The Resurrection of the Romanovs by Greg King & Penny Wilson

Author:Greg King & Penny Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2010-11-29T16:00:00+00:00

In 1936, the claimant was back with Frau Stahlberg, staying at her Pomeranian estate of Gut-Retzow when she met newspaper owner Paul Madsack and his wife, Gertrude; the couple was so taken with the claimant that they asked her to live with them, first at Deisterwald bei Barsinghausen and later in Hannover, where they provided her with a series of apartments.38 Here she remained through most of the Second World War, living through the uncertainties and food shortages and nightly air raid sirens that regularly sent her scurrying in terror. One night, an Allied bomb fell on her apartment house, erupting in a “sudden explosion and clouds of dust and rubble” that exploded around her. When she looked up, Anderson saw that the windows were shattered, the doors all blown off their hinges; she ran past “white-lit rooms” where people were “screaming and shrieking” as flames swept through the building; on the street, she abruptly stopped when she found her neighbor’s head, dead eyes staring. “The streets were on fire,” she recalled, “it was all black, but on fire, and I was running through burning streets.”39 Anderson barely escaped this conflagration, but her apartment was lost, and like others left homeless by the war, she slept where she could, in temporary shelters, in houses where friends of the Madsacks offered respite, and finally in the relatively isolated Schloss Winterstein, a Thuringen castle belonging to Princess Louisa of Saxe-Meiningen. But the arrival of Soviet troops near the end of the war sent her into a panic, and one night she secretly fled, running through forests and crossing rivers with the help of a friend until she reached the safety of a French-occupied zone.40

Anna Anderson, with Prince Friedrich of Saxe-Altenburg, on the day she moved into her converted barracks at Unterlengenhardt.

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