EILEEN BATTERSBYponders Anastasia to Anne Frank
ON THE NIGHT OF JULY 17 1918, the Romanov family held captive by Red forces were wakened and ordered to dress. They were informed that the Whites were advancing and it was now necessary to move to a safer location. It soon became obvious that death, not safety, was the objective. The executions were conducted in a frenzy of shooting and knife attacks.
There has never been any doubt that Nicholas II, the last tsar of Russia and his wife, Alexandra, a German princess of Hesse, three of their four daughters and the youngest child and only son, tsarevich Alexei – two weeks shy of his 14th birthday, itself something of a miracle as he suffered from severe Haemophilia, a disease also carried by his mother and sisters – had been viciously assassinated by the Bolsheviks. Yet for years a mystery shrouded the fate of the fourth of the five royal children, 17-year-old Anastasia.
It was rumoured that she alone had escaped the Ekaterinburg massacre. A dramatic story evolved, helped perhaps by accounts of her lively and precocious personality. Perhaps she alone had managed to elude her killers?
The theory emerged that having somehow eluded the bullets fired into the death chamber, a basement that must have quickly filled with gun smoke and plaster dust, in the chaos of movement and screams she may have avoided being stabbed and initially feigning death, she then charmed a susceptible captor into helping her. At least 10 imposters emerged during the years that followed, the most famous being Anna Anderson (1896-1984), a patient in a Berlin mental institution, recovering from a suicide attempt. She began claiming to be the Grand Duchess in about 1922, and was believed by many, including Romanov relatives – for a while. Yet Anderson persisted in her delusion for about 60 years, travelling back and forth between Germany and the US, before eventually sharing contented squalor with an eccentric history professor in Charlottesville, Virginia. Anderson died in 1984. DNA tests confirmed that she had most likely had been a missing Polish factory worker, not a Romanov.
We humans need survival stories that defy hard fact. Perhaps Elvis is living in Argentina with the kidnapped champion Shergar on a ranch owned by a Butch Cassidy who looks like Paul Newman?
One of history’s most enduring optimists is another teenage girl whose tragedy is huge but whose sense of life is even greater. Anne Frank, born in Frankfurt-on-Main in 1929, fled with her family to Amsterdam in 1933 when Hitler came to power. But there was no escape from the Holocaust. The Franks and four fellow Jews went into hiding on July 9th, 1941. Elaborate planning kept them safe for just over three years.
Anne’s immortal narrative vividly details long days of living like mice. Betrayed by Dutch informers, Anne and her family were arrested by the Gestapo, 68 years ago today, August 4th, 1944. She and her sister died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen. Her father Otto survived Auschwitz and published her diary.