The Resurrection of the Romanovs (42 page)

After half a century of arguments, of contradictory recognitions and denunciations, of warring photographic comparisons and handwriting analyses, these DNA tests conclusively and damningly overturned popular belief: Fraulein Unbekannt, Anastasia Tchaikovsky, Anna Anderson, Anastasia Manahan—whatever name the world’s most famous royal pretender had answered to, the one to which she had absolutely no claim was that of Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaievna of Russia. The bowel tissue examined by Gill and his colleagues genetically matched different samples examined by Weedn; the follicular hair from the envelopes found in the books was identical to the clump hair from the wine box; and the profile for the two different hair samples matched that derived for the bowel tissue. The three laboratories, working independently and relying on different samples, had achieved a uniform genetic profile for Anderson, one that excluded the possibility that she had been a child of Nicholas and Alexandra.

But if not Anastasia, who had she really been? Since the late 1920s, there had been rumors, assertions, accusations, and declarations—all rejected, mocked, ignored, or dismissed by Anderson’s supporters—that she was actually a woman named Franziska Schanzkowska, described as a Polish factory worker who had gone missing in Berlin sometime at the beginning of 1920. Some of her opponents had taken it all quite seriously: in his
Fausse Anastasie
, Gilliard simply described it as accepted fact, but the stories that trickled out to the public were unconvincing, the evidence in favor of this unlikely solution so contradictory that even many who completely rejected the idea that Anderson was Anastasia refused to consider this a viable possibility. “Whoever she is,” commented Princess Nina Georgievna, “she is no Polish peasant.”
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However unlikely it seemed, though, Franziska Schanzkowska was the only actual identity—other than Anastasia—that had ever been ascribed to Anderson. Knowing this, producer Julian Nott located members of the missing girl’s family and obtained a blood sample from her great-nephew Karl Maucher. This was sent to Gill’s team: if Anderson failed to match the profile for Anastasia, a comparison with the Maucher sample might conclusively confirm or refute the Schanzkowska story. When the first results showed no match to the Hessian profile, therefore, the Forensic Science Service Laboratory analyzed the Maucher sample against that found in the Anderson tissue and hair. Maucher was the son of Margarete Ellerik, daughter of Franziska’s sister Gertrude; as such, he and the missing Polish factory worker would share the same mitochondrial DNA profile. And this is exactly what Gill and his team found: five identical matches between the sequence established for Anderson’s tissue and hair samples and the blood donated by Maucher. While two such mismatches could refute a genetic relationship, mitochondrial DNA could not prove identity; the most that Gill could say was that “Karl Maucher may be a maternal relative” of the claimant.
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Working independently of these scientists for German producer Maurice Philip Remy, Dr. Charles Ginther of the University of California at Berkeley obtained and sequenced a blood sample donated by Margarete Ellerik, Maucher’s mother. The resulting mitochondrial DNA profile proved identical to that of her son and to that found in the Anderson tissue and hair samples.
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But, with a genetic link established, the question of just how likely it was that Anderson had in fact been Schanzkowska came down to a statistical analysis contrasting the obtained profile against sequences collected in genetic databases. The profile shared by Anderson and Maucher, Gill found, was extremely rare—so rare that it did not appear in any database they examined. This rarity strengthened the odds that the two were indeed related. The tests undertaken by Stoneking and Melton of Pennsylvania State University established that the hair sample they examined matched the hair analyzed in Great Britain; the profiles for these samples of hair, as they now found, also matched the Maucher and Ellerik blood sequence, as did the bowel tissue tested by Weedn at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. Gill estimated the probability of a random match between Anderson and the Maucher profile at “less than one in three hundred” and placed the odds that the woman known as Anna Anderson had been Franziska Schanzkowska at roughly 98.5%.
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In a case filled with extraordinary twists of fate, this was the most extraordinary of all, this genetic turn, this intrusion of modern science into the Edwardian fairy tale. There was the bowel tissue, it was true, but alone it offered only a single compelling strike against Anderson’s claim: it was the hair discovered by Susan Grindstaff Burkhart that, in many ways, provided the final, undeniable proof. “I was devastated when the results came back,” she recalls. “This was not how the fairy tale was supposed to end.”
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Those who had known the Manahans in Charlottesville had deplored the disintegration of their house, the accumulation of clutter, Jack’s well-known habit of saving anything and everything connected to his wife as a historic artifact. And yet, in the end, his diligence had unwittingly helped solve one of the twentieth century’s greatest mysteries.

The world learned the news, learned that a few millimeters of preserved tissue and loose strands of hair had destroyed the most enduring of royal legends. But in the aftermath of scientific certainty, a certainty that contradicted nearly everything the world had been led to believe about Anderson’s case, came the questions: Who was Franziska Schanzkowska? How had she managed to seem so convincing? How had she apparently fooled so many people who had known the real Anastasia? How had she come by her impressive roll of asserted memories, her linguistic skills, her scars? The DNA verdict did nothing to address these issues. The questions would remain unanswered.

Until now.

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A Girl from the Provinces

A cold, frozen landscape stretched out as far as the eye could see: meadows green six months earlier and dotted with apple and cherry trees now blanketed in snow; forested hills rising against the dark sky; lonely, reed-rimmed lakes fringed by the white-frosted spikes of fir and pine trees. Now, this December evening, the northern edge of the Lippusch Forest, straddling the border of Pomerania and West Prussia, was still, unwelcoming, silent but for the wild boar and deer that crept over the marshes and bogs, nosing through the drifts to lap at the icy rivers trickling into the glassy lakes.
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Spidery wisps of smoke, fueled by peat burning in open hearths, curled over the cluster of little farmhouses and huts—sixteen in all—comprising the “noble village of Borowilhas,” a tiny hamlet of 117 that clustered along a single road, muddy in spring and fall, dusty in summer, and now nearly impassable with snow.
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And yet figures moved about, harnessing horses and oxen in the bitter cold, for this was Thursday, December 24, 1896—Christmas Eve—and the people who lived in Borowilhas, conservative and Catholic, were off to celebrate. It was a measure of their devotion, for this was a real trek: Borowilhas had no church, and attending Mass meant a journey over the frozen countryside to the little town of Borek, three miles to the north.

And, at one farmhouse, the activity, anticipation, excitement—it was all magnified. It was an old sod building, weathered and worn, divided in two, where “pigs, sheep, and hens,” as a later visitor found, lived under the same thatched roof as the inhabitants. There were no comforts: a worn, dangerously crumbling hearth offered the only warmth to stave off the northern winter.
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Here, just eight days earlier, on Wednesday, December 16, a rotund, middle-aged man and his hard-faced wife had greeted the birth of their first daughter. They may have been Catholic, but the couple, like their neighbors, were first and foremost Kashubians, descendants of Baltic Slavs who had settled in the area sometime in the Middle Ages. This heritage infused nearly every aspect of life: Kashubians kept to themselves, formed their own communities, celebrated their own festivals, practiced their own crafts, sang their own songs, and even spoke their own language.
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They also knew and respected the centuries-old superstitions, knew that unseen evil lurked in the surrounding forests and must be battled at every turn. Following custom, the new baby would have been wrapped in one of her mother’s aprons and a rosary placed around her neck to ward off any goblins or vampires waiting outside the house, and the heart of a freshly killed black cat hung in the fireplace to counter any hexes cast by a witch.
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Kashubian tradition also dictated that a new infant be baptized on the first Sunday following his or her birth, lest the child fall victim to the nefarious influences waiting to corrupt the innocent.
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But the deep snow of 1896 made this an impossibility, and the parents, despite the superstitions, waited until this Christmas Eve to do their religious duty. And so they bundled themselves up and set out with their neighbors across the frozen countryside to Borek’s seventeenth-century Church of St. Mary. Here, as candles burned and the congregation sang, the baby was christened after the fourteenth-century St. Frances of Rome, received into the Roman Catholic faith as Franziska Anna Czenstkowski.
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Thus, in circumstances far removed from the glittering pageantry that welcomed the 1901 christening of Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaievna, began the adventures of Franziska Schanzkowska, Anna Anderson, the most famous royal claimant in history.

Birth registry for Franziska Schanzkowska.

Princess Nina Georgievna was correct in one respect: Franziska Schanzkowska was no Polish peasant. The place of her birth, today called Borowy Las, sits squarely in modern Poland, but in 1896 the entire region belonged to Germany: Borowilhas lay in West Prussia, just a few miles east of the border with the German province of Pomerania. Polish forces had occupied the land, as had Russian settlers, the Teutonic Knights, and invading Prussian and Swedish soldiers before Berlin finally seized control in the late eighteenth century.
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The Czenstkowski family, as Franziska’s ancestors spelled their name, did, though, have ties, however tenuous, to the old Polish kingdom. In 1683, King Jan III Sobieski had raised several members of the family to the
drobna szlachta
, or petty Polish nobility, after they helped his army repel forces of the Ottoman Empire at the Battle of Vienna.
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The reward was not uncommon, but it gave the family certain rights not enjoyed by ordinary peasants and later allowed them to use the honorific “von” before their surname as a mark of their status. With the raise in rank came a minor grant of land in the area then known as Kartuzy, the marshy countryside that in the nineteenth century edged the borders of Pomerania and West Prussia.
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The countryside around Borowilhas.

Did these past noble trappings somehow influence Franziska in later making her claim? Was it all some misguided attempt to capture what had been lost? For lost it had been: by the time of her birth, whatever privileges had once enveloped the von Czenstkowski family were gone. They still had the thirty-acre farm in Borowilhas, originally given to them by the king when they were ennobled, along with its sod house in which Franziska was born, but not much else.
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Since his birth in 1842, her father, Anton, had struggled, struggled in Borowilhas, struggled during his mandatory three years with the Prussian Army, struggled to find a place for himself. Embittered by his lot in life, said to have harbored a passing interest in socialism, he had dropped the honorific “von” from his surname as an unwelcome reminder of just how far the family had fallen.
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Anton married late: he was fifty-four when Franziska was born. His first wife, Josefina Peek, died in 1892 after two years of marriage; in 1894, he wed twenty-eight-year-old Marianna Wietzke.
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As far as anyone could tell, it was a marriage of convenient practicalities, for aside from a shared Kashubian heritage, Franziska’s parents had little in common. Anton was gregarious and carefree, a man who disliked work but enjoyed drinking to excess with his friends; Marianna, in contrast, was an abrasive woman who seems to have left vivid and unfavorable impressions on those she encountered.
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Kashubian farmers using a cow to plough their field, turn-of-the-century postcard.

Like Anastasia, Franziska grew up with four siblings. She was not her parents’ first child: a son, Martin Christian, had been born in November 1895, but he died in infancy, as did another son, Michael, who arrived on Franziska’s third birthday, in 1899. Of the others, a second daughter, Gertrude, was born in 1898; Valerian in 1900; Felix in 1903; and Maria Juliana in 1905. Franziska’s early life was nomadic, defined by an unsettled restlessness, a succession of gruesome and grueling farms and villages where the family struggled to eke out a living. In 1897, they left Borowilhas, settling in the West Prussian village of Zukovken (now Treuenfelde), some ten miles to the north, where Anton worked as a
tageloehner
, or daily agricultural laborer, just one of the many desperate and dispossessed driven by poverty to indenture themselves to ensure that their families were housed and fed.
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It was a brutal existence, recorded one critic, ruled “with the rod and the whip,” where “drunkenness, theft, idleness, and the most degrading forms of immorality” were common.
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In 1900, Anton signed a three-year contract with a Pomeranian agricultural estate at Glischnitz, bringing his family with him to work and live; in the spring of 1905, they were in the Pomeranian city of Schwarz Dammerkow (now Czarna Da’brówka); and by 1906 they were working at Gut-Wartenberg, an agricultural estate just outside the Pomeranian town of Bütow (now Bytów).
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Then, in 1906, Anton inherited the ancestral thirty-acre holding in Borowilhas; this he sold, purchasing a farm in the Pomeranian town of Hygendorf (now Udorpie), a few miles south of Bütow.
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At the beginning of the twentieth century some five hundred people lived there, in modest little wood or brick houses set in gardens leading to flat meadows and long, low barns. At one end of the village stood two schools, Catholic and Lutheran churches, an inn, and the usual assortment of markets, bakeries, butchers’ shops, blacksmiths, stables, and taverns; at the other sprawled two sawmills that planed trees from the surrounding forests, and a furniture manufacturing plant. The streets—all three of them—were still unpaved as the century began: in summer, clouds of dust swelled in the wake of horses and carts, and in winter they became a muddy morass. Farmers drove herds of cattle through town to pasture, leaving streets clotted with piles of manure rotted until the rains swept them away. The house where Franziska lived is gone now, but it would have followed traditional Kashubian design: a single-story structure of pine logs, the rooms—simply decorated with carved, brightly painted furniture and cheap lithographs—clustered around a massive central chimney. Electricity and running water were unknown; lighting came from candles or oil lamps, while water was carried in from a nearby pump.
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How different this all was from the Alexander Palace, from the heritage Franziska later attempted to claim as her own. The farm in Hygendorf erased some of the earlier deprivations, but for Franziska life was still simple, still lean: fields had to be turned and planted in spring for the coming fall harvest; animals had to be fed and watered; the garden tended; water pumped and carried to the house; baskets of logs brought from the woodpile; fires stoked; oil lamps filled, wicks trimmed, and candles replaced; laundry done; the farmhouse cleaned—a dozen little, daily chores comprising Franziska’s universe. And at night, like every other Kashubian girl, she would have learned the elaborate, colorful needlework that adorned bodices and shirts—a skill her supporters later took as evidence that she must have been brought up in aristocratic circles for—presumably—who else but an idle aristocrat could devote time to such pursuits?
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Such ideas—that hers had been a world defined by few opportunities and even fewer abilities—extended to Franziska’s education. It all stemmed from misguided attempts to reconcile preconceptions—sometimes snobbish preconceptions—about the woman erroneously described in the wake of the DNA tests as “a Polish peasant” and the legendary figure of Anna Anderson. A “Polish peasant,” or so this reasoning often went, must by definition be incapable of assimilating the myriad of information the claimant revealed over the years. Even her sister Gertrude quarreled with this simplistic mischaracterization: “Franziska,” she declared, “wasn’t stupid.” Even in grammar school she far outshone the rest of her family. “Her reports were better than mine and those of my other siblings,” Gertrude added.
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