The Resurrection of the Romanovs (44 page)

20

The Polish Factory Worker

A single photograph of Franziska before 1920 survives. It appears to be an informal scene, snapped against the back ground of some bucolic woodland. Probably taken in 1916, it shows not a dowdy peasant from the provinces, but a pleasant young woman, slender and petite, with her dark, auburn hair styled around a distinctive face. She wears a print dress adorned with a black bow at the neck, hands clasped in her lap, eyes bright and the hint of a smile on her lips. It is an image of a young woman seemingly full of confidence, her face optimistic, free of any hint of the tragedies that would soon befall her.

Franziska disappeared into the anonymity of metropolitan Berlin, just one of the capital’s numerous
minderbemittelte Frauen
(women of meager means).
1
Little is known of her life here; like others armed with more ambition than money, she presumably rented a room in one of Berlin’s grim working-class apartments, squalid tenements crowded with impoverished families.
2
Franziska first worked as a maid in a wealthy Berlin household; she soon took a job as a waitress in a
Konditorei
, a local bakery that also offered meals.
3
She went to work, came back to her lodgings, and, when time and money allowed, spent hours at the cinema, watching newsreels and short features produced in Germany or imported from England, France, or America.
4
And she did it all with a new name. Since birth, Franziska had carried the Czenstkowski surname of her ancestors; now, in Berlin, she adopted the more Germanic, feminized, and grammatically incorrect Schanzkowska, perhaps in an effort to abandon her Eastern background. (This change was inconsistent, in that Franziska used the feminized form of her surname, ending with “a,” something done in Poland and in Russia but not in Germany. The variations in spelling and confusion over proper usage meant that Franziska’s brother Felix was usually referred to by the surname Schanzkowsky, while his daughter, conversely, reverted to von Czenstkowski.) The First World War came, and Berlin began its slow, torturous slide into despair as the British navy attempted to starve the Germans into submission. And in the midst of this daily struggle, Franziska was saddled with a new responsibility: looking after her sixteen-year-old sister Gertrude, who in 1915 had been sent to join her. A Frau Peters rented the sisters a room in her apartment at 17 Neue Hochstrasse, a grim, gray street in north-central Berlin where, as one reporter noted, “simple people live, passing the days of their lives in eternal sameness.”
5

The only known pre-1920 photograph of Franziska Schanzkowska.

Late that summer, Franziska’s fortunes improved considerably when she obtained a position at Allgemeine Elektrizitäts Gesellschaft, or AEG (later AEG Farben), a factory in Berlin.
6
Mass conscription and the endless months of fighting had left Berlin’s factories undermanned, and women were quickly encouraged to enter the industrial arena. “Every German woman,” the state declared, “is a soldier in this economic war.”
7
More than three million German women took such industrial jobs in the midst of the First World War, seizing the opportunity for steady employment at a time when insecurity had become a constant companion.
8
Work in munitions factories was one of the few jobs with guaranteed wage increases; steady employment; and, perhaps most important, special ration privileges—extra coupons for flour, meat, and fat at a time when daily life in the city was beginning to fall apart.
9

Gertrude Ellerik, Franziska’s sister.

The AEG factory where Franziska worked still stands in Berlin, a massive concrete and glass building at 71 Ackerstrasse, not far from the apartment on Neue Hochstrasse; ironically, much of the complex—built atop the remains of a slaughterhouse—had been designed by Peter Behrens, one of Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig’s favorite architects.
10
Before the war, the factory produced dynamos and electrical motors; now it manufactured military matériel, including field telephones, airplane motors, machine guns, and munitions.
11
Franziska worked on an assembly line, polishing live grenades, a potentially lethal occupation under often inadequate safety regulations: daily she was exposed to explosives and hazardous chemicals, in an environment where industrial accidents and even deaths were increasingly frequent.
12

Then came the spring of 1916, “so warm and so bright,” recalled one Berliner, that it somehow seemed “out of tune and out of place” in a city “that still thinks it necessary to send hundreds of men each day to their deaths.”
13
Franziska had met one of these men, a young soldier training in the German capital, and, accelerated by the urgency of uncertainty, romance soon gave way to an engagement—an engagement perhaps marked by the single photograph of Franziska—before deployment separated the couple.
14
The name of the fiancé is lost to history, but not so his fate. He was sent to fight, not on the Western Front, as has previously been reported, but rather to the Eastern Front, joining in Germany’s Galician campaign. In the early summer of 1916, he died after being wounded in combat.
15

A contemporary view of the former AEG factory in Berlin, where Franziska Schanzkowska worked and where she had her industrial accident in 1916.

It was a time of war, and such a blow cannot have been unexpected, but the death may have coincided with a crisis of more pressing and personal concern: sometime before 1920, Franziska was pregnant. This much she admitted, though she insisted that she had given birth to Alexander Tchaikovsky’s son after he raped her following the Ekaterinburg massacre, a story she may have invented to explain why a surviving Anastasia was no longer a virgin. In 1951, a gynecological examination in Germany revealed a distortion in the shape of her cervical opening; this change occurs naturally when a woman gives birth, but can also stem from a late-term miscarriage or abortion, or from an early, invasive abortion.
16

Franziska’s family later insisted that she had never been pregnant or given birth, something true enough up to February 1914. Circumstantial evidence, though, suggests Franziska may have been pregnant in the summer of 1916, a period coinciding with her only known romantic relationship. There was a sudden and violent break with her sister Gertrude at the time, some argument serious enough that Franziska abruptly moved out of their shared room at 17 Neue Hochstrasse.
17
Gertrude later tried to downplay the incident, admitting only to her sister’s sudden departure. “I don’t know why she moved,” Gertrude insisted, suggesting that perhaps Franziska “thought the rent was too high.”
18
This isn’t convincing. The sisters had shared a room at Frau Peters’s for more than a year; both were employed by AEG at the time; and nothing suggests that Franziska was in any financial difficulty.

The decision was even more curious since Franziska didn’t even leave the building. Anna Wingender, the building manager, had a fourth-floor apartment where she lived with two of her daughters, thirteen-year-old Rosa Dorothea, known as Doris, and nine-year-old Luise (the oldest daughter, Kathe, lived elsewhere at the time).
19
Later described as a “loving, maternal type,” Anna Wingender now came to the rescue. “I always felt sorry for Franziska,” she said, attempting to explain how the young woman from Hygendorf first came to live with her.
20
Even after the move, relations between Franziska and Gertrude were strained; although only three floors separated them, Gertrude never once called on her sister.
21

Doris Wingender, photographed during the Hamburg civil trial.

And this was all the more inexplicable because, as Gertrude later explained, Franziska suddenly fell ill. She was sick, weak, suffering from fainting spells and an inexplicable case of blood poisoning—symptoms certainly suggestive, first of a possible pregnancy and then of an invasive abortion.
22
It isn’t a difficult scenario to envision: Franziska was alone, in the middle of an ongoing war, and facing an uncertain future. It wasn’t merely the stigma of being an unwed mother, for by 1916 the public largely viewed all potential mothers as burdensome, unproductive drains on scarce resources; limited rations, it was argued, were best saved for those actively engaged in the war effort.
23
Pregnant women also lost their jobs, and losing a job at AEG meant the loss of privileged ration status as a munitions employee at a particularly desperate time. If Franziska was indeed pregnant, such considerations may have pushed her toward an abortion, a common enough occurrence in the Berlin of 1916 owing to wartime liaisons. Such a theory, at least, reconciles the evidence of her pregnancy with her sudden break with Gertrude, with her inexplicable move to the Wingender apartment, and with her illness and blood poisoning. And this fits in with what Franziska told Doris Wingender: that she had fallen out with her sister because Gertrude had been “telling tales” about her behavior to their mother back in Hygendorf.
24

That August of 1916, ill, on edge, Franziska returned to work, laboring over grenades to kill Russian soldiers even as, a thousand miles east, Anastasia was busy at Tsarskoye Selo tending to her wounded officers. Then, on August 22, disaster struck. Franziska was on the line polishing a grenade when, suddenly ill, she fell to the concrete floor in a faint. The grenade rolled a short distance; when it hit the foot of the line foreman, it exploded, killing him in a shower of gore.
25

Later, Franziska would call the Ekaterinburg massacre “an accident, a very bad accident.” This was an odd choice of words to describe brutal executions, but an apt depiction of the horror at the AEG factory in 1916, suggesting an inadvertent weaving of personal history with imagined fiction. “I fainted,” she said, “everything was blue, and I saw stars dancing and had a great rushing in the ears . . . my dresses were all bloody. All was full of blood.”
26