In the House of Special Purpose, June 25, 1918, Marie Nicholaevna Romanovna would celebrate her last birthday. In less than a month, she was executed with her family.
I am obsessed with the entire Romanov family but I was first drawn especially to Marie- as she had experiences quite different from her sisters- Marie alone traveled
with her parents on their April journey to Ekaterinburg and she endured the rough frozen river crossings, the abrupt halt of their train by the Ural Soviet, their capture and the time alone in the Ipatiev Mansion before the other siblings arrived later in May.
Her point of view was therefore very different and I was stunned by her writings and the poignancy of her prayers.
She alone watched as the elderly Russian applied whitewash to their windows and effectively sealed them in from the rest of the world.
Did she have a romance with a guard? Some experts say yes;no one can fully know. We do know that she received a cake on her birthday and her father debated the fateful letters from "An Officer" which purported to offer the family a chance to escape but which may have been a trap.
