Anastasia

On the night of July 17, 1918, ostensibly on their way to exile or imprisonment, the mild-mannered Czar of All the Russias, his German-born Empress, their five children, their family doctor, a chambermaid of the royal household, their cook and the Czar's English valet were all herded together in the cellar of a house in Ekaterinburg (now Sverdlovsk) and sprayed with Bolshevik gunfire. That much of one of the most brutal murders of modern times has been recorded as fact in all the history books. A vital footnote to the bloody night has remained ever since in the realm of speculation.

Even moviegoers flocking to see Actress Ingrid Bergman in her current hit role as Anastasia have had to leave their theaters with the question unanswered: Was the bewildered, scarred and unstrung girl who claimed to have escaped alive from that Uralian basement really the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova, the Czar's fourth daughter? For 35 years the question has been asked and answered, but until last week never officially settled.

Out of the Canal. German prisoners of war, crawling back from the Bolshevik wastes after World War I, brought with them legends of the escape of one of the Russian royal family. In 1920 the half-dead body of an unidentified young woman was dragged from a Berlin canal. She claimed in semi-delirium that she was Anastasia. Two years passed before even the girl herself, closeted in a mental hospital, could piece together a coherent story of how, aided by two brothers named Tchaikovsky, she had been carried out of the cellar and across Russia into Rumania. No Tchaikovsky ever showed up to verify the tale, though "Anastasia" claimed to have married one of them. She found many friends to champion her cause, even after one enterprising German journalist discovered that a Polish girl named Franziska Schanzkowsky had disappeared from a Berlin boarding house shortly before the young woman's discovery in the canal, and suggested that she was the same girl.

In the 1920s Long Island's fashionable North Shore society, who had just played host to Britain's bouncing Edward, Prince of Wales, gave a royal welcome to the Grand Duchess. Many of those firmest in proclaiming her authenticity were distant relatives and friends of her supposed family--but one branch, the German House of Hesse, to which the Empress of Russia had belonged, declined to accept the newcomer. The Czar, it was said, had deposited some 20 million rubles in England before the revolution, and the House of Hesse wanted to assure itself a prior right to the money.

Into the Courts. By 1941, after a score of years in and out of hospitals and sanatoriums, Anna Anderson, as the purported Anastasia called herself, brought suit against the House of Hesse for her legacy. Interrupted by war and Russian occupation, the suit dragged on. In 1950 Anna herself, a fuzzy-minded, aging woman surrounded by a court of solicitous refugees, was living in an old army shack on the edge of the Black Forest, as a poverty-stricken pensioner of Prince Friedrich Ernst von Sachsen-Altenburg.

Last week, after combing a mountain of evidence and weighing the testimony of four anthropologists who studied the conformations of Anna's ears, nose and cheeks in relationship to photographs of the teen-aged Anastasia, the 83rd Civil Chamber of the West Berlin District Court at last reached a decision. In an impressive dossier of official documents, it notified Anna's lawyers that in its opinion their client was not the Romanov Princess, and had no claim to any part of the late Czar's estate.

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