, the infant was pulled from his mother’s arms and placed aboard Lifeboat No. 11. His mother was loaded into Lifeboat No. 13.

Once aboard the RMS Carpathia, the Virginia mother began frantically searching the deck for her lost son.

She spotted little Filly in the grasp of an Italian woman who, some accounts said, claimed the baby was her own flesh and blood.

Capt. Arthur H. Rostron intervened, challenging each woman to prove her motherhood.

Aks told him about a hidden birthmark.

“He found it on Filly’s chest,” said Gary Vollo, a Valley Stream, LI, photographer who met the “Titanic baby” at a 1988 convention in Boston.

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Sorrow at Sardi’s

The word “Titanic” was banished from the Peracchio home for six decades.

“I don’t want to know about the ship. It’s a curse,” cried grieving Mama Louisa Peracchio, pregnant with her eighth child, after hearing that two of her sons had perished.

“Don’t mention the name ‘Titanic’ in this house ever again!”

Modesto Peracchio, who would one day helm Sardi’s famed kitchen, was just 4 years old when his brothers, Alberto, 20, and Sebastiano, 17, were lost.

He heeded his mother’s mandate, but always wondered about their last days.

In 1976, “Zio Mo” enlisted his niece, author Angelica Harris, to piece together the long-forgotten story of how his brothers from Fubine, Italy, came to be on the doomed vessel.

After 14 years of investigation, Harris learned that Alberto studied under Luigi Gatti, who was hired to run White Star’s dining rooms, including the lavish A La Carte restaurant where he employed both brothers as assistant waiters.

In the last photo taken of the two, Alberto, clutched a maritime book because he was studying to become a ship’s officer, Harris wrote in “The Peracchio Brothers: Two Brothers and a Dream.”

Alberto sent a telegram home: “I feel like I’m at home,” he wrote. “This is what I want to do.”

Sadly, she solved the puzzle of the Peracchio brothers after Modesto Peracchio had died.

“So now you know, Zio,” she thought. “You are with them.”